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Stuart Bingham

The 2008/09 season was something of a disappointment for Stuart Bingham as he lost his opening match in four of the eight ranking events, and only reached the last 16 of one tournament.
That was the Roewe Shanghai Masters, in which he beat Mike Dunn and Peter Ebdon before losing to Stephen Maguire.
Bingham did have the consolation of getting to the televised stages of the Betfred.com World Snooker Championship, beating Alan McManus in the final qualifying round. He was drawn against Ronnie O’Sullivan at the Crucible, and gave the defending champion a decent game before going down 10-5.
“It was always going to be an uphill struggle, but this is my fourth appearance at the Crucible and I’ve always told myself to enjoy it out there,” said Bingham, who stayed at No 21 in the official rankings, but is down to 32nd on the provisional list going into the 2009/10 season. “If you can enjoy it, there is a better chance of playing well. I played well today in spells, it’s probably my best performance this year because by my own standards, this year I have not played that well. But playing the world No 1 and defending champion, it was always going to be tough.”
Bingham made a piece of snooker history in 2006 by becoming the first player ever to win the Masters qualifying event in consecutive seasons.
Indeed, by beating Mark Selby 6-2 in the final at the World Snooker Academy he became the first player to win the tournament twice. "It’s great to have a bit of snooker history to my name," he said. "It was a fantastic experience to play at Wembley last year, there’s so much history to the event. I’m delighted to be going back."
In 2005/06, Bingham enjoyed a sensational run of 13 consecutive wins in qualifiers, which won him a bet with manager Gary Purkiss and earned him a new BMW X5.
Bingham went on to reach the quarter-finals of the UK Championship. "My level has gone up a gear," he said after a 9-3 defeat of Matthew Stevens.
The Basildon cueman has caused a stir at the Crucible on two occasions. In 2000 he scored one of the event’s biggest ever first-round shocks, beating defending world champion Stephen Hendry 10-7, before losing 13-9 to Jimmy White.
Two years later he hit the headlines for less happy reasons during a first round match against Ken Doherty when he came within two balls of a maximum 147 and a £167,000 jackpot but missed the final pink. "I suppose the £167,000 wasn’t mine to start with, but it’s hard to take," he said. "Some bloke came up to me last night and said I had cost him £20 by missing the pink. I said ’how do you think I feel!’"
Bingham, world amateur champion in 1996, is a talented golfer and plays to a single-figure handicap.

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