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Snooker Season 2021/22

Joe_ Public

It's no weather for it but it all gets underway today with the Championship League kicking off in Leicester. Ranking event, 128 players, 32 groups of 4, winners progressing to Stage 2.

No huge interest but Aaron Hills group is on tomorrow so will keep an eye on that. In with Scott Donaldson, Alex Ursenbacher and fellow munsterman, Leo Fernandez. Big season ahead for Aaron as he fights to retain his tour place so a couple of good early results would be huge for confidence.

Interesting no sign of world champ selby given it's being staged in his home town but otherwise, nearly all the big names are in the field.

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Joe_ Public

Now's the big chance for him. Just do it Elliott!

Joe_ Public

Well done Elliot, great red to win it. Judd shouldn't be winning matches playing like that, but you still got to produce the shots to beat him.

waynescales1

Last 16 draw has a very “random” look to it, only 2 of the top 16 left in the tournament I think. You’d expect that with the Bo5 format probably, still I’ll take it though, good to have the snooker back on telly.

Joe_ Public

Judd in his interview not all that inclined to accept the official rankings that now say he isn't No.1. I see his point, but the world championships have always been accorded huge weight in the ranking system so this is only possible because his last two crucible performances have been underwhelming. I don't have an issue with that personally and good to see an edge developing at the top like this.

mrunsure

Ali Carter gets a max.

Trump is obviously still the best regardless of what the rankings say, and most pundits seem to think that. The fact that he managed to stay at number 1 without winning the world championship for two years shows how consistent he has been.

waynescales1

Is Trump the best though? Over 19+ frames I'd put my money on Selby. There's far more ranking points on offer for the WC, and rightly so, because multi-session matches are the hardest to win.

mrunsure

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117782454#Comment_117782454

Trump's been more consistent than Selby. Selby was significantly poorer than Trump the season before last, even though rankings are supposed to take into account the performance over two seasons. That season Selby only won two tournaments and didn't get to any other finals whereas Trump won six tournaments, and also got to the final of the non-ranking Champion of Champions, where he only just missed out as he was about to win in the penultimate frame and Robertson needed snookers.

It is harder to win a tournament with shorter matches, because that gives more chance for the weaker player, so winning a lot of those kinds of tournaments is very difficult.

Joe_ Public

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117782492#Comment_117782492

So the British Open, or even the Gibraltar Open for that matter, is harder to win than the world championships? Interesting perspective i have to say.

waynescales1

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117782553#Comment_117782553

My thoughts exactly. 17 of the last 24 WCs were won by the same 4 players. You have to be, at the very least, one of the best players of your generation, if not all time, to win the WC, which is reflected by the prize money/ranking points.

eric hoone

This tournament's gone right off the boil with all the big names gone. I'll still watch it but not sure best of fives is a good format to keep the quality

Brian?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117782631#Comment_117782631

I haven’t watched a huge amount, but what I have watched has been poor.

mrunsure

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117782553#Comment_117782553

Looking at it from a purely statistical point of view, that is the case.

Suppose player A beats player B in 70% of frames. So in a one frame shoot out, player A has a 70% chance of winning.

If you have a best of 3, your possible frame outcomes are AA, ABA, BAB and BB, with the following probabilities: 0.49, 0.147, 0.063 and 0.09. That means that player A has a 0.637/(0.637+0.153) chance of winning that match i.e. 80.1%.

In a best of 5 that increases to 87.0%.

And so on.

So the longer the match, the "easier" it is for the better player to win.

waynescales1

You’ve disproved your own point with the above explanation. Shorter matches result in more weaker players reaching the latter stages of those tournaments, resulting in a lower overall standard for the tournament, making the tournament easier to win.

mrunsure

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117782693#Comment_117782693

But you've got a high chance of going out of the tournament early yourself so you are more likely not make the later stages of the tournament to play those weaker players. Therefore a top player has a lower chance of winning a tournament with shorter matches. If you win several of these tournaments, that shows that you've been significantly and consistently better than the rest of the field in order to overcome the greater odds of being knocked out in an early round.

