Ace wrote:Don't you care about the World Championship?
Yes and No. Yes, in the sense that it's a Triple Crown event and a Ranking Event, but No in the sense that I'm in the (very small) minority of snooker fans who doesn't consider the WC to be umpteen times more important than any other event, or umpteen times more revealing of a player's true ability and "greatness".
In my view, the WC is such a long event that it goes "too far" in the direction of rewarding natural personality traits (e.g. mental endurance, ability to concentrate and focus for long periods of time, ability to deal with boredom, etc.) that are not snooker-related and that are not evenly-distributed across players. Some players are born with more of those traits than others, and some of those traits are not very easy to learn if you weren't born with them.
While it is true that the other 2 Triple Crown events have shorter formats that might be better-suited to players that lack those traits, the fact that the WC is given SO MUCH MORE WEIGHT than the other 2 events means that the players whose personalities are better-suited to the shorter formats will always be at a (what I think is an unfair) disadvantage in conversations about Player of the Year, GOAT, etc., because of the disadvantage they face at the WC.
To use a golf analogy, the Masters is the only one of the 4 majors that is played on the same course each year. This gives a big advantage to players whose games match up well with the course setup, while disadvantaging players for whom the course is a bad fit. The other 3 majors play on a variety of courses, which gives a wider range of players an opportunity to win. The Masters gives some players an advantage over others, which is unfair but not quite as big of a problem in golf as it is in snooker because the 4 majors in golf are (more or less) equally-weighted and respected, at least more so than in snooker...