While the start of the new season remains a few months off yet, World Snooker have today published the provisional 2009/10 calendar. I have now updated this as the calendar appears to have changed already since I first posted this article earlier on…
To view the calendar please click here.
As you can see, the calendar is looking rather bare at present with just six rankings event tournaments plus the Masters and the Jiangsu Classic, but it is very early on so hopefully more will be added in due course.
It has been rumoured for some time but it does appear the the future of both the Northern Ireland Trophy and the Bahrain Championship tournaments look bleak as neither are on the provisional calendar. Mark Allen spoke to the BBC recently and said that there is still time for the former should sponsors come forward, but the signs do not look good at the moment.
With regard to the dates, the obvious changes are that many of the tournaments have been brought forward, notably Shanghai, the UK Championship and the Welsh Open which are now much sooner than they were in the 2008/9 season. Hopefully the spaces left by Northern Ireland and Bahrain will be filled at some point as otherwise there will be quite a gap between the Grand Prix and the UK Championship tournaments.
The only stumbling block however may be that the Premier League has already scheduled events to take place on each week of October/November following the Grand Prix, so if there is a new tournament to come then we might see a repeat of the fiasco last season which saw four players miss out on Bahrain.
We shall see, in any case I will update my calendar page with this information in due course.