Joe_ Public

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117782657#Comment_117782657

So if it's technically harder to win those smaller tournaments, why wouldn't Judd be able to manage better at the bigger ones with the longer formats that suit the better players? That doesn't compute for me. The two longest formats are worlds and tour champs and he's only been beyond the QF in one of them over the past 2 seasons. Which, basically, is the main reason why he's not No.1 anymore.

waynescales1

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117782734#Comment_117782734

It means he’s been better than the rest of the field at winning best of 7 matches against players ranked in the bottom 32, the significance of which according to the ranking points weighting, is negligible and rightly so.

mrunsure

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117782762#Comment_117782762

Trump's won plenty of longer frame matches as well over the years but there is relatively little separating the players at the top of the game and it just so happened that he lost quite a few of these recently. Sport is random. I don't think it is a case of him not being able to perform in longer matches or his game being suited to shorter matches. Man City comfortably won the league last year but lost to Chelsea twice in a month including the biggest match of the season. Chelsea have the more prestigious trophy (Champions League) but most pundits would say that Man City were the best English team last season.

Joe_ Public

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117782848#Comment_117782848

Judd is a world champion so can't be said he's not able to do it. But past two seasons he's come up short and that's why he's No.2 for now. Maybe people don't like the ranking system, but that's what it says anyway.

Just to take one tournament last season: Judd won the Northern Ireland Open last season, beat Ronnie well in the final. But faced a grand total of one top 50 ranked player to get there. I'm sure every draw isn't that benign but quite a few are eminently negotiable and my recollection of watching Judd last season is of him playing an awful lot of bad snooker and lads just not having the bottle to beat him. Not knocking him, still great achievement to do what he has done and he is an amazing, once in a generation talent.

But I'm old school in many ways and I just hold the worlds in such high esteem that it fully merits its exalted place in the rankings system. The calendar is so crammed now that I think half the players are turning up week to week, possibly worn out and exhausted, already mentally half beaten. And if they lose, no biggie, there's another tournament next week. And the week after that.

But the worlds is different. There's nothing after the worlds and it can and probably will define your season. It demands everything of your game, a mental endurance test over 2 weeks, that only the very strongest and best survive.

Or to put all this very simply another way: ask the likes of Ding, Kyren Wilson, Mark Allen, Barry Hawkins etc what's the hardest, most demanding tournament to win and i don't believe there's a moment's hesitation in any of their answers.

Joe_ Public

The point about players more suited than others to shorter formats is a key one. Anto McGill is a classic example of a player you probably won't hear much about for a lot of the season and then no surprise come Sheffield, he's there or thereabouts. Personally, McGill getting to world sf and qf, and being narrowly beaten in classics, is worth as much to me as 2 or 3 shootouts or riga or even Scottish Opens. But maybe that's just my personal prejudice.

ArmaniJeanss

I think that the Worlds is too weighted in the rankings - doesn't seem right to me that a win there counts the same as winning five £100K-to-the-winner events.

I've no quibble with the prizemoney if that's the pot that the sponsors/wpbsa are willing to put up, but it overly skews the rankings imo because they insist on a 'point per pound' method.

It doesn't help that the World prize fund is itself so skewed, £500K to the winner but only £200K to the runner up. Most sports have a much flatter structure. Like there's no reasonable case to say that Selby was 2.5 times a better player than Murphy in early May, but that's how it translates when it's applied to the ranking list.

Always instructive to see how other sports do it - e.g., in golf, regardless of prize fund, the majors are worth roughly just double points vis-a-vis a top tier non-major event. Within every event (major or not) second place gets 60% of whatever points the winner gets, 3rd gets 40% and it continues on a sliding scale. This seems a much fairer method to me.

I guess when we hopefully get the Chinese events back (some of which were £200K to the winner) that it will balance out the Sheffield effect somewhat.

