New pro snooker season to start with Chinese qualifying double-header in Leicester

Since Wu Yize's deciding frame world championship title triumph at the Crucible Theatre on May 4th, a lot of action has taken place on snooker's secondary tiers.

Ronnie O'Sullivan won the World Seniors Snooker Championship on debut, and the following weekend added another new accolade to his career CV at the inaugural Global Snooker 900 Championship.

In China at the World Women's Snooker Championship, Thai teenager Panchaya Channoi was a somewhat surprise winner of the blue riband women's title, defeating record 12-time champion Reanne Evans in the final to lift The Mandy Fisher Trophy and pocket a professional tour card.

And 12 further pro tickets were stamped at this year’s Q Schools in Thailand and England.

The 2026/27 World Snooker Tour begins on Wednesday 10th June with five days of qualifying for the China Open.

Set to be the most lucrative professional snooker event ever to be held in the Far East - with a total prize fund in excess of £1.2 million - the China Open is back on the pro circuit for the first time since 2019. It was scheduled for 2020 but cancelled due to COVID-19 and then stayed off the calendar, until now.

The format used is very similar to that of the UK Championship, with the world's top 16 ranked players all getting passes straight through to the main draw, televised stages held between August 8-16 in Taiyaun.

All the remaining contestants (and two local amateur wildcards who will also play at the main venue) must attend qualification at the Mattioli where there are four preliminary rounds in total with the lowest seeded players coming in at the first hurdle.

Cueists seeded 17 to 48 enter the fray in round three, meaning they require two wins to book a ticket in several weeks' time. All matches at the qualifying rounds are the best of 11 frames.

A host of rookie professionals will be playing their debut top-flight matches in the competition, meanwhile snooker legend Jimmy White is set for a record-equalling 47th consecutive professional term.

Amongst those featuring from the penultimate round are reigning Northern Ireland Open champion Jack Lisowski - the highest ranked player at these qualifiers - and Thepchaiya Un-Nooh who was the winner of the last ranking event to be held in China, the World Open last March.

Former World Champions Stuart Bingham and Luca Brecel are also in the mix - they would play each other in the final qualifying round should they both navigate their opening assignments - as too is 2008 champion, Stephen Maguire.

Other ranking event winners in the draw for these preliminaries are Gary Wilson, Hossein Vafaei, Ryan Day, Tom Ford, Zhang Anda, Anthony McGill, Matthew Selt, Ali Carter, Lei Peifan, David Gilbert, Matthew Stevens, Jordan Brown, Fan Zhengyi, Marco Fu, Michael Holt, Ricky Walden, Alfie Burden, and Robert Milkins.

The day after the 16 China Open qualifiers are discovered, another Asian ranking event gets underway in Leicester with the opening phases of the 2026 Wuhan Open (June 15-18).

The fourth annual edition of the Wuhan Open, Judd Trump won the inaugural staging in 2023 before back-to-back glories for home hero Xiao Guodong in 2024 and 2025.

This year, though, the Wuhan Open format has changed, moving from a flat draw to a tiered one.

Again, this means the top 16 seeds do not need to attend the qualifiers and are guaranteed to be at the big party at the end of August. But Wuhan does has a different arrangement to Taiyuan.

The same as last season's German Masters format, the 2026 Wuhan Open consists of eight rounds in total, although the first two-and-a-half (ish) will be played as 'qualifiers' in Leicester. We'll explain.

The top 32 seeds go straight through to round three (last 64). The opening round involves the lowest-ranked contestants, with the winners of these ties moving into round two when the next band of players come into play.

A batch of round three ties will also be completed at the Mattioli, although none of these involve the top 16, or fixtures with local wildcards in them.

Please note, to accommodate wildcards for the Wuhan Open, there is a preliminary round of two matches in Leicester, too. All matches at the qualifiers are the best of nine frames.

Only a few days after this qualifying double-header ends, the 2026 Championship League Ranking Event starts on June 22nd, with the Finals Day and the first trophy of the new season to be awarded on July 15th.

A triple-header of qualifiers for the Xi'an Grand Prix, British Open, and English Open are confirmed for the second half of July, and with several top players likely to skip the Championship League again, we won't see many of the sport's biggest stars back on the baize until the Shanghai Masters invitational starting on July 27th.