Challenge Tour (Snooker)

The Challenge Tour is a series of snooker tournaments for amateurs that are played over a season. The best players in the overall ranking qualify for the Snooker Main Tour . The series began in 1997/98 under the name UK Tour with five tournaments and was then continued with four tournaments until 2005. Since 2018 there has been a new edition with 10 tournaments.

History and meaning

The idea behind the UK tour

After the Snooker Tour became an open tour in 1991, i. H. If there were no athletic requirements for participating in the qualification in the important tournaments, over time there was a large number of participants of several hundred players, which meant too much organizational effort. For this reason it was decided to introduce a two-part tour in 1997. 96 players qualified for the Snooker Main Tour , which continued to include all major professional tournaments. For the other players there was the UK Tour with 5 tournaments at different venues in England. The idea was that the best players in the UK Tour rating could qualify for the following Main Tour season. Not only the results of the UK Tour tournaments counted, but also the performance of the participating players in the World Cup , which was the only major professional tournament that remained open to all players, was included in the overall ranking in each year.

Development from 1987 to 2005

At the end of the 1990s, however, there were repeated changes in the composition of the main tour and the qualification criteria, so that the second tour also changed again and again:

• In 2000 the UK Tour was renamed the Challenge Tour
• In the first two years, Main Tour professionals threatened with relegation were able to take part in the tournaments in order to secure themselves twice for the next season. From 1999 the tours were completely separated.
• From the second year there were only four tournaments. At the beginning there were five different clubs, but the number has continued to decrease. Already from the second year two tournaments took place in the Jesters Snooker Club in Swindon , from 2000 alternating with the Manhattan SC in Harrogate . In 2002/03 the final tournament took place in Prestatyn in Wales , which was the first time a non-English venue was chosen. The sponsor Pontin's Holiday Park there was then the sole venue for the Challenge Tour tournaments from 2003 to 2005 and also for the qualifying rounds of many Main Tour tournaments.
• At the first tournament over 400 players who had not made it into the main tour played the entire tournament. Then a qualification was introduced here too and 128 played the main round. Then the qualification was divided into two parts, one in the north and one in the south of England. 16 players each then played the main tournament of the last 32. In 2001, the time of the open professional tournaments ended and the number of participants in the Challenge Tour was limited to a total of 128 players.
• The number of players who eventually qualified for the Main Tour changed from year to year. In 1998 and 2000 the Main Tour was increased to well over 128 players and reduced again in the following year. As of 2004 there were only 96 Main Tour professionals. This year the best 16 players were taken on, in 2005 only 6.

In the 2000s, the sport of snooker lost major sponsorships due to the UK ban on tobacco advertising. As a result, the prize money on the first UK tour fell from almost £ 40,000 at the end to under £ 20,000. The number of tournaments on the Main Tour fell and there was less to earn. As a result, there were fewer and fewer players who could still make a living from the sport. In 2005 the Challenge Tour was therefore abolished as the second professional tour. Only the 96 Main Tour players retained the professional status and for the amateurs there was a newly designed tournament series from 2005, the Pontin's International Open Series (PIOS), with 8 seasonal tournaments as a qualification option.

New edition 2018

In 2010 the Q School replaced the PIOS tournaments. Once a year two or three successive qualification tournaments were held there. In addition, the Players Tour Championship (PTC) was introduced, in which amateurs could also take part. After these Pro-Am tournaments could not establish themselves permanently, except for two, the amateur players lost opportunities to compete and improve internationally. That is why in 2018 they returned to the idea of ​​the Challenge Tour as a kind of “2. League “back. The Q School 2018 plus some supplementary players were used as the basis to determine a field of 64 players. Then 10 tournaments were scheduled in English snooker clubs over the 2018/19 season and prize money was awarded. Based on the model of the world rankings , a premium ranking list was drawn up at the end of the season and the two leaders in the ranking were given the right to start the next two seasons of the Snooker Main Tour . The next year there was a new edition .

Results

Only the first two places in the season's overall ranking are given. The number of players who qualified for the Main Tour changed from year to year until 2005. In the new edition 2018, 2 professional licenses were played.

season	Surname	1st place	place 2
UK Tour (Professional Series)
1997/98	UK tour	Paul McPhillips	Mark Fenton
1998/99	UK tour	Alfred Burden	Joe Swail
1999/00	UK tour	Barry Hawkins	Simon Bedford
Challenge Tour (professional series)
2000/01	Challenge Tour	Shaun Murphy	Andrew Norman
2001/02	Challenge Tour	Ryan Day	Lee Spick
2002/03	Challenge Tour	Martin Gould	Tom Ford
2003/04	Challenge Tour	Brian Salmon	Steve James
2004/05	Challenge Tour	Jamie Cope	Lee Spick
Challenge Tour (amateur series)
2018/19	Challenge Tour	Brandon Sargeant	David Grace
2019/20	Challenge Tour	Lukas Kleckers 1	Allan Taylor

¹The first place in the ranking qualified directly; the players in the following eight places played a play-off, the winner of which received the second qualifying place and which is given here. In addition, the Englishman Ashley Hugill actually took first place in the ranking, but he was already qualified for the next two seasons via the WSF Open 2020 , so that the second-placed Lukas Kleckers received the direct qualification place.

Maximum breaks

During the first eight seasons there were two maximum breaks on the tour, both in the 1998/1999 season. Stuart Bingham got one against Barry Hawkins and Nick Dyson got one against Adrian Gunnell .

Web links

• Chris Turners Snooker Archive - World Snooker UK Tour / World Snooker Challenge Tour ( Memento from April 18, 2016 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ snookerscene.blogspot.com
2. ↑ FCnooker: 2000/2001 Challenge Tour ( Memento from October 10, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
3. ↑ VHSL History , The Vic Harris Snooker League, accessed on July 9, 2018
4. ↑ Challenge Tour Nominations Announced , World Snooker, May 30, 2018