Stevens withdrew from the season's opening ranking event, the Wuxi Classic due to a bad back and could not advance beyond the second round in any of the next three events.&lt;ref name="2012/13"&gt;&lt;/ref&gt; At the 2012 UK Championship he beat Dominic Dale 6–1 and Marco Fu 6–4 to reach the quarter-finals for the first time since lifting the trophy in 2003. In a scrappy game versus Mark Davis, Stevens was beaten 4–6. Stevens missed a simple brown at 4–1 up against Mark Williams in the first round of the Masters and then made a series of errors during the rest of the match to lose 4–6. His second quarter-final of the season came at the German Masters, where he was defeated 3–5 by Marco Fu, before losing 2–4 to Stephen Maguire in the second round of the Welsh Open.