Mark Allen is looking to improve on a disappointing World Snooker Championship record and feels he has improved on one Crucible failing he has suffered from in the past.
The Pistol has been consistently one of the best players on the planet since a breakthrough season in 2008/09 when he made the semi-finals of the World Championship.
He followed that with back-to-back quarter-finals and the Northern Irishman looked like he was a Crucible champion in the making.
However, since that run to the last eight in 2011, he has made just one semi-final and one quarter-final among 12 exits in the first or second rounds.
During this time he has won the UK Championship and Masters, taken his ranking event tally to 12 and reached the world number one spot, so it is a strangely bad run in Sheffield over the last decade and a half.
With his most recent semi-final run coming in 2023 and now back in the quarter-finals against Barry Hawkins this year, there are signs that the 40-year-old is solving the Crucible puzzle.
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After a second round win over Kyren Wilson, he offered his thoughts on how he is learning to handle his Sheffield campaigns better.
‘I don’t think you can ever work this place out, to be honest,’ said Allen. ‘But I think, it’s trying to get the most out of your bad sessions.
‘In particular the Zhang Anda match [in round one], for me to get out of that first session only 5-3 down, that’s probably a session a few years back I’d have lost 7-1 and then you’re out of the match.
‘Even Kyren, the 4-4 session in the middle, that’s probably a session I could have lost 6-2 before and you’re up against it.
‘It’s just getting your most out of your bad sessions. I’ve always thought you need to come here and play really, really good stuff, and it would be nice to do that, but it’s just about limiting the damage when you’re not at your best.
‘I think that’s something I’ve got better at, but there’s still room for improvement on that too.’
The Pistol will now see this year as a fabulous chance to make a first Crucible final, after big names fell on Monday in Sheffield.
Former champions Ronnie O’Sullivan, Mark Selby and Judd Trump were all dumped out of the tournament on a dramatic conclusion to the second round.
The winner of Allen vs Hawkins is now guaranteed to play a first-time semi-finalist in either Wu Yize or Hossein Vafaei after Wu downed Selby and Vafaei stunned Trump 13-12.
In the top half of the draw there are only world champions, as Zhao Xintong plays Shaun Murphy and John Higgins, fresh off his epic win over O’Sullivan, meets Neil Robertson.