Joe_ Public

I think the ranking systems can always be questioned. I don't know about necessarily looking to other sports, though. It's not that long ago i recall some brouhaha in golf circles about Justin Rose being No.1 despite other golfers being in better form and winning more. Or tennis when poor Caroline Wozniacki used to ship some grief for being No.1 despite not having, at that point, ever won slam event. You could argue a points system with the worlds a little less weighted might be fairer, but you'll still probably get anomalies regardless as no system seems perfect.

Question in this case, though, is folk seem to believe, as Judd himself does, that his case to be No.1 is both watertight and unarguable. I'm far from convinced personally that that is the case.

ArmaniJeanss

Yeah, it's tough to get it perfect - golf is continually tweaking, almost every year and there's a new system coming in next season. There's always debates about winning versus ultra-consistent placing, how long events should stay on your ranking for, the merits of the 'turn up every week' player versus the 'selective schedule' player.

I suppose for those who think the snooker point-for-pound system is fair I'd ask what their cut-off point is. If Betfred were convinced to make it £1M for the winner of the Worlds next season, and thus the winner almost automatically also becomes #1, is it still a fair system?

Joe_ Public

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117783272#Comment_117783272

That's a fair question and honest answer is that would obviously be a big issue. The worlds preeminence is already an issue as it is, it just lords over the rest of the season and efforts to change that, like bringing in the tour championship and the rather tenuous 3 majors triple crown concept, hasnt really diluted that in any significant way I don't think. So i believe the ranking system simply reflects that core reality. But i see the other side of it too. Spreading the load out over the season would help things, should never have diminished the uk when they did for starters, but i promised to stop banging on about that 2 years ago!

To be honest, I don't see this as that big a deal anyway. Judds a bit piqued, having a bit of a pop at Selby and it just adds to the spice when the Northern Ireland spins around. Not been enough testy rivalries in the game, so it's all good far as I'm concerned!

Joe_ Public

Interesting they have snooker on this afternoon given they usually dont for the itv covered events, at least the past few years anyway. Proper order really.

mrunsure

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117785011#Comment_117785011

The lack of snooker on Saturday afternoon is usually because of racing, but that is on the main ITV channel.

But they do have racing tomorrow on ITV4, and therefore snooker only in the evening.

So not really any better than past years. They have just put the racing on Sunday afternoon instead of Saturday afternoon. Arguably worse this time, as it means a one session final.

Joe_ Public

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117785823#Comment_117785823

Do you think it's only a one session final because of racing? It's a short format tournament so I'm not sure why you'd suddenly jump from bo5, bo7 to bo17 or 19 for the final.

I suspect itv had to make that choice today because there was no other way to squeeze the whole thing into 7 days, so normal service will resume for champion of champions or whatever's next. Tv coverage is critical, of course, just not a huge fan of tv companies having so much power to dictate formats and schedules.

mrunsure

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117785974#Comment_117785974

Yes, going from best of 7 to 17 or 19 would be a big jump, so having the racing on Sunday instead of Saturday fits. Still, it means a gaping hole at the end of the tournament that doesn't exist in BBC or Eurosport tournaments. According to David Hendon on the Snooker Scene podcast, ITV didn't know about the best of 5 format before they agreed to host the tournament.

waynescales1

Slessor playing well again against Wilson. I’ve seen him play very well before but never consistently. A tournament win would do him a lot of good.

Will it be best of 9 or 11 on Sunday evening I wonder...

Joe_ Public

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117786018#Comment_117786018

What we can deduce from today is that ITV can switch the racing to accommodate the snooker if it wants. But it's probably they just don't want to, only a 128 player tournament forced their hand this occasion. Whether the final was played in the afternoon or evening tomorrow I'm not sure makes all that difference tbh. Suits me perfectly as i can focus on golf and hurling for the afternoon. I don't know what contracts they sign for these things, but find it curious a major sporting body seems happy to leave Saturday afternoons empty at the whim of the broadcaster who just isn't suited by it!

Joe_ Public

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117786126#Comment_117786126

Survived a pretty hairy one against Zhou earlier, maybe drawing some heart from that. BO11 tomorrow.