Aditya Mehta is a prominent Indian professional snooker player. In the year 2013 at the Indian Open he was accredited as the first Indian to reach the final of a ranking tournament. In the following year he made his first ever maximum break in professional competition at the 2014 Paul Hunter Classic. Aditya Mehta practices snooker in London along with Alfie Burden and Anthony Hamilton. He also serves as a regular column writer for an Indian sports portal.
Career of Aditya Mehta
Aditya Mehta started his professional career in 2004 with the Challenge Tour. Later he earned the nomination for a Main Tour place for the 2008/2009 season and became the first Indian to play on Main Tour after Yasin Merchant in 1990s. However at the end of the season he fell off the tour but managed to get a place again for the 2011/2012 season. At the 2010 Asian Games organized in Guangzhou, China, he bagged Silver and Bronze medals in Men`s Snooker Team and Men`s Snooker Singles respectively. Aditya Mehta participated in 10 of the 12 minor ranking PTC Events scoring the best in the ninth event in which he beat two-time World Championship runner-up Matthew Stevens. He achieved victory at the 2012 Asian Snooker Championship over Pankaj Advani and finished with a world ranking of 80.
Aditya Mehta began his 2012-13 season with narrow miss from qualifying for the first tournament, Wuxi Classic. He then qualified for the International Championship and for the first time reached the main stage of a ranking event. He lost in his first televised match in a major ranking tournament in which his opponent defeated him with a score of 0-6. In the rest of the phase of the tournament he could not qualify for any other event and ended up with a world ranking of 73.
In the year 2013, in July, Aditya Mehta marked victory at the World Games and also became the first Indian to win the gold medal. In the season of 2013-14, ranking event, organized in India, was introduced for the first time and Mehta successfully qualified it. The first round of it was held in New Delhi and he scored a break of 127 in the deciding frame against Peter Ebdon and won, thereby reaching the last 16 of a ranking event, an occurrence he encountered for the second time in his career. He won over the two-time world champion Mark Williams and also Pankaj Advani making history in India as the first semi-finalist of a ranking event. However he later lost to Ding Junhui which brought an abrupt end to his tournament and he finished as the runner-up. Following this he lost in the quarter-finals of the minor-ranking Antwerp Open and ended up with a ranking of 29th on the Order of Merit, and was excluded from the top 25 who reached the finals.
