PLtheRef wrote:SnookerFan wrote:I don't understand why they don't set up some temporary PTC events.
If and when China comes back and we're allowed to have tournaments there again, we can then get shot of the PTCs a lot easier than we could a proper ranking event.
The PTCs might not be the greatest thing to watch ever, but they still would serve some purposes. Mainly, and most importantly at the moment, it gives players playing opportunities when there isn't any other tournaments going on. Even amateur players.
And as minor as they are, they'd be a damn site more interesting than the Championshit League. Which is just awful.
You'd only need to find a venue that would host it for a few days at a time, rather than a full week. Leicester seems to have hosted a lot of qualifiers recently. Milton Keynes always seems up for it. I am sure they could find somewhere willing to host extra snooker for a few days at a time.
It's not ideal, but it'd give us something in what's been a pretty barren start to the season.
I read on Twitter that Dave Hendon had suggested on his podcast that WST should be exploring this option regards holding PTC style events to keep the players going. I guess it would come down to the economic costs of running such an event whilst using 3 or 4 tables at the venue, which I assume is one of the reasons why qualifying was brought into several events. That said though I can understand why the players feel that there should have been more of a contingency in place, even if you couldn't directly schedule replacements for planned events in a usual calendar.
As others have said, the irony isn't lost on the fact that the players spent time pre-pandemic speaking about how the tour had too much snooker and yet now even with 15 ranking events on the tour they don't feel there is enough snooker on the calendar.
In essence it's been a no-win situation for WST. - I can remember one interview a player gave last year (not Mark Allen) lamenting how there wasn't enough events and then the same player promptly didn't enter some events that were put on.
In one respect, just because you don't think there's enough tournaments, doesn't mean you have to enter everything if there's a tournament practically every week. But yeah, slightly damned if they do and damned if they don't with that one. At least if there's tournaments every week they have the opportunities to play, even if they don't necessarily need to play every week, the opportunities are there.
What I will say is that in some ways WST has always been quite good at papering over the cracks with some things. Yes, of course the tour is better post-Hearn than it was directly pre-Hearn, but that doesn't mean everything is rosey all of the time. Like how Hearn was constantly bragging about how much sponsorship that he's brought in, but all the sponsorship was gambling companies. It was a long time before he extended it to companies outside the gambling world, and even when the WST did do that they rely on Cazoo for everything. Obviously, it's an improvement on what it used to be sponsorship-wise, but bragging how well they're doing with it seems to ignore the problems they still have. A bit smoke and mirrors. Definitely resting on their laurels somewhat.
The reason I use that as an example is that it can be the same here. There seems to have been a bit over-reliant on China. Yes, there's more tournaments in Continental Europe than there used to be, but China because of the popularity was willing to put in a lot of money, even if they weren't getting any crowds in. When China isn't there, they don't seem to know what to do in the first few months of the season. We get a shitty Championship League, the European Masters and then weeks of nothing happening.
I understand that you can't just pull new tournaments out of your bottom. But it's not liked Covid, or the absence of the Chinese tournaments, just happened this season. Some kind of short-term way of filling a few gaps in the season must have been possible by now. Even if it's just a few weekends of PTCS.