KrazeeEyezKilla wrote:LDS wrote:Vallomas wrote:So, the only qualifiers who have won so far, are Jamie Jones and Stuart Bingham (who is a top 10 player in reality).
There's a case starting to emerge for going back to a 24 player format for the World Championship IMO.
Top 8 start automatically in the last 16 stage and only those ranked 9-16 play a qualifier each in the first round.
There's a few Top 32 players who lost in qualifying who would probably have done better than the players who beat them.
It's just something I've always wondered about really.
Just having 16 players for the WSC never seemed like enough, that's for sure, but I've always felt 36 was just too many, in that there has never been 32 strong competitors for the title. Or even 32 people who can put on a good show at the top event.
There was this brief moment when it expanded from 16 to 24 and that seemed about right, but it quickly then shot up to 32, not because of any gameplay reason, but just because that is the correct number to have a neat knock-out table.
However, the 32 simply lets in too many qualifiers. And the 16 qualifiers are never going to be even close to being those ranked 17-32, it's always going to be a mix of all and sundry of 17-100 odd.
It's nice for those who do make an unusual qualification, of course, and there is some entertainment value in potentially losing a top seed to joe nobody in the first round, but I don't think that outweighs the fact that, most years, there's always at least 6 or 7 first round matches that are practically unwatchable and mostly pointless. And, if anything, have the potential to ruin the spectator aspect precisely by upsetting the popular players too soon into the competition.
You could pick any random year and look down the list of 1st round matches and find six or seven match-ups where you just think "I don't even know who that was" or "I wouldn't even watch that on youtube during maximum lockdown with no current snooker for a month".
And it's not like a magical one-off qualification is some kind of magical kick-starter to a player's otherwise dumpster-fire career, as you can still find first-rounders from the crucible era who don't even have wikipedia pages, let alone a history of events.
However, there's always six or seven 1st round matches that turn into crackers, and they usually involve someone on the way up against someone on the way down, which is still equally possible with the 24 system.
I have no real impetus to make a campaign out of it, it's just one of those things I've always thought of as being a shame, in that the possibly best method was the one skipped over so quickly.