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Can the tour be improved? Some ideas

Postby gninnur karona

According to Barry Hearn, in a recent tweet, "snooker is flying". When I read that tweet the word that jumped out was complacency.

The WST reply to Stephen Maguire inspired that same word - complacency.

Snooker isn't in imminent danger of dying but nevertheless Stephen Maguire and Anthony Hamilton seem to me to have correctly diagnosed that the patient is in need of some TLC.

If WST carry on regardless what happens next?

Does anyone out there want to set up an alternative tour? Current levels of prize money are too low to serve as a barrier to entry. If golf can be challenged so can snooker. The danger for the sport is that the form of an alternative tour would likely prioritise profit rather than the best long-term future for snooker. The deeper WST bury their heads in the sand, or at least portray that impression, the greater the chance that an alternative tour will surface. On the other hand if WST take on board constructive criticism and act upon it, that threat will gradually recede.

But if it did arrive should we support an alternative tour? That depends. The key to the answer is not who runs professional snooker but how professional snooker is run.

Establish credible long-term objectives. By 2030 professional snooker should have sustainable annual ranking event prize money in excess of €50M. To put that into context that's below the four majors total prize money in golf, and way below total prize money of the four tennis grand slam tournaments. Just four tournaments not the entire tours.

All steps and changes taken from now should be compatible with long-term objectives. If, as I suspect, the constraints of a 128 player tour and an overwhelmingly United Kingdom orientated calendar of events are acting as blockers to vastly increased prize money then remove them. Sporting integrity should be a key element of snooker going forward - ranking system, tournament structure and calendar should reflect that. The World Championship should be the only tournament not using an open flat structure.

What sort of tour for 2030?
Ranking list to be points based rather than money.
Ranking list includes all players who have competed in a ranking event in 2-year period.
Five tiers of ranking events based loosely on event length, match length, and prize money.
Tour structure to have pyramid of events - 1 tier 0, 3 tier 1, up to 8 tier 2, up to 22 tier 3, up to 22 tier 4.
Ranking prize money: tier 0 €10M; tier 1 €5M; tier 2 €1M; tier 3 €500K; tier 4 €250K.
All events to be classified as ranking are flat and open and follow a strict template with two qualifying rounds.
Flat 128: 176 players; top 104 rankings + 8 wildcards main draw; 105-160 rankings + 8 wildcards qualifiers
Flat 64: 88 players; top 52 rankings + 4 wildcards main draw; 53-80 rankings + 4 wildcards qualifiers
Flat 32: 44 players; top 26 rankings + 2 wildcards main draw; 27-40 rankings + 2 wildcards qualifiers
Flat 16: 22 players; top 13 rankings + 1 wildcard main draw; 14-20 rankings + 1 wildcard qualifier
Organisers encouraged to hold local preliminary competitions to select majority of wildcards
QSchool abolished - no longer necessary.
Fifteen weeks of the calendar blocked ie no events simultaneously: 3 weeks for a ShootOut tour and 3 weeks for a 6Red tour each with €5M centralised prize money, 3 weeks for the World Championship, and 2 weeks each for the German, UK and China.
Tier 2, 3 and 4 events run in parallel - but not in same geographical area.
Masters, Tour Championship are invitational not counting towards ranking points
ShootOut and 6Red tours have own rankings used as part of criteria for following season
DRAFT CALENDAR ASSUMING WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP RETAINED
June 15 start season
June 15-August 2 (9 weeks China Asia) 2 tier 2 events, 7 tier 3 events, 7 tier 4 events
August 3-23 (3 weeks) ShootOut tour 8 venues eg Australia, Iran, Germany, UK, China, Belgium, Thailand, another in Europe - final venue rotated.
August 24-October 4 (6 weeks Europe excluding UK Ireland) 2 tier 2 events, 4 tier 3 events, 4 tier 4 events
October 5-18 (2 weeks) German Open - tier 1.
October 19-December 6 (7 weeks UK and Ireland) 2 tier 2 events, 5 tier 3 events, 5 tier 4 events
December 7-20 (2 weeks) UK Open - tier 1.
December 21-January 3 (2 weeks) mid-season break
January 4-10 (1 week Europe) 1 tier 3 event, 1 tier 4 event + Masters invitational top 16 €5M
January 11-31 (3 weeks) 6Reds tour 8 venues eg Australia, Iran, Germany, UK, China, Belgium, Thailand, another in Europe - final venue rotated.
February 1-March 14 (6 weeks China Asia) 2 tier 2 events, 4 tier 3 events, 4 tier 4 events
March 15-28 (2 weeks) China Open - tier 1.
March 29-April 4 (1 week) 1 tier 3 event, 1 tier 4 event
April 5-11 (1 week) 1 tier 3 event, 1 tier 4 event + Tour Championship invitational season's top 8 €5M
April 12-May 2 (3 weeks) World Championship - tier 0.
FORMAT OF SHOOT-OUT and 6RED TOURS
Player has one entry
Round 1 17 days: 8x3-day event 2-day main event (2 groups of 8 round-robins - 1 afternoon 1 evening) 1-day qualifier (group of 8 round-robin)
2nd day of main event coincides with qualifying day of next event
Final round 2 days: 16 group winners in 2 round-robin groups; concluding with a final between the two group winners
Entries season 1: 1-104 + 16 wildcards direct; 105-152 + 16 wildcards qualifiers
Entries from season 2: split prioritises those who finished in top 4 of their groups previous season before using the rankings

