There are genuine problems with the current tournament structure on the World Snooker Tour, but calls for flat draws and a smaller tour risk addressing the wrong issue.
Former professional Peter Devlin probably didn’t expect his recent criticism of snooker’s tournament structure to generate quite so much attention.
“I didn’t ask for this or expect it when I posted this post while I was on the toilet,” the 30 year-old, who is also a talented rapper, joked on Facebook afterward.
Devlin argued this week that the current tiered system is unfair to those lower down the rankings, pointing to the example of Liam Davies winning 17 matches this season and earning £38,900 compared with Ronnie O’Sullivan winning five ranking-event matches and collecting £48,000.
“Having to win three or four matches to get to the big names, then lose to them, and they earn more points than you is crazy in my book,” Devlin wrote.
He also questioned the logic of qualifying being used as evidence that players are match-sharp and ready for the main event when, in some cases, the two stages are separated by several weeks or even months.
His comments were backed by ranking event winners Gary Wilson and Alfie Burden, while former world champion Shaun Murphy agreed that a flat draw was the fairest option.
Burden, who first turned professional in 1994 but has spent most of his career in the lower section of the rankings, was particularly critical of the lack of exposure for up-and-coming talents.
“The current state of the tournament structure is simply an absolute shambles and disgracefully unfair to the majority of the tour,” last year’s Shoot Out champion said.
“For new pros and young players in the game now, playing in soulless qualifying venues for every tournament is no way to develop young players and give them the experience they require to develop.”
For a young professional trying to establish a career, reaching a major venue can be as valuable as the result itself.
Playing in front of a crowd, dealing with television conditions, and experiencing the atmosphere of the sport’s biggest events are all part of becoming an accomplished professional.
But does that necessarily make a flat draw fairer?
A flat draw is equal in the sense that everyone begins at the same point. A tiered draw, on the other hand, rewards players who have performed well enough to establish themselves higher up the rankings.
Why should the world number one and the player ranked 100th automatically receive exactly the same starting position?
Rankings are supposed to mean something, and there is nothing particularly unusual about higher-ranked players receiving benefits from having established themselves near the top of the sport.
The biggest tournaments also need venues that can accommodate their schedules, broadcasters need predictable programming, and promoters need to sell tickets.
There is an obvious attraction in guaranteeing that the sport’s biggest names will appear at the main venue rather than potentially requiring several rounds before they enter the competition.
That doesn’t mean the current system is beyond criticism. It simply means that removing the tiered structure would create a different set of problems.
It’s worth remembering that the World Snooker Tour not long ago almost wholly adopted a flat-draw system for a decade-long span, and there were plenty of problems and criticisms associated with it.
The draw structure isn’t really the biggest problem here. The ranking system is.
The prize-money-based rankings have created huge differences in how significantly an individual tournament can affect a player’s position.
The 2027 world champion is set to receive a record £625,000 payday compared with £312,500 for this season’s UK Championship winner and £100,000 for Ali Carter’s recent English Open triumph.
Jak Jones, meanwhile, earned £33,000 for triumphing at the season-opening Championship League.
The difference in prize money is of course understandable as the World Championship represents the biggest tournament in snooker, while the Championship League – played behind closed doors – is an entirely different proposition.
But why should the amount of money attached to an event automatically decide how valuable winning it is for the rankings?
That’s the problem with using prize money as the ranking system. A player’s ranking should tell us how well and how consistently he has actually performed.
Neil Robertson came within one match victory of returning to the world number one position last month, but can anyone really say that he has genuinely come anywhere near to being the best player across the last two-year period?
Prize money is affected by commercial considerations, event budgets, and how much a promoter is willing to put into a tournament.
It’s for these reasons that a lot of the Chinese tournaments have grown in importance (never mind the ill-fated Saudi Arabia Masters), with events on the likes of the Home Nations Series deemed less vital as a result of the limited prize funds on offer.
A points-based system, more like the one used in tennis, would offer a much cleaner way of doing it.
The biggest events could carry the most points, with other tournaments given their own set value depending on where they sit in the calendar.
The World Championship could still be vastly more important than a lower-tier event without needing its prize fund to determine exactly how much it counts towards the rankings.
It could also help the very players who are currently complaining about the qualifying system.
If a player lower down the list starts putting together good results, those wins should move him or her up the rankings in a more meaningful way under a well-implemented points system.
Climb high enough and the rewards are obvious – start entering tournaments later, face fewer qualifiers, and get more opportunities to play at the big venues.
In that sense, the answer to a player being stuck in qualifying doesn’t necessarily have to be eliminating qualifying.
