Pontins Professional
Tournament status | ||
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Ranking tournament: | - | |
Minor ranking tournament: | - | |
Invitation tournament: | 1974-2000 | |
Tournament dates of the last edition | ||
Venue: | Pontin's Prestatyn , Prestatyn | |
Prize money (total): | ||
Prize money (winner): | ||
Frames in the final: | Best of 17 | |
Records | ||
Most wins: | Ray Reardon (4 ×) | |
Highest Break: |
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Venue (s) on the map | ||
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The Pontins Professional was a tournament for snooker professionals from 1974 to 2000 . As an invitation tournament, it never had the status of a ranked tournament .
history
In the early 1970s, the British holiday operator Pontins introduced snooker events for its holiday resorts. Especially in the holiday park in Prestatyn on the Welsh coast, snooker professionals often performed and created a special attraction. In 1974 the Pontins Spring Open was therefore introduced as a spring event , at which holidaymakers could compete against professional players. The professionals got a handicap in the form of a point deduction. At the same time, a purely professional tournament was held, which was scheduled to end the season after the snooker world championship at the beginning of the summer break and was therefore attractive to many professionals. Initially, a group phase was also experimented with, but the tournament was mostly played as an elimination tournament with 8 participants. In 1981 a second open tournament was introduced in the fall, the Pontins Autumn Open.
Prestatyn developed beyond the tournament to a center of the snooker sport. For years the qualification rounds for the big snooker tournaments took place there. While the prize money increased enormously in other tournaments, the Pontins Professional only received £ 5,000 prize money at the best of times. The professional tournament lost its attractiveness and was discontinued in 2000, while the open tournaments continued. In the 2000s there was a Pro-Am tournament series instead of the tournament and from 2005 to 2010 the Pontin's International Open Series , the qualifying series for the amateurs for the Snooker Main Tour in Wales, took place. After that, the professional tour was increasingly redesigned and Prestatyn lost its importance for professional snooker.
The record winner of the Pontins Professional is Ray Reardon from Welsh , who won the first three editions of the tournament and was victorious a fourth time after a one-year break. He was in the final seven times. His compatriot Terry Griffiths and the Irish Ken Doherty each won the tournament three times. With Darren Morgan and Doug Mountjoy there were two more multiple winners from Wales, the Englishman Neal Foulds also won two tournaments. John Spencer made it to the finals six times, but only won the title once.
winner
Web links
- Pontins Open / Pontins Professional / Pontins World Pro-Am Series in Chris Turner's Snooker Archive (archived version)