WST has published this announcement yesterday:
TIERED FORMAT FOR HOME NATIONS AND GERMAN MASTERS IN 2024/25
Next season’s Home Nations events, as well as the German Masters, will have a tiered format, which means that all of the world’s top 32 will start in the last-64 round at the final venue.
The round structure for the 2024 English Open, Northern Ireland Open and Scottish Open as well as the 2025 German Masters and Welsh Open will be:
Qualifying rounds
Round one
Players seeded 65-96 v players seeded 97-128
Round two
Those 32 winners v players seeded 33-64Final venue
Last 64
32 qualifiers v players seeded 1-32This change gives the lower ranked players the opportunity to earn prize money through the earlier rounds and beyond, while ensuring that television audiences and ticket-holders can see the leading players at the final venue. To support this change, we will be increasing prize money for all of these events to over £500,000.
WST Chairman Steve Dawson said: “The 2024/25 season will undoubtedly be the biggest season in the history of the sport. We have announced events with prize money in excess of £16 million and there will be further announcements regarding prize money and new events that will take us close to our target of £20 million; a target we had set for the 2026/27 season and that we expect to hit well in advance of time. This could see not only two or three players hitting over £1 million prize money from a single season that we will witness this year, but four, five or six players joining that group.”
(The “green highlighting” above is my doing.)
This is excellent news , in my view at least. That will come to no surprise to regular readers of this blog. This new approach will mean that at most 32 players will come out of those events penniless, instead of 64 currently. It will also mean that the lowest ranked players will play their first match against opponents ranked outside the top 64. They will be guaranteed a more winnable first match. This is particularly important for the young players and the rookies. Adapting to the professional tour isn’t easy and being hammered all the time is not helping in any way. It destroys both confidence and self-esteem. Being guaranteed matches of progressive difficulty should help.
I have had disagreements about this subject with some of the older (former) pros who came through the old tiered system. Yes, there was too much protection because the players entering at level “n”, should they lose, were guaranteed the same points the “n-1” level winners. I expect that, in this system, even IF the players entering at a “higher” level get some money if they lose their first match, it won’t count towards their ranking, just as it is the case now for the seeds losing their opening match at the Crucible.
Barry Pinches – who I respect and like – was particularly vocal against the tiered system, arguing that it meant that the lower ranked players had to win more matches to win a tournament than the higher seeds. This is true, but I’m not sure it’s a bad thing… in particular for the younger ones. They need to “grow” as professionals and for that they need to play as much as they can. The current system often left them for weeks with nothing at all to play in, brooding over yet another first round defeat against an opponent far too strong and experienced for them.
The next good move would be to have those qualifiers played at, or next to, the main event venue, the week before the main event. That would guarantee that the in-form players are in the “main” draw, as opposed to having there the players who were “in-form” two months earlier in the season. The wildcards, in any, should enter those events at the bottom, play in those qualifiers in front of their friends and family with a reasonable hope to be able to show what they can do.
Ronnie O'Sullivan 
Yes, I read it today and thought it was a good thing. I suppose the very low ranked players are not “in danger” of having to play too much to win, but at least might be able to play a few matches. Interesting that WST started doing it first with the UK and now with the Home Nations too.