It could be providing a better escape out of it.
There is another peculiarity in the current system that makes things even more complicated – the Players Series.
The World Grand Prix, Players Championship, and Tour Championship are among the richest events on the calendar, with qualification based on the one-year ranking list.
Once a player qualifies, however, he receives ranking money even if he loses his opening match.
That’s different from the vast majority of ranking events, where a player’s first-round defeat means no ranking money is earned.
That doesn’t mean the Players Series shouldn’t exist, or that those events aren’t deserving of their lucrative status.
It does, however, add another layer to a ranking system that is already heavily influenced by the financial value attached to individual tournaments.
There is a difference between saying the ranking system is unfair and saying every player should have the same route through every tournament.
The former is increasingly difficult to dismiss. The latter is much more debatable.
The suggestion of Mark Williams, meanwhile, that the “tour will have to be cut” in size to accommodate flat draws introduces another problem.
The professional circuit currently provides 128 places. If the difficulty of staging 128-player flat draws is the reason for reducing that number, then the sport would effectively be solving a tournament-format problem by giving fewer people the opportunity to be professional snooker players.
That seems an extraordinary trade-off for a sport that is supposed to be expanding globally.
In recent years, snooker has been developing in markets beyond its traditional strongholds, with more players from emerging countries like Poland, Latvia, Ukraine, and Austria attempting to break onto the professional circuit.
Reducing the size of the tour would inevitably make that pathway narrower.
There are genuine questions around the amount of time lower-ranked players spend in qualifying venues, the development opportunities available to younger professionals, and whether the current balance between the top end and the rest of the tour is right.
Those issues could be addressed without abandoning the benefits of having a tiered system.
Ali Carter’s response to the debate was typically straightforward: “As a pro for 30 years, whatever the format – if you are good enough, you will get there.”
Professional sport is built around a hierarchy, and players who establish themselves at the top should receive some benefit from doing so.
The bigger question is why snooker is using prize money as its main way of measuring achievement when the amount of money attached to an event and the difficulty of winning it are not always the same thing.
A points-based ranking system, with properly defined values for different tournaments, could give the biggest events the weight they deserve while also giving players lower down the rankings a clearer opportunity to climb.
That would leave room to look at the qualifying system and find better ways of giving young professionals experience at major venues, without requiring every player to start every tournament at the same point.
Snooker doesn’t need to flatten everything or shrink the tour.
It needs a ranking system that better reflects what actually happens on the table.
Featured photo credit: WST
David Caufield this column is by far the most revealing, most explanatory and altruistic facts that many others try to ignore.
I will likely read this article 50 times because it is so rich with valid facts, history and the real issues snooker will need to face going forward.
Thank you David Caufield
I do agree we need a return to a ranking system that’s not so heavily distorted by a few elite events. DC has outlined this excellently.
Carter is very much correct in that talent will penetrate any structure. I’m against elitism that’s not based on merit like the monarchy, but the top ranked players have earned the right, having progressed from the lowest base, to earn some privileges.
A flat draw for events like the World Championship and the UK Championship would see these majors lose a little of their sheen if you have a repeat of the Barbican period where eight tables were in operation for the early rounds.
I oppose any tour reduction as this sport badly needs a greater representation of nationalities, especially if it’s serious about reaching Olympic status.
Hello Jay, I am board with everything you said. I also picked up on what Carter said and therefore is there really an urgency to potentially de-value all the sponsor financed tournaments that make the big tournaments so important. I mean. do you think the World Championships went up to £500,000 to the winner when the Saudi tournament paid the same. I am not sure if it would have. Now the winning prize at the World Championships is going up again, to the spoils and all that.
The fact”Joe Blows” of the snooker world feel humiliated that they are not worthy is only their problem, not the sports’. There are a few 100 of Canadians playing professional hockey in England and across Europe earning a paycheck, but will never be rich like the players in the NHL. In snooker, the market is extremely small and very fragile. I don’t know the ramifications of lowering the 128 rooster, but if it stays the players earning not enough money are better off trying something else. Maybe they could make more on the smaller table, I do not know.
A compromise would surely be a seeded system so that the top 16 seeds won’t see each other until at least the last 16 – and you don’t have the #2 meeting the #6 in the second qualifying round
Thanks for this excellent article David!
