QUIZ! End-of-Season Snooker Rankings (1990s Edition)

How many top-16 members can you remember from this decade?

With the Players Championship in the middle of the quarter-final stage, let’s take a small break for another rankings snooker quiz.

Barry Hawkins won a scrappy affair with Stuart Bingham to reach the last four at the Marshall Arena on Wednesday night.

It was an important victory for the Hawk, who won the tournament under its previous guise as the Players Tour Championship Grand Finals back in 2014.

Hawkins has now risen to 13th on the provisional Race to the Crucible standings, with Bingham heading in the opposite direction following a poor campaign by his standards.

Although officially ranked in 14th, the 2015 world champion is way down in 22nd provisionally and in genuine danger of having to qualify for the World Championship in April.

Only the top 16 in the world rankings after the completion of the Tour Championship will gain automatic entry through to the Crucible Theatre.

This has been an important factor in the sport for decades, and the top 16 has always been a mark of a player’s status within the game.

In those days, the rankings were updated just once – at the end of each campaign – before each player’s position was locked ahead of the next term.

This took on added significance as the events weren’t operated with flat draws as is the case nowadays, rather with a tiered seeding system that protected the top stars who only entered proceedings in the later rounds.

We have already had a quiz each on the snooker rankings history from the last two decades.

For this teaser it’s the turn of the 1990s, and your task is to name the top 16 members on the end-of-season rankings – that is, the official standings after the World Snooker Championship each year – between the 1989/90 and 1998/99 campaigns.

The question is, how many can you get right?

Click here if you can’t see the quiz (Sporcle Website)

Featured photo credit: WST