47 years three-time champion Mark Williams blew away fellow Welshman Jackson Page with a flurry of scoring to lead 7-1 in the second round of the World Championship.
Mark Williams produced a scintillating session of snooker with three centuries and five breaks of 50 or more.
Page pinched the eighth frame to avoid a whitewash, but could lose the match with a session to spare.
Judd Trump, the 2019 champion, leads 6-3 against Hossein Vafaei, the first Iranian to play at the Crucible.
They play to a finish from 19:00 BST on Thursday, for the right to face Scotland’s Anthony McGill in the second round.
Williams and Page resume at the same time in their best-of-25 encounter, with the 47-year-old needing just six more frames to progress to the quarter-finals.
The two players know each other well, being practice partners and with Williams describing 20-year-old Page as his “fourth son”, going round to his house to play cards and having pizza with his other three boys.
But on the table Williams showed no sympathy, rattling in breaks of 125, 74, 53, 50, 100, 75, 51 and 121 to take complete control.
Page got a generous ovation when he managed to get on the scoreboard, but mustered only 134 points in the entire session and faces the prospect of not returning for Friday’s final session.