What circumstances could cause the World Championship to not be retained?
If an alternative tour replaces WST.

What now?
We could make a start on improving sporting integrity.
Convert QSchool from knock-out to the Swiss system. IMPLEMENT MAY 2023
Ranking system remains money-based.
All players to have one-year tour cards only. IMPLEMENT FOR 2023-24.
End season the top 80 on the 2-year-list and the 16 'best of the rest' on the 1-year-list retain their cards. IMPLEMENT AT END 2023-24
End season 22-23 only. Any player who would have survived under new ranking system remains on tour for 23-24. IMPLEMENT END SEASON 2022-23 ONLY
All players retain their ranking points - only rookies begin season on zero. IMPLEMENT FOR START 2023-24
All ranking events bar the World Championship to be flat 128. IMPLEMENT FOR 2023-24
All flat 128 draws feature 4 wildcards directly into last 128 stage. IMPLEMENT FOR 2023-24
Qualification round to reduce field to 128 features everyone below a certain point + a further 4 wildcards. IMPLEMENT FOR 2023-24
EG: For 135 ranked players entered: 1-109 directly in last 128 accompanied by 4 wildcards; 110-135 in qualification round with other 4 wildcards.
All flat 128 draws protect the top 32 seeds. RETAIN FOR 2023-24
All flat 128 draws protect players that met the top 32 seeds in the opening round of the previous competition. IMPLEMENT FOR 2023-24
NB In simple terms place those 64 players on the left side of the draw.
All events to have all rounds operating entirely at one venue, or at least in one area. IMPLEMENT FOR 2023-24
All events to be played in one contiguous timeframe. IMPLEMENT FOR 2023-24
ShootOut to use 10 second shot clock throughout (cuetracker records ASTs of over 15 seconds for more than a third of this year's competitors) IMPLEMENT FOR 2023-24

And the transition between 2023-24 and 2030-31?
For another day........................................

Re: Can the tour be improved? Some ideas

Postby lhpirnie

Yes, of course we should have a lively debate about the future of snooker! I enjoyed reading your post!

All this would be fine in principle, but the practicalities are an issue. Any scheme which depends on exactly 128 or exactly 135 players is too rigid. Similarly, the capacity of tournaments will vary. Any tournament has to be a partnership between WST, WPBSA, promoters, broadcasters and most importantly sponsors. We need a system that is above all flexible to cope with that. Tournaments happen organically, not so much by top-down design.

Also, I may have said that we could implement new things by 2023-24, but what I actually meant was technically. The implementations are not too difficult to achieve. What is too difficult is a short timescale for radical changes. We saw the problems WST created with the Asia-Oceania Q School last year: hey announced it so late that various Asian federations (China, Hong Kong, and remarkably Thailand) had already arranged to send their players to the UK!

I don't think we can ever have a tour where all tournaments have a 128-player draw. It's even worse when we consider events outside the UK - there just isn't the capacity and the costs are immense. That's the fundamental reason why I'm against 'ranking points' for professional tournaments. And if we can't have a clear distinction between amateur and professional, we should rank amateur events as well. Otherwise, it's just unfair and inadequate.

But I do agree that tournaments should be played contiguously, preferably at a single venue (or close by). These weeks between qualifiers and main events are bad, as is banishing the 'numpties' to squalid conditions with next to no crowds. I just got back from Berlin, where on the first evening Rolf Kalb announced to the Tempodrom audience that the reason why there were so few top players was because the qualifiers were played directly after the UK Championship, which had been the priority for the top players. For me, a tournament should be cohesive, with a few exceptions (such as the World Championship).

