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Looking for an invite
If you're wondering why top players such as Stephen Hendry, Stephen Maguire and Mark Allen would go to China in July to play in an invitation tournament, here's a clue:
The top prize in 110sport's Beijing Challenge is £50,000.
There used to be a large number of small invitation tournaments on the calendar and, having dwindled, it's good to see more cropping up.
Invitation events - not ranking tournaments - are the best way of promoting snooker. They cost far less to stage and feature mainly big names so audiences are guaranteed to recognise the players in action.
In recent years, snooker fans have been brainwashed into believing that if a tournament doesn't hold ranking status it's not worth staging.
Rubbish.
Does anyone remember the Irish Masters at Goffs? That was one of the best events on the circuit.
There was also the Scottish Masters in Motherwell and tournaments such as the World Matchplay and the Champions Cup, plus a number of others that helped create a more vibrant circuit than we have today.
Ideally, I'd like to see a Masters series for the top players, preferably played around Europe: short events featuring the top eight or twelve players in the world rewarded for being the elite, something that snooker seems to frown upon.
The WPBSA recently announced tournaments aimed at lower ranked players - how about some purely for those on whose shoulders the game's popularity is carried?
More...
The top prize in 110sport's Beijing Challenge is £50,000.
There used to be a large number of small invitation tournaments on the calendar and, having dwindled, it's good to see more cropping up.
Invitation events - not ranking tournaments - are the best way of promoting snooker. They cost far less to stage and feature mainly big names so audiences are guaranteed to recognise the players in action.
In recent years, snooker fans have been brainwashed into believing that if a tournament doesn't hold ranking status it's not worth staging.
Rubbish.
Does anyone remember the Irish Masters at Goffs? That was one of the best events on the circuit.
There was also the Scottish Masters in Motherwell and tournaments such as the World Matchplay and the Champions Cup, plus a number of others that helped create a more vibrant circuit than we have today.
Ideally, I'd like to see a Masters series for the top players, preferably played around Europe: short events featuring the top eight or twelve players in the world rewarded for being the elite, something that snooker seems to frown upon.
The WPBSA recently announced tournaments aimed at lower ranked players - how about some purely for those on whose shoulders the game's popularity is carried?
More...