The ranking system is fundamental to the way snooker is structured, but it really isn’t straightforward! Here’s what FIFA announced when they changed their system in 2018:
“The new model … was developed over two years during which time a large number of different algorithms was tested and extensively discussed.”
https://digitalhub.fifa.com/m/f99da4f73212220/original/edbm045h0udbwkqew35a-pdf.pdf
The issue of ‘tour size’ is also vital, and related. The size of the events is not fixed, with some having 144 players, down to the Tour Championship with 12. There are increasing absences, meaning top-up players are invited. So far this season over 100 matches have included an amateur player (around 15%), albeit mainly in the Championship League. Players are beginning to want to choose their schedule. Some players cross boundaries, for example Reanne Evans has played on 4 different tours already this season! We face a future with many more players from outside the UK – perhaps 50-60 from China and 20-30 from other countries. Will we really see 80 non-UK players being forced to live in student houses in Sheffield, playing ‘qualifier’ rounds in the Mattioli Arena? There will be growing resistance to that. It’s proven very difficult to stage tournaments outside the UK or China. Apart from the German Masters, all the events in Europe, India, Thailand, Australia, Turkey have collapsed. Perhaps they could have staged smaller events. The Saudi experiment didn’t work out. Even in the ‘Chinese’ events, most of the matches are actually played in the Mattioli Arena, making it cheaper for the British players. This strongly suggests we need to look beyond a fixed-size ‘tour card’ model, and make the professional game more compatible with other tours such as Q Tour, WWS, Seniors, CBSA and various regional series.
Which leads back to the ranking system. Points-based rankings struggle to deal with tournaments which don’t include the whole field – it’s the reason why the Masters has never been a Ranking Tournament. It is possible, but only with a whole set of complex rules. Other solutions exist but haven’t been used before in snooker, which I think explains the reluctance of the snooker community to discuss them. In 2010, Raymond Stefani did a survey covering 159 sports and games! Since then there has been a lot of academic research. We saw when WST tried to run a very simple-sounding ‘money list’ system, how complex it had to become, and how a succession of loopholes needed to be hastily patched. And it all matters critically to those players whose livelihood depends on travelling to tournaments and winning matches!
Excellent article and really good highlighting of the actual issue. I dont think you should cut the number of players, and a return to the flat draw system didn’t work in that playing half empty leisure centres with tables scattered everywhere looked ‘cheap’ and rubbish on tv or having matches played in the practice room at York for example.
I think that finding ways to get youngsters into the lower echelons of the game also and rewarding the best players for their performances, are the lifeblood of the sport. The middling journeyman pros aren’t going to like a structure that does those two things. They shouldn’t be listened to too much in my opinion. They are there to get match fit, to challenge the elite and to test the incoming youngsters. They can not be involved any more than that because they aren’t good enough. Simply put they aren’t attractive enough to watch so they aren’t part of snookers showbiz. They earn money generated commercially by the sport which depends on the elite players entertaining sufficiently large crowds. You simply can not listen to journeyman pros too much. Just enough to keep them playing. They aren’t directly important beyond what they will do for the better players: test them, challenge them, give them someone to beat. They could ask boxing about the life of a journeyman in that sport! Staggering reading. Literally for many of them.
The issues with the tour will change as it grows. I don’t think it will grow if anyone focuses on the chaff any more than is necessary to help them to keep the game A.) breeding young entrants and B.) thrilling larger paying audiences with elite player performances.
If the game grows, the tour will have to change and adapt in all sorts of ways. Getting away from prize-money-ranking-points sounds a good enough immediate reform to me.
The question is, is the game really growing, and where? China and Thailand? Where else is the game really growing, and to what degree?
Thanks to our esteemed blog host for this article — I commented about this topic before — I want to highlight this part:
[If a player lower down the list starts putting together good results, those wins should move him or her up the rankings in a more meaningful way under a well-implemented points system.]
For all the reasons mentioned here, and maybe more, I think you will not eliminate tiered draws — in fact, perhaps the WST should add more tiers, or at least one more tier, designed in such a way to give an advantage to lower-ranked players who ‘put together good results’, i.e. do well in qualifying, especially regularly — by ‘do well’ I mean win matches — because I agree that a tier is a reward for good performance, and there should be a way to reward more players, specifically lower-ranked players who win matches in qualifying.
Also the ranking system should be changed to use points rather than prize money — as this column points out, different events may award different prize money, even if regarding the snooker played they are entirely comparable competitively — the two recent events in China are good examples of this: Mark Selby got 250k for winning the China Open, while Chang Bingyu got 175k for winning the Wuhan Open — that is obviously not fair vis-a-vis ranking: Selby lost in the last 8 of the Wuhan Open, and in the SF the eventual winner Chang Bingyu beat the person who defeated Selby (O’Sullivan).