China Open Snooker 2026: UK TV Times and How to Watch

Every session of the China Open is live on TNT Sports in the UK and Ireland, and streams on HBO Max. Play starts at 07:00 and 12:30 UK time every day, and the tournament runs to Sunday 16 August.

Two things trip people up this year. The streaming home changed — discovery+ no longer carries TNT Sports — and the tournament is not in Beijing.

How can you watch the China Open in the UK?

On TNT Sports, or streamed on HBO Max. Not on discovery+, which stopped carrying TNT Sports in March.

That third row is the one worth knowing. HBO Max launched in the UK and Ireland on 26 March 2026 and became the streaming home of TNT Sports on the same day. If you had a discovery+ subscription for the snooker, TNT Sports says the same login works on HBO Max — you download the app or go to the website and sign in with the details you already have.

TNT Sports is sold either as a standalone plan or alongside one of HBO Max’s entertainment plans, and it also remains available through the existing TV partners that carry it. We have not printed a monthly price here because neither TNT Sports nor HBO Max would show us one directly, and a subscription price quoted second-hand is exactly the sort of number that is wrong by the time you act on it.

Snooker is not a short-term arrangement for the broadcaster: TNT Sports has extended its World Snooker Tour deal and remains the home of the sport in the UK and Ireland.

What time are the sessions in the UK?

07:00 and 12:30, every day. There is no evening session for UK viewers.

The broadcaster publishes its schedule in UK time, and those are its figures. Converting them the other way puts the two sessions at 2pm and 7.30pm local, which is why a UK viewer gets an early start and an early finish.

China is seven hours ahead of the UK, and for this tournament that number does not move. That is worth stating because the gap between the UK and most places is not a constant — it changes whenever one side puts its clocks forward or back. China does not use daylight saving at all and the UK stays on British Summer Time until late October, so seven hours holds for every one of the nine days here. Add seven to any UK time in this article and you have the time in the arena.

What is the schedule for the rest of the tournament?

Second-round matches begin on Wednesday 12 August, and the final is on Sunday 16 August.

The tournament began on Saturday 8 August and finishes on the 16th at the Riverside Sports Centre in Taiyuan. As of the morning of 11 August, this was the published schedule for the next two days:

Dates for the quarter-finals and semi-finals were not published on the broadcaster’s schedule when we checked, so we are not going to guess at them. What is fixed is the shape: every match up to and including the semi-finals is the best of 11 frames, and the final is the best of 19 over two sessions on 16 August.

Who is already out?

The world number one, in the first round.

Judd Trump arrived having just won the Shanghai Masters and lost 3-6 to Noppon Saengkham at the first hurdle, a result that also removed the prospect of a Trump–O’Sullivan second-round tie. Ding Junhui went out 1-6 to David Gilbert, Mark Williams lost 3-6 to Zhou Yuelong, and Barry Hawkins lost 4-6 to Liu Hongyu.

Through to the second round: Ronnie O’Sullivan, who beat Jackson Page 6-2 after a slow start; Neil Robertson, the defending champion from 2019, who beat Chang Bingyu 6-3; Mark Selby, 6-3 over Pang Junxu; Shaun Murphy, 6-0 against Matthew Selt; and Kyren Wilson, 6-5 against Aaron Hill. Mark Allen advanced when Hossein Vafaei withdrew.

O’Sullivan’s reward is Saengkham, the man who knocked Trump out, at 12:30 UK on Wednesday.

There are 14 Chinese players in the draw, and the main venue stage has 34 players in total: the world’s top 16, sixteen qualifiers from Leicester in June, and two Chinese amateur wildcards.

How much is the prize money?

£250,000 to the winner, from a fund of £1,205,000.

The winner’s cheque is about a fifth of the entire fund, which is a steeper curve than it looks: the gap between winning and losing the final is £150,000, more than the combined prize for reaching the last 16 and the quarter-finals ten times over.

Where is the China Open actually played?

Taiyuan, in Shanxi province — not Beijing.

The event was played in Beijing in its earlier run and has returned to the calendar after an absence since 2019, when Neil Robertson beat Jack Lisowski in the final. It is now at the Riverside Sports Centre in Taiyuan, roughly 500km south-west of the capital.

That matters mainly if you are searching for it: a lot of older coverage and a lot of assumptions still say Beijing, and the tournament has not been there for seven years.

What this does not tell you

Who is still in by the time you read it, what a subscription costs, or who wins.

This is a live tournament, and the results above are a snapshot taken on the morning of 11 August. Three first-round matches were still to be played that day and one was in progress as we read the schedule, so anything past the second round in this article is structure rather than fact.

We have not printed a subscription price, for the reason given above. If cost is your deciding factor, the number to trust is the one on HBO Max’s own checkout, not one in an article.

And we have not tried to tell you who will win. The draw has already produced one shock in the first round, which is the usual argument against that sort of thing.

Sources

Checked on 11 August 2026, with the broadcaster’s page last updated at 08:12 UK that morning.

Both TNT Sports pages were opened in a browser and read directly, which is the only way they can be read — TNT Sports rejects command-line requests, and it does so identically for a real page and an invented one, so the usual wrong-path test proves nothing there. The Wikipedia entry was checked that way and passed, returning the article for the real path and a 404 for a made-up one.