Snooker doesn’t change much. Tennis has different surfaces. Golf has the weather. Snooker stays the same regardless. Much is made that there are loads of tournaments now. But to the average Joe, who isn’t invested in the Qualification Process or the unfolding of the season, they turn the telly on a certain channel and yet again it’s a couple of people playing snooker. Sometimes they wear T shirts. Once in Turkey there was a funky carpet. “Ooh look, they’re using Rasson tables” I have previously announced to the amazement of nobody. If you can’t be bothered to watch it this week there’ll be another one next week. The only clue as to what is going on is that maybe it says ‘Scottish Open’ on the TV guide, and even then, does the average Joe care?

What do we currently have? Well the tournaments currently largely follow these formats:

• Best of 7’s with a best of 17 final
• Best of 11’s with a best of 19 final
• The top 32/16 playing their own little boutique events, usually a mixture of the above
• Short Form tournaments the Shootout (1 frame), the British Open (best of 5 for early rounds) and the Championship League which exists only for betting purposes, nobody really knows what the fuck is going on, and for an added twist: there’s two of them
• The Long Form events: the Tour Championship (best of 19 from the start) and the World Championships (best of 19 up to best of 35 frames). Guess which one I prefer?

You can dress it up however you like, but that’s the season right there, other than a couple where best of 9’s are deployed and, pleasingly, a couple of Chinese events with multi-session semi finals. Sometimes there are qualifiers before it gets to the telly, but the majority of them water 128 players down to a televised final. Some of them start their life with qualifiers in a leisure centre in Barnsley then end up several months later in Snooker City in China, and we all just sort of play along.

Most players don’t like best of 7’s – there’s no interval so having a bit of a bad day can see you dumped out in under an hour before your arm has got going. If the Shootout is the ultimate lottery, then best of 7’s are still viewed with suspicion. Best of 11’s are the sort of ‘premium standard’, with just enough time for drama to unfold without it going to a second session and crucially the TV companies are ok with them. It feels like a premium event when it’s a best of 11.

Snooker is a sport built on patience. The game played by anyone starting now is the same game as the one Joe Davis played in the 1920’s. It requires patience to get proficient, it requires patience to watch. If we look at cricket, another game that can go on for days – for many years Test matches were seen as the pinnacle of the game. But then it was decreed that people couldn’t watch for 5 days all the time so 50 over cricket came in, then in the early 2000’s Twenty20 was invented. It’s been enormously popular and has given rise to multimillion dollar playing contracts, one of the main reasons being it’s great to broadcast, a neat 3 hour-ish package played to a conclusion. A top player from the 1920’s wouldn’t recognise it at all and now nobody really knows what represents the pinnacle of the game.

Snooker has the opposite problem. Everyone agrees that the World Championship is the pinnacle. And it’s, by a considerable distance, the longest tournament. To win the World Championship a seeded player has to win 71 frames. An unseeded player has to win at least 10 more, possibly up to 40, simply to qualify. One session at the Crucible, after which there will be no result, is longer in frames than most of the completed matches played all season… and then you have to come back for more later. It’s the “Everest of snooker” as Elliott Slessor called it.

By comparison Lei Peifan, winning the Scottish Open last week, won 32 frames at the venue (+ 8 in qualifying). Tom Ford won 8 frames for the Shootout. In March, Ronnie O’Sullivan only took down 13 frame balls in Riyadh and pocketed £250k for his trouble. For exactly the same prize pot for the UK Championship, Judd Trump had to win 34 frames. Snooker is gloriously peculiar in this regard – imagine if for the entire season in cricket they only played T20/50-overs, then to decide who was best at the end there was a Test series over 17 days where you have to play almost every day. It sounds bonkers but that’s basically the snooker season.

Snooker fans are, by their very nature, patient viewers. We are intrigued by the twists and turns of the game. We are not into it for a quick fix. If the entire season was 20 Shootouts, we’d all switch off. However if the entire season was 20 WSC-length tournaments, probably nobody new would tune in. So the Tour attempts to find a happy medium. With logistics in mind, WST hires a venue for a week, puts a few tables in, get two finalists and give one of them a trophy and a cheque – rinse and repeat for 9 months, see you in Sheffield in April.

Some have little twists such as a shot clock or, cough, the ‘Golden Ball’. But it does run the risk of all being a bit the same. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking the tour could be a bit more creative generally… so here are my suggestions to tweak the current calendar, hopefully without it costing the Earth:

Tournaments in places other than the UK, China and Saudi Arabia

Who remembers crazy shit like the Gibraltar Open, the Malta Cup and the Riga Masters? How about more European snooker? Everyone says the German Masters is great to play in, the appetite is definitely there on the Continent – so much so that Belgium even produced a World Champion in Luca Brecel. Ronnie, who of course likes a good cash incentive, has done exhibitions in Finland and Bulgaria in the recent past, so there must be plenty of people willing to watch snooker. The Irish Masters was a firm favourite among the players who went to Goffs, so the venues themselves are almost certainly out there.

