lhpirnie wrote:The real problem with Q School is it tends to favour battling players, who win frames on the colours. But those players won't do so well on the tour. The structure of Q School is wrong.
I admire your deep-seated conviction that it's always the system's fault when players don't play well enough to win matches, it never ceases to amaze me the angles you manage to find and present.
But really, just being good at snooker on a consistent basis is the real factor regardless of what system you impose or promote.
I agree, it'll always be better if more good quality tables are available, but that's not as much structural as it is economic, and a trail of into other topics.
Steve Davis emerged as a player because he beat everyone at his club, and had a reputation at his club for beating everyone at his club. He then got challenge matches from people from other clubs, which he tended to also win. When he arrived on the scene proper he'd already had countless victories and was ready for the big time and everyone knew he was a genuine threat by the age of 21 purely by natural word of mouth.
Likewise Jimmy White. He carved through the amateur scene like a hot knife through butter so that by the time he was a late teenager he was already being touted as a future world champion and an immediate and present threat to the current pros.
And that's how it usually goes. Hendry, O'Sullivan, Selby, Murphy, Allen, Trump, Wilson, they just burst onto the scene regardless of what system produced them. Because they had the necessary talent to do so.
If snooker goes a few years without finding a new talent, that doesn't mean the system for finding them is at fault, it's usually blatantly obvious because they cream through the opposition. It just means there's no new hot player at the moment. Or, rather, that the newest hot players aren't quite as hot as the current leading pack. Nothing really new there.
I get that it would be 'nice' if all the players who could play to a top 48 standard could all get a top 48 rhythm to their life, but that's where the current limit is, for a whole host of reasons. The sport doesn't really need an endless supply of random top 48 players, and neither does the viewing public.
People play to win money and/or fame/reputation, the aim is to find out if you can win a tournament. Making your entire personal pet peeve "what a bad lot snooker provides to the top 49+'ers" isn't really relevant to either the players nor the spectators nor the promoters.
If a player doesn't feel like they'll ever win anything and gets no enjoyment from trying for a top 48 spot then there's not a lot of point twiddling the system all the time to try and molly coddle players on the brink of quitting. It's an entertainment sport, everyone is in it just to see and play good quality snooker and make some money and a reputation. Wondering why random player X is struggling while random player Y seems to be quite happy isn't really anyone's issue other than the players themselves.
I mean here, we've got 3 tournaments each producing 4 new pros, so 12 new pros every year. I feel sure any young talent that matures into greatness will, by the sheer weight of odds in their favour, win one of these places in the first 6 years of their 'serious' career and go on to great things. If they are obviously talented enough. It's not really about showing promise, it's about beating other players regularly and easily, regardless of whether one of the frames was a masterpiece of execution.