Pakistan\u2019s seasoned snooker player Muhammad Asif booked his place in the final of the IBSF World Masters Snooker Championship with a commanding 4-2 victory over India\u2019s Manan Chandra in Thursday\u2019s semi-final at the Crowne Plaza Bahrain. The former world amateur champion displayed resilience, recovering from an early setback to seal the match. Frame scores were: 118-6, 0-84, 25-76, 92-11, 87-62, and 72-41. Asif started the match on a high as he completely outclassed Chandra 118-6 in the opening frame. Chandra, however, responded strongly as he won the next two frames to take the lead, only for Asif to win three consecutive frames to round up a thumping victory. In the final, Muhammad Asif will face India\u2019s Vijay Nichani or Brijesh Damani, who earlier defeated him in the group stage. A day earlier, Pakistan\u2019s emerging cueist Hasnain Akhtar also qualified for the final IBSF World U17 Snooker Championship by defeating Poland\u2019s Oliwier Nizialek 4-0. The in-form cueist, who has thus far lost only one frame in his dominant campaign, took early control of the match by sealing three consecutive frames. Nizialek, who could not score in double digits in each of the first three frames, offered some fightback in the must-win contest, but his efforts were insufficient to down Hasnain, who secured a perfect 4-0 victory with the frame scores of 76-1, 69-8, 88-0 and 62-37. Hasnain Akhtar will face Wales\u2019 Riley Powell in the final, scheduled to be played on Friday. Notably, the 16-year-old booked his spot in the IBSF World U17 Snooker Championship semi-final with a resounding 3-1 victory over Poland\u2019s Krzysztof Czapnik.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pakistan\u2019s seasoned snooker player Muhammad Asif booked his place in the final of the IBSF World Masters Snooker Championship with a commanding 4-2 victory over…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25875,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25874\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}