The first event on the World Snooker Tour 2021/22 season is underway.
The Championship League is a Matchroom event played at the Morningside Arena in Leicester between July 18 and August 13.
Most of the top stars are involved but for various reasons many cannot make the trip. This leaves plenty of opportunity for amateurs to be included.
As there are only 122 professional snooker players this season there will always be top-ups.
Sometimes there are wildcards such as for the Home Nations events where the home NGB is invited to nominate amateur players to take part.
For the Championship League there has been no less than 28 amateurs included and they have been taken from the Q School Order of Merit ranking list – published by the WST.
There is a quite different format for this event and historically it has been mainly for bookmakers’ sites which meant that even pre-Covid, this event was played behind closed doors. The players are of course used to playing without crowds these days.
It may well be a bit of a culture shock for many when they play in the forthcoming British Open, also to be played at the same venue in Leicester, which will have an audience.
The Format
Played across three weeks, Stage One features 32 groups of four players, with two tables per day hosting one group each. The player who tops each group will progress to Stage Two.
Another peculiarity of this event is that each group match consists of a maximum of 4 games and draws are common. If it gets to 3-0 the fourth frame is not played.
Winners of the groups in Stage One are split into eight further groups of four, with two groups per day played over two tables.
The eight Stage Two Group winners battle it out over two final groups,
The final two group winners compete in a best-of-five final for the title, an additional £20,000 and a place in the Champion of Champions.
Some early results
At the time of writing there have already been a couple of shocks.
In Group 8 on Sunday, Peter Lines took top spot ahead of the expected group winner, Mark Williams. Lines beat Williams 3-0 in their match.
On Monday in Group 23 Scott Donaldson could not win a match and Alexander Ursenbacher took top spot.
No shock that Ronnie O’Sullivan won his group on Tuesday but maybe many would not have picked Fergal O’Brien to win his.
Some do not particularly like the short format, but it definitely gives us more chance to see lots of players in a short space of time.
The British Open is also short format with most of the matches being best of 5.
It remains to be seen if this is a new trend to be followed by WST with possibly only the larger events being played over the traditional longer format favoured by many of the players and fans.