If you get a sense of dรฉjร vu at this week’s Tour Championship on the Players Series, you’re probably not alone.
A different venue and a slightly longer format are just about the only things that distinguish the penultimate ranking event of the campaign with the one that preceded it.
The Tour Championship not only boasts 12 of the same players who featured at the recent Players Championship but an almost identical breakdown of prize money as well.
To compound matters, all four first-round ties at the Manchester Central mimic opening-round fixtures from a couple of weeks ago in Telford.
Once again, we’ll be treated to a match involving Mark Williams and Ding Junhui and an all-Chinese showdown between Xiao Guodong and Wu Yize.
Shaun Murphy and Barry Hawkins actually swapped seeding positions after their Players Championship clash earlier in March, but that hasn’t prevented them from being drawn to face each other again here.
Like Ding, Wu, and Hawkins, Si Jiahui will have an opportunity to enact some immediate revenge when he faces Mark Selby for the second time in as many weeks.
The Tour Championship is billed as one of the most prestigious tournaments of the season, but it is effectively a carbon copy of what just happened in Telford when the top 16 from the one-year list qualified to participate.
Judd Trump, Kyren Wilson, Neil Robertson, and John Higgins have the advantage of being seeded through to the quarter-finals on this occasion.
But depending on how the first-round results transpire, there is the possibility that all four could face the same opponents in the last eight as well.
In fact, every single match in this year’s Tour Championship could mirror ones that took place at the Telford International Centre.
It was always likely to happen, of course, with the World Snooker Tour opting to consecutively schedule all three events on the Players Series for the first time this term.
Never before have the World Grand Prix, the Players Championship, and the Tour Championship gone back-to-back-to-back.
There had always been the intriguing element to the series whereby, if a player missed one, he or she still had the opportunity to qualify for the next through performances in the intervening events.
This was especially evident during the 2021/22 season, when there were two ranking events in between the World Grand Prix and the Players Championship, and a further four prior to the Tour Championship.
Even last season there was at least one ranking event separating each leg of the Players Series.
The World Grand Prix’s rich move to Hong Kong for 2025 and a new time slot in March have obviously complicated matters.
But that it has led to this samey conclusion is hardly a surprise, and it paints WST in a questionable light when it comes to the scheduling of its calendar.
To put it more bluntly, the repetition is boring.
There were some empty slots in March which may have been filled with other ranking events, but that never materialised.
The negative effect it has had on the rest of the tour is also realised by the fact most players have not picked up a cue for competitive action since the end of February.
By the time the World Snooker Championship qualifiers commence in a week’s time, it will have been six weeks since a lot of the circuit hit a competitive shot.
That becomes even longer for those who failed to qualify for that outing at the World Open in Yushan.
The Tour Championship this week will likely conjure some thrilling affairs, whetting the appetite ahead of the season-concluding feast in Sheffield to come.
Few will be disappointed if Judd Trump and Kyren Wilson end up rekindling their growing rivalry in next Sunday’s final in Manchester.
But let’s hope that lessons will be learned and we don’t have to go through the same thing again with the Players Series next season.
The current schedule devalues the Tour Championship’s prestige and has a damaging impact on what should be an important juncture of the calendar generally.
2025 Tour Championship draw
Times in UTC+1
Round of 12 (bo19)
Shaun Murphy vs Barry Hawkins
(Monday at 1pm and 7pm)
Xiao Guodong vs Wu Yize
(Monday at 1pm and Tuesday at 1pm)
Mark Selby vs Si Jiahui
(Tuesday at 1pm and 7pm)
Mark Williams vs Ding Junhui
(Monday at 7pm and Tuesday at 7pm)
Quarter-Finals (bo19)
Judd Trump vs Murphy/Hawkins
(Wednesday at 1pm and 7pm)
John Higgins vs Xiao/Wu
(Wednesday at 1pm and Thursday at 1pm)
Neil Robertson vs Selby/Si
(Wednesday at 7pm and Thursday at 7pm)
Kyren Wilson vs Williams/Ding
(Thursday at 1pm and 7pm)
Semi-Finals (bo19)
TBC vs TBC
TBC vs TBC
Matches to be played on Friday and Saturday at 1pm and 7pm. Schedule to be confirmed.
Final (bo19)
TBC vs TBC
Match to be played on Sunday, April 6th at 1pm and 7pm.
Click here for updated scores and results
(snooker.org)
Featured photo credit: WST
WST are good at putting on events, albeit in an old-fashioned style and often with substandard venues. But they never get to grips with tour logistics, formats and systems. It was easy to see that the duplicate draws was likely, and highly undesirable. They could have made a random draw for the last-12 round, for example, but they didn’t think of it.
The schedule problem is a little more difficult, because deals have to be made with multiple parties under difficult calendar constraints. It’s necessary to anticipate problems before too much has been signed off.
Barry Hearn has regularly refused authorisation for non-WST events on the basis that they don’t support ‘all 128 professionals’. The exclusive back-to-back Players’ Series makes a mockery of that, and questions his motives. They even expanded the TC to 12 players because ‘the right players didn’t qualify’ in 2023.
I do think 12 players works pretty well as creating a two-table situation allows for more play in a session when you get a runaway like tonight.
World Snooker deserve some criticism for not envisaging the strong possibility of a repetitiveness in terms of the draw. This situation might have been somewhat avoided if the top four seeds had not progressed to the semisin Telford.
I totally agree it would’ve been preferable to intersperse the Player’s Series events with fuller ranking events. It does seem unbalanced for so much of the tour to be inactive these last few weeks.
I don’t feel strongly about it though. The Player’s Championship was one of the best events of the season. While the longer format used during the Tour Championship does offer an important point of distinctiveness to the Player’s.