I like the idea of wildcard entries. Again, an important theme in our time is 'inclusivity'. We shouldn't be building a wall around professional snooker, there should be pathways.

But I'm not sure Shoot-Out tour would work, assuming you're being serious. I did propose a Shoot-Out in China, to separate two serious tournaments in a 3-week block. But any more that that would probably be overkill. It might be possible to expand 6-Reds, but it's very unproven.

Anyway, some valuable ideas there!

Re: Can the tour be improved? Some ideas

Postby gninnur karona

Thanks.

No doubt I could have been clearer. Perhaps not my best idea to mix tangible proposed changes for next season with a basket of ideas for 2030.

For next season. As things stand with 128+ tour players I favour flat 128s throughout (World Championship excepted). Barry Hearn was right to introduce that from 2010 and changing it for the UK Championship this season ran against sporting integrity. It's OK for the BBC to want a two-table set-up with just 32 players in York for the televised segment BUT that doesn't require a pre-selected 16 players to be dispensed from earning their places. In a flat 128 the odds are already stacked in favour of the top 32 who never have to play another member of the top 32 before round 3. In contrast each non-top-32 player who reaches the last 32 has had to have beaten either a member of the top 32 or a player who beat a member of the top 32 in round one. If a top 16 player cannot win two matches against players from outside the top 32 they don't deserve to be playing in the last 32.

Over time. I agree with you concerning varying participant numbers. I outlined a template flat and open structure which could be used for tournaments with a variety of participant numbers 128 players, 64 players, 32 players, etc. To add another example I would propose a flat 96 would run with 132 players, the top 78 rankings and 6 wildcards into the main draw, 79-120 and 6 wildcards in the qualifying rounds.

Ranking method. Moneylist? Points? Elo? The only thing I am certain about is that the current money list is the least accurate of the three.

Future. Yes, I'm serious about both ShootOut and 6Reds tours. Objective: attract young people to the sport. As I outlined, although these 'tours' would take three weeks elapsed time each player directly qualified into the main draw would only play on two days, with the exception of group winners who would play a further two days at the final venue. Round-robins guarantee that every player plays seven matches over two days with every player playing in each of the four sessions. Every ticket-holder for a single session thus knows they will see each of the 16 players at least once, most twice. My ideal target audience is family with children, an audience that from what I could glean from TV pictures appeared to be almost entirely absent from last month's ShootOut. There's so much you could build around these events. A secondary side event for amateurs; goodie bags for child ticket holders; Q and A session; technical demonstrations; autographs; selfies; and more. So much opportunity.

Re: Can the tour be improved? Some ideas

Postby Juddernaut88

Pink Ball wrote:Don't give ranking points for the Shoot Out, extend the UK Championship so all matches are at least best of 17, do the same for the Masters and reduce the field, bring back point rankings.

Beyond that, I've no bright ideas.


Improve the scheduling for the ITV events. They should start Monday afternoon and not Monday evening! Also only have 1 championship league a season the invitational one and scrap the other one.

Re: Can the tour be improved? Some ideas

Postby McManusFan

I'm against flat draws as the standard. Having a new player turn up just to get pumped by a seasoned top player isn't good for bringing new talent in. The move to more tiered seeding this season is fairly positive.

I'm not saying bin flat draws all together, but that there should be a variety of tournament structures. I would keep the home nations as flat draws, and return them to how they used to be before the qualifying rounds.

Qualifying rounds also need to be close to the tournament they are associated with.

I'm also in favour of the Elo rankings, it's a much better measure of average skill.

Re: Can the tour be improved? Some ideas

Postby SnookerFan

McManusFan wrote:I'm against flat draws as the standard. Having a new player turn up just to get pumped by a seasoned top player isn't good for bringing new talent in. The move to more tiered seeding this season is fairly positive.

I'm not saying bin flat draws all together, but that there should be a variety of tournament structures. I would keep the home nations as flat draws, and return them to how they used to be before the qualifying rounds.

Qualifying rounds also need to be close to the tournament they are associated with.

I'm also in favour of the Elo rankings, it's a much better measure of average skill.


Yeah, I've never been the hugest of fans of Flat 128. I don't mind it in some events, but I don't think it's had the benefits that everybody has said it would.

It was supposed to get young up and coming players more used to playing the big names on match tables, and harden them to it. It hasn't worked. Where are all these young players coming through? Not there. Apart from maybe a couple of Chinese Players who aren't eligible to play at the moment anyway.

