The new season starts here! World Snooker have today confirmed who the 96 professionals will be during 2010/11 and you can see that list over here at my Roll Call page. Click below for more…
UPDATE: Click here to view my newly updated Players page.
The last few weeks have seen the last few places snapped up and with Kuldesh Johal’s victory in the Pro Ticket Tour Play-Offs earlier in the week, World Snooker have now been able to confirm who the 96 will be.
So who do we have?
Getting the obvious ones out of the way, 73 of those are players who were on the tour last season, 64 of them via the two-year list and another eight via the one-year list. The odd one out is Chinese wildcard Xiao Guodong who has been given another crack at the tour, a decison that I am supportive of and in fact advocated here at this blog during my article back in March. You owe me one Xiao!
Next up we have the eight players who have qualified by finishing in the top eight of the PIOS rankings, including talented youngsters such as Jack Lisowski, Liam Highfield and Anthony McGill.
The remaining 16 spots were awarded to players for both their International and National achievements, though of those there were four wildcard choices. The decision to award a spot to Reanne Evans has been known for a while now, while I have already discussed Xiao’s selection above.
How about the others then? Well it is safe to say that the governing body have put the World back into World Snooker as they have opted for Brazil’s Igor Figueiredo and Germany’s Patrick Einsle! It is arguable that there were potentially more deserving candidates (Tian Pengfei anyone?), but let’s be honest, any criteria is better than that used last year and it will do snooker no harm to be more widely represented.
I will now endeavour to complete work on updating the player profiles and making sure that I have as much information as possible for the tour newcomers, though this will be easier once I have my own computer back! In the meantime if anyone has any information that I could use on the players though then please drop drop me an email. Thanks!