… I have to confess that I’m in a quite disillusioned mood …

Barry Hearn is talking about forcing Sheffield into building a new Crucible, having any number of new tournaments, and taking big – and very dirty – money from making business with Saudi Arabia (*) BUT today’s simple, practical truth is quite dispiriting:

• the scoring system still doesn’t work properly and some essential aspects are missing, most notably how many points remain on the table while frames are “live”
• the season “prize money schedule” is nowhere to be found and we don’t even know how much money/points those winning tomorrow will get
• it’s very obvious that more and more snooker players are looking elsewhere

Meanwhile, Matt Huart has published the first seeding list of the season, following the conclusion of the 2023 Ranking Championship League Snooker. Ronnie has a hell of a lot of points to defend this season, but, of course, that includes the 500000 from the 2022 World Championship coming off only at the very end of this season. Ronnie is provisinally 16th on snooker.org end-of-season rankings.

Looking at that list, I was surprised to find Neil Robertson at 22, John Higgins at 26, Stuart Bingham at 28 and Stephen Maguire uncomfortably close to the relegation zone.

Meanwhile WPBSA has revealed their new banner

The main idea behind this design is clearly to promote diversity but most fans will probably struggle to name more than four of the eight on that banner. I’m not sure it’s going to work.

(*) Given what happened with golf, IF snooker succeeds there, Barry might well be facing the birth a “richer” rival tour before he even understands fully what he got himself into.