What really happens is that the lower ranked players turn up, and they're playing Ronnie or Selby or Higgins, and they're getting spanked in the first round.

This hasn't helped the young players. Not many have come through, and all you have is that the first few rounds of a lot of tournaments are really boring. The Home Nations suffer from that, in that the first few days feel like endless 4-0s or 4-1s. In fact, I personally don't really start getting that interested in the tournaments until Quarter-Finals. The early rounds all have to be best of seven to fit everybody in, and I can just take it or leave it..

You've made several tournaments be boring for half of their run, and got no younger players coming through in return. What's the advantage?

Re: Can the tour be improved? Some ideas

Postby Juddernaut88

Also scrap all the qualifiers for the home nation events. Just have all 128 players in the main event. It would mean they would have to choose venues which have 8 tables though but so be it.

Re: Can the tour be improved? Some ideas

Postby lhpirnie

SnookerFan wrote:Yeah, I've never been the hugest of fans of Flat 128. I don't mind it in some events, but I don't think it's had the benefits that everybody has said it would.

It was supposed to get young up and coming players more used to playing the big names on match tables, and harden them to it. It hasn't worked. Where are all these young players coming through? Not there. Apart from maybe a couple of Chinese Players who aren't eligible to play at the moment anyway.

What really happens is that the lower ranked players turn up, and they're playing Ronnie or Selby or Higgins, and they're getting spanked in the first round.

This hasn't helped the young players. Not many have come through, and all you have is that the first few rounds of a lot of tournaments are really boring. The Home Nations suffer from that, in that the first few days feel like endless 4-0s or 4-1s. In fact, I personally don't really start getting that interested in the tournaments until Quarter-Finals. The early rounds all have to be best of seven to fit everybody in, and I can just take it or leave it..

You've made several tournaments be boring for half of their run, and got no younger players coming through in return. What's the advantage?

Well, it's not true that young players get drawn against the top guys every week - the odds are heavily against that. But it may be true that some poor sod does get a run of bad draws and it may be unfair to them (I seem to remember Arnie Ursenbacher getting John Higgins 3 times running).

The problem is that young players keep losing to opponents ranked 30-80, who are now very tough in today's landscape.

In the actual events, flat draws means that top players come in at Round 1, which means from the first day there are matches that people want to watch (either live, or broadcast). With tiered draws you get several rounds that most viewers can't be bothered with. So you can see the attraction of flat-128 from the point of view of event organisers. But with tiered draws, they then have to ensure that top players don't get ambushed by guys who have got momentum, so they deliberately break up the event, with a few weeks in between. For me that destroys the cohesion of a tournament.

It seems like you and me are opposites - I prefer to see the early rounds with multiple tables, usually tracking the development of young players; you prefer the big names from Q-final onwards. Perhaps we can share a season-ticket? Are you up for that?

Re: Can the tour be improved? Some ideas

Postby Aislabie

SnookerFan wrote:Yeah, I've never been the hugest of fans of Flat 128. I don't mind it in some events, but I don't think it's had the benefits that everybody has said it would.

It was supposed to get young up and coming players more used to playing the big names on match tables, and harden them to it. It hasn't worked. Where are all these young players coming through? Not there. Apart from maybe a couple of Chinese Players who aren't eligible to play at the moment anyway.

This does make the error of mistaking correlation for causation. Most analysis does suggest that there is a lack of young players currently at the top end of the sport, but there is no reason to assume that this is because of flat draws. It is equally possible that without flat draws, the sport would be in an even worse situation, with even fewer young players making it into the back end of tournaments. The most obvious example of this is Kyren Wilson - he was able to drag himself up to the top bracket of players by excelling in flat draw tournaments. Without them, it's entirely possible that he wouldn't even still be playing snooker.

SnookerFan wrote:What really happens is that the lower ranked players turn up, and they're playing Ronnie or Selby or Higgins, and they're getting spanked in the first round.

This hasn't helped the young players. Not many have come through, and all you have is that the first few rounds of a lot of tournaments are really boring. The Home Nations suffer from that, in that the first few days feel like endless 4-0s or 4-1s. In fact, I personally don't really start getting that interested in the tournaments until Quarter-Finals. The early rounds all have to be best of seven to fit everybody in, and I can just take it or leave it.

The pivot to best-of-sevens is certainly a compromise that has been made to accommodate flat draws, and I do think it's quite disappointing that there hasn't been more creativity from WST to ensure that the calendar isn't just flooded with identical cookie-cutter tournaments. I'm not against multiple tournaments having a shared identity - indeed, the Home Nations Series is probably my favourite series on the calendar at the moment if I set aside the silly Wigan Leisure Centre qualifying format.

