Wild wrote:after one full season with Rankings Changing after each Tournament and 3 Seeding Cut off points during the season what are peoples opinion of it ?
Personally like Witz id like to see it go further and even change more often as well as closer to the Actual Events Qualifying or in the Masters Case Closer to the Masters but whats other Peoples Opinions of the new look Rankings/Seeding's.
I've always been mixed on it as an issue. There are pros and cons, I feel. But they are the same pros and cons that could've outlined before the rolling rankings even happened. We don't need to have trialled them, because by and large they are obvious.
I can see why they have it, but it's a bit of a pain in the bottom when it comes to ticket booking. I tend to buy tickets for first rounds, and I know there were people buying tickets for first round Crucible matches completely blind this year. That's fine if you don't care monkeys who you watch, but it's not going to encourage more casual fans to go, and caters only to more hardcore fans. Which is the opposite of what we should be trying to achieve. When it comes to something like the UK, where get sit where you like tickets for a Roll On Roll Off session, buying tickets blind is less of a pain.
Also, I think changing it for every tournament would be a nightmare to administrate. Especially if you're ranked 15th one tournament and 17th the next. It would be difficult planning travel and stuff if you didn't know if you were an automatic qualifier or not from one tournament to the next. And also, the people that were waiting to see who were playing in each tournaments before purchasing tickets might be waiting until the event was almost upon them. This may affect people that travel and purchase accomodation, though the other side of that is you'd probably only travel and pay for hotels if you truly loved snooker, so you may not be the sort of person who cared who you saw. Or at least not as much. More tournaments give you a better indication of form, obviously. But it also makes rolling rankings a bit more difficult to run. I'd rather see more tournaments, and rolling rankings change every few months personally.
Though, the advantages are obvious. If you're purely a televisual fan, then it works better. Because you get the form players being at the top the whole time which increases the matches chances of being high quality. (That and the fact people are playing more, of course.) Also, you don't get the situations you had before where somebody barely wins a match all season, and manages to scrape staying in the top-16 with a decent tournament run. I think there's a definite reason for doing it, and if you can get round the problems administrating it (which they obviously have) then yes, there is definitely a reason for doing it.
The ticket allocation issues are more my issues then anything, because I buy lots of tickets, and think we do more to fill the massive amounts of empty seats I sometimes see around me. But I'd put up with that if it leads a greater good.