We’re not expecting megabucks prizes to be put up like Riyadh or Xian, but nor should they be comedy minor tournaments – we need more people watching the sport, so going to Europe is a slam dunk. When I started watching the game in early 90’s there were tournaments in Dubai, Thailand, Canada and Australia, we also used to have an Indian Open but everything seems to have been curtailed since the pandemic. We have a bizarre situation in snooker where the ‘World Snooker Tour’ seems to not be overly worldly, we’d rather have another tournament in Bolton than Budapest, thank you very much. No disrespect to Bolton and its snooker fans, but I can’t help but feel growing the sport means taking it to other places.

The Saudi legs of the tour are obviously mired in controversy for numerous reasons, the subject of many articles elsewhere. However, the powers that be have found people willing to stump up huge amounts of cash for the players and a little gimmick in the Golden Ball that, like it or not, has generated a lot of interest. But it’s patently ridiculous to suggest we are going there to “grow the sport” if we aren’t going to even attempt to do so anywhere else. Going into territories which currently provide actual professionals is surely the best way of doing that. Take the money from the Saudis while it’s on the table by all means, WST would be fools not to really, but invest it wisely.

Will more European tournaments transform snooker for our Average Joe? No. But will it grow the sport… undoubtedly. It already is – look at the numbers of young Europeans popping up, Matt Selt’s new best mate Artemijs Zizins is Latvian so the Riga Masters may well have had a hand in introducing someone to the sport, perhaps? This is great to see and should be a springboard for doing this as often as possible.

Or maybe the same tournaments as what we have now, but in different places

I do believe the Turkish Masters was brokered with similar lofty ideals, only for the promoter to fail to pay prize money, which has caused WST to be understandably wary of new events. So if promotion is a concern, or trying to find sponsors for prize money etc, maybe we don’t even need brand new tournaments at all for our European fanbase.

In a move which would also solve the “players travel expenses” issue, why not go on the road with the ‘ITV Tournaments’ where you have to have earned a certain amount to qualify… ones with 2 tables and less logistics. I actually don’t mind the World Grand Prix moving to Hong Kong this year, if they think they can fill a massive arena with it, then go for it – it makes perfect sense. So go the whole hog – put the Tour Championship in Brussels, try the Players Championship in Helsinki, get the Champion of Champions in Goffs. Rotate different countries each year – Latvia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, they all like their snooker, I’m sure there are more.

Let’s be honest the arenas in the UK aren’t usually full unless it’s later stages or Ronnie O’Sullivan is playing. When the Tour Championship went to Hull it had a major issue because only a couple of big names qualified and thus the good people of Hull kept their money in their pockets and watched it at home. Whereas I have a funny feeling there will be more people happy to watch ANY snooker in Europe live. And if they do pack the crowds in, we can appropriately gauge where to stage potential new tournaments in the future…

With just one county in England, Yorkshire, hosting two of the three ‘majors’ (for now) why can’t we take the other prestigious tournaments on an international tour? Ah yes, I hear you answer, ITV may not like it. Well I’m sure this can be worked upon with start times in order to facilitate a 1pm and 7pm UK broadcast in between reruns of Minder and the Professionals on ITV4. Such things are not beyond the wit of man.

There’s also a couple of ‘nomad’ tournaments already in existence – I’m looking at you, European Masters and World Open. The latter I seem to recall going via Preston, Aberdeen and Glasgow to find home in Yushan in China. The European Masters (held in Austria earlier this year) could certainly help break new ground if they want a flat 128 tournament somewhere.

Tournaments involving a ‘group stage’

And when I say groups, I don’t mean pretend groups like the Champion of Champions, which is just a straight knockout mutton dressed up as lamb and hoping we don’t notice. Unlucky WST, we’ve noticed. Especially with the Chinese tournaments, even for the Chinese-based participants, all the players traverse thousands of miles to get to the venue – so let’s get a bit more bang for buck.

Rather than one match, guarantee anyone who has qualified three – a group of four, everyone plays a best of 7 against everyone else, 1 point to the winner, frame difference then highest break to decide progress in the event of a tie. If you had 2 tables, each playing a ‘group’ in a day then in 4 days you can get through the ‘last 32’ and then it’s top 2 of each to QF/Semi/Final like normal, so the tournaments wouldn’t take any longer. You could even ‘seed’ the groups if that was what TV wanted – 1 from the top 16, 3 from qualifiers.