The Championship League (ranking event) also has something really fun and unique to offer, and is a perfect curtain-raiser for the season.

SnookerFan wrote:You've made several tournaments be boring for half of their run, and got no younger players coming through in return. What's the advantage?

I'll get onto this later, but I do wish to highlight the misconception that this rubbish (click link) wasn't overwhelmingly boring for most of the tournament. Absolutely nothing of value before the Last 32, which I presume to be when the TV cameras turned up.

Although this tournament is obviously very memorable for being Andrew Higginson's one with the snooker gods, the fact that he had to win four more matches than Neil Robertson to reach that final just demonstrates how the entire event was rigged against him from the start. I would also point to Andrew Higginson's entire career as a prime example of the old system not working. A phenomenally talented player, and yet that Welsh Open was only the third time he even made it into a main draw (the Malta Cup the week before was another one). He was 29 years old at that point and a professional for eight years, and yet the old Tour had given him absolutely nothing. Compare that to a similar player from the modern day: Chris Wakelin has played all sorts of top players, has been a semi-regular in Last 16s, and just recently won his first event.

The present system is better. It can also be better still.

lhpirnie wrote:Well, it's not true that young players get drawn against the top guys every week - the odds are heavily against that. But it may be true that some poor sod does get a run of bad draws and it may be unfair to them (I seem to remember Arnie Ursenbacher getting John Higgins 3 times running).

I also remember poor Amine Amiri getting Judd Trump two weeks running, thanks partly to the strictly seeded draw in the UK Championship at the time. Absolutely brutal for him, but also not an argument against having flat draws (which I'm not for a second suggesting you framed it as).

lhpirnie wrote:The problem is that young players keep losing to opponents ranked 30-80, who are now very tough in today's landscape.

My ongoing favourite stat in snooker is that Ali Carter was the 29th player to win a ranking event since Jack Lisowski first lost a ranking event final. This includes players like Fan Zhengyi and Jordan Brown who came from absolutely nowhere to have a career week. Several of those 29 winners have fallen off the tour, either temporarily or permanently. This is huge when you consider the depth of talent new players now have to come on and face.

lhpirnie wrote:In the actual events, flat draws means that top players come in at Round 1, which means from the first day there are matches that people want to watch (either live, or broadcast). With tiered draws you get several rounds that most viewers can't be bothered with. So you can see the attraction of flat-128 from the point of view of event organisers. But with tiered draws, they then have to ensure that top players don't get ambushed by guys who have got momentum, so they deliberately break up the event, with a few weeks in between. For me that destroys the cohesion of a tournament.


My personal view is that flat draws are overwhelmingly the best way to structure a tournament with very few exceptions. I would also count league structures as flat draws here - any format where every entrant starts the event the same number of wins away from the title (or as close as possible in the case of awkward numbers) is in my opinion a flat draw.

Looking at it logically, the argument of young players benefiting from tiered draws is utter hogwash as well. If the top 16 are seeded into the last 32, then there can only ever be 16 players from outside that pool getting to an advanced stage in the competition. If the top 16 are present from the very beginning of a flat draw, then it's a mathematical near certainty (I'm sure Lewis will have already figured out the odds) that at least one of the top 16 will be knocked out a bit early in an upset. Not only are upsets exciting, but so too is seeing more new faces in the latter stages of a tournament.

It's just better for the sport.

I was going to propose some ideas of my own, but I think my post is already plenty long enough for one evening.

Re: Can the tour be improved? Some ideas

Postby Pink Ball

I would have no problem with the flat 128 structure being kept for every ranking tournament aside from the World Championship, UK Championship and ITV series. Young players aren't coming through for many reasons, but I think you'd have even less of them breaking through if we went back to the way things were.

Re: Can the tour be improved? Some ideas

Postby KrazeeEyezKilla

When the Flat draws were first announced in 2012 I wasn't against it but thought it would be very hard to implement and presumed Hearn had some plan for it. He didn't and so while it worked out well in some cases it was a mess in others. The German Masters was the big loser along with the Wuxu Classic whose demise is one of the stupidest things that's happened in the last ten years. It can only really work when everyone is at venue. Also it was the reason for the tour being increased from 96 to 128 even though lower ranked players were already struggling. I think for some reason there were 99 tour card holders immediately before the expansion and maybe that's the right number as it would allow a certain amount of local players/wildcards into flat draw tournaments.