2024 Saudi Arabia Snooker Masters Draw Announced

Monique Snooker

This was published today by WST:

DRAW FOR SAUDI ARABIA SNOOKER MASTERS ANNOUNCED

The world’s best players have learned their fates, with the announcement of the draw for the Saudi Arabia Snooker Masters.

Click here for the draw

The finest cueists on the planet will converge on Riyadh later this month to contest the sport’s fourth major. The event takes place from August 30th to September 7th. 

The Saudi Snooker Masters is part of the country’s investment to help grow the sport in the Kingdom and across the Middle East.  As well as hosting international events, the Saudi Billiard and Snooker Federation is investing in grass roots facilities, events and promotions to help inspire its young population into the sport.

…

The field includes 17 local wildcards nominated by the Saudi Arabian Billiard and Snooker Federation, including seven Saudi players. Their first round matches are:

Abdulraouf Saigh v Robbie McGuigan – Friday August 30th – 2pm
Faisal Bahashwan v Oliver Lines – Friday August 30th – 2pm
Saleh Alamoudi v Dean Young – Friday 30th August – Not Before 9pm
Abdullah Alotayyani v Ben Mertens – Friday 30th August – NB 3pm
Ziyad Alqabbani v Stan Moody – Friday 30th August – NB 9pm
Ayman Alamri v Haydon Pinhey – Friday 30th August – 8pm
Omar Alajlani v Rory Thor – Friday 30th August – 2pm

Other notable first round ties include all-time legend Jimmy White taking on United Arab Emirates’ Mohammed Shehab, while former World Champion Ken Doherty meets European Under-21 Champion Liam Davies.

The sport’s top 16 players, including seven-time World Champion Ronnie O’Sullivan, world number one Mark Allen, current World Champion Kyren Wilson and 28-time ranking event winner Judd Trump, will be in action from September 3rd .

Potential opening opponents for O’Sullivan include Hossein Vafaei and Joe Perry, while Trump could face the likes of close friend Jack Lisowski or Matthew Stevens.

World number two Trump said: “Everyone is really excited to have an opportunity to play in an event which compares with the World Championship. To have something so early on and not just rely on the World Championship at the end of the season is really good,” said 35-year-old Trump. 

“It is nice for everyone to be playing for big money and you feel that all the work you’ve put in over the years pays off if you do well. 

“There are more and more tournaments around the world. Now is the time where all eyes are on snooker and now is the time to expand and take tournaments to different places. It is great to be able to travel more doing what we love.”

The action will be broadcast live on Eurosport, Matchroom Live and a range of other broadcasters to be announced soon.

In total there will be 144 players in the field. The round structure is as follows:
Round one: Seeds 81-112 v seeds 113-144 (August 30th)
Round two: Those 32 winners v seeds 49-80 (August 31st)
Round three: Those 32 winners v seeds 17-48 (September 1st)
Round four: Those 32 winners play each other (September 2nd)
Round five: Those 16 winners v seeds 1-16 in the last 32 (September 3rd)

So this is how it looks … “left side of the draw”

… and “right side of the draw

I still have strong reservations regarding the Saudi Arabia political regime. I just hope that hosting big sporting event will put them under more and more international scrutiny, and that this, in turn, will lead to changes for better and fairer politics when it comes to human rights and women rights.

7 thoughts on “2024 Saudi Arabia Snooker Masters Draw Announced”

  2. https://m.weibo.cn/detail/5069913785898498

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    https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1NkWMeDE9w/ (O’Sullivan: I just want to win one more World Championship now (other events don’t matter), so that I can surpass Hendry and hold all the records in the field of snooker (alone).)

    • In effect he is right, in that most fans consider the ‘record’ to be 7. But in fact that is just recency bias. Nobody is going to beat Joe Davis’ 15 – unfortunately that record is off limits. We should learn to live with that, but it’s better than resetting the record books every couple of generations. Would we approve if snooker fans in 50 years’ time wiped out all of Ronnie’s achievements because they weren’t in their ‘modern era’?

      • Comparing records across eras is alway perilous for various reasons. When Joe Davis won his 15 World Titles, the World Championship had a completely different format, very long matches and played over several months, and he “seeded” himself into the very last stages. He still had to win it of course. The conditions were quite different too. It’s the same in most sports. Consider “Pole Vault” for instance: the material used to make the poles nowadays is a a very sophisticated composite, mainly fiberglass and carbon fiber. There is no way Armand Duplessis, for all his genius, could have jumped 6.25 m with a pole made of wood, iron or aluminium, all materials used in the past.

  3. Come on, it will just accomplish the opposite. It’s not called sportwashing for nothing. Why would they change when their money will buy everything? Everybody is excited as the interviews say and no questions will be asked.

    • I think it can and will Csilla. Hosting big sporting events means attracting people from all over the world, including media people, coming to watch those events and, as far as media is concerned, report on them. Those people will inevitably go out, walk the streets, see how the locals are going. It’s sports-washing, but it also brings scrutiny, whether they like it or not and they will want to present a good “image” to the outside world. Things have already started to change, albeit slowly, when it comes to women’s rights. The situation about ethnic and religious minorities, living in rather “isolated” regions, probably won’t change in the near future, I agree.

      • Yes, it certainly holds more hope of changing things than a policy of ‘distant disapproval’, i.e. trying to cut Saudi Arabia out of sporting involvement. A couple of years ago I read a book about a series of cricket tours to South Africa in the 1980’s. The players that went were heavily criticised and banned from playing for years (some for life). But ultimately things did change in South Africa, and certainly cricket played a part in that.

        What is disappointing is that none of the Saudi wildcards is a woman. Do they have a national championship for women? I would have expected WST to have made that a requirement for holding a ranking event, as a fundamental part of their development strategy. There are several Saudi women players who have played in international events.

        The best Saudi players are around 1000 on my ranking list. That’s a little lower than the level of Siripaporn Nuantakhamjan (Baipat), the weakest player currently on the main tour. So they are not hopeless, and have the potential to improve. Nevertheless they should be outsiders to win those matches, even with home support.

        Other wildcards who are much stronger are Ali Al Obaidly (Qatar), Habib Sabah (Bahrain), Ali Jalil Ali (Iraq) and Khalid Al Kamali (UAE). These players are quite close to some of the lowest-ranked professionals. It does at least mean this Saudi tournament will showcase some other players in the region, which is a plus.

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