This would definitely be different to just a load of knockout games. I appreciate there’s the chance of the odd dead-rubber game, but this doesn’t seem to affect (checks notes) oh yes, the biggest fucking sporting event on the planet, the football World Cup. Put some prize money up per match rather than per round and there’s still incentive for players to perform – and their individual sponsors get 3 games of table time rather than one so everyone’s a winner.

NOTE: If anyone at WST is reading this, none of your stupid groups of 3 like what you get in the Championship League, and certainly none of this ‘drawn match’ bollocks, snooker should always have a winner and a loser.

Ditch one or two of the existing tournaments?

The age old dilemma. Quantity of tournaments, therefore multiple earning opportunities for all players including those lower down the rankings… or “quality” tournaments where we allow everyone to have a nice rest and which will naturally favour the higher ranked players. My feelings are probably very much in the ‘you can have too much of a good thing’ camp. There is no shortage of tournaments, there are plenty of earning opportunities, and my previous proposal of a Group Stage style event would actually increase earning opportunities without affecting the calendar.

Outside of those mentioned already, we are left with the Chinese and Home Nations events. The Home Nations get a bit of stick, but who can fail to be delighted to see Gary Wilson win two Scottish Opens on the bounce, only for the trophy to then go to Lei Peifan? Wasn’t it great seeing Noppon, Wakelin and MOD getting to a final? So these ‘short format’ events do throw up some unlikely finalists and this is A Good Thing. Initially they were grouped as the Home Nations because there was a mad £1m bonus on offer for anyone who could win all four in a season… but that’s gone now so they don’t come as a package.

However I firmly believe the Welsh Open is part of the snooker “furniture” and I also believe at least one event per year should be in Scotland and Northern Ireland as they have a rich snooker heritage. That leaves maybe the British Open and English Open at risk of being canned off… ask yourself would you mind? If the British Open is, as I suspect, tied in contractually with ITV, then can it be spruced up a bit because best of 5’s are just a bit of a joke. Make that best of 9’s, keep the random draw, ditch the English Open, and I think we’ve got one good tournament rather than two ‘meh’ ones.

“FA Cup” style draws for longer-format events all the way through

Currently only the Shootout and the British Open do this, already both lotteries due to short format early rounds. Why not do it with one of the best of 11 tournaments, such as the Wuhan Open or the International Championship? I assume the chance of big names falling out early makes the beancounters wary of this… but then the Masters is done on random draw for the first round, so it’s clearly not something that is putting sponsors off.

Maybe they worry that the big names might knock each other out early and struggle to sell tickets or TV adverts in case the later stages are a bunch of lower ranked players who have rode their luck. But at what point do we as a sport have to say to the broadcasters, “look, there’s no guarantee Ronnie O’Sullivan will even turn up, and if he does it’s far from guaranteed he’ll get to the latter stages depending on what mood he’s in, so can we stop basing our entire TV programming around maybe getting to see him?” Perish the thought we might have a final of two relative unknowns because of a lucky draw. Or, in the case of Lei Peifan, getting to the final by beating quite a lot of top players in deciders in a very hard draw, and then going on to win it anyway.  

However, let’s be honest, for much of the past 20-30 years, it’s been the same names in the finals. But we, as the public, love underdogs – look at Jak Jones’ run to the Crucible final. Nobody outside the snooker hardcore will have seen him play before May but he had a sort of ‘everyman’ quality about him that we all warmed to, a once-in-a-lifetime run. It’s all just so bloody nice to see some people enjoying it. Only those with a heart of stone could fail to be loving this season’s stories involving Chris Wakelin. Michael Holt. Xiao Goudong, Wu Yize and Lei Peifan. More please. Random draws rather than seeded ones would, in my opinion, increase the chances of this.

A “match clock”?

I’m against any talk of shot clocks etc, difficult individual shot selection is part of the game and you might need to take your time. The issue with slow play is when someone takes 30-40 seconds to play a routine red, that’s when we start smelling the ‘he’s doing this deliberately’ rat. So is it worth trying for just one tournament with some sort of ‘match clock’?

Work out with the TV companies a maximum table time, perhaps with some convoluted Duckworth-Lewis formula to work out the winner for pure #bantz. Keen to stress this should not apply to the ‘major’ tournaments (and I sat through all three of Graeme Dott’s Crucible finals, two of which I wished they had this) but trialling it for a relatively minor tournament wouldn’t be the end of the world, just to see what happens. Might work, might not, let’s find out. Would have to be non-ranking, of course.

© Long Form Snooker 2024