Star names happy as big format change for Chinese events on the World Snooker Tour

It seems only like yesterday that Wu Yize dramatically ousted Shaun Murphy in a thrilling deciding frame Crucible final to win the sport’s blue riband event for the first time, but the new 2026/27 professional snooker season is just around the corner.

Top-flight snooker action recommences from Wednesday 10th June with the opening qualifying round for the revived China Open taking place at the Mattioli Arena in Leicester.

These preliminaries last for five days (June 10-14), with the Wuhan Open qualifiers (15-18) to follow at the same venue, then not long after that the opening stage of the 2026 Championship League Ranking Event (from June 22) gets underway.

More big time professional snooker in Asia than ever before

Snooker’s top stars are set to be busier than ever before in the Far East next term with six ranking events scheduled on the World Snooker Tour calendar to be staged there: China Open, Wuhan Open, Xi’an Grand Prix, International Championship, World Grand Prix and World Open - and the invitational Shanghai Masters.

For several years, the format for ranking events staged in China has remained pretty much the same: a flat, 128-player draw meaning all players - regardless of their world ranking position - had to win the same amount of matches to lift the trophy.

However, the vast majority of opening round matches in these tournaments had been staged as ‘qualifiers’, held in England several weeks before the ‘main draw’ televised stages broke off in the Far East.

Several of the top seeds - because the event organisers/promoters wanted to guarantee certain names would be at the final stages in China in order to sell tickets etc. - have traditionally had their first round engagements ‘held over’ to the main venue, although everyone else has had the bother of playing a low-key ‘qualifying’ match, usually held behind-closed-doors in recent years.

But all this has changed for the upcoming season.

The end of the ‘flat draw’ system on the World Snooker Tour?

The 2026 China Open - which is understood to have a top prize of at least £300,000 - features a ‘tiered draw’ system, meaning players enter the fray in different rounds depending on their world ranking.

The China Open will pretty much mirror the formats used in the sport’s two biggest ranking events - the UK Championship and the World Championship - with the top 16 all going straight through to the main party where they will eventually be joined by the 16 players who emerge from qualifying.

Qualifying at the Mattioli consists of four rounds; the lowest ranked seeds starting out at the opening hurdle, and those positioned 17-48 entering at round three, meaning they need to navigate two rounds in order to qualify for the final stages which are due to take place in Taiyuan between August 8-16.

The Wuhan Open is back for a fourth edition this year; Judd Trump won the inaugural staging in 2023 before Xiao Guodong’s back-to-back triumphs in 2024 and 2025. But the format has changed this year with a tiered draw in place.

This, though, will be slightly different to the China Open permutations, with the top 32 seeds all going through to the final stages in Wuhan between August 23-29 where the ‘main draw’ consists of 64 players.

The other half of that draw will be made up of 32 qualifiers emerging from Leicester in June. For the Wuhan Open, there will be two rounds of qualifying - the bottom 64 seeds contesting the first round, and then those placed 33 to 64 coming in at the second step.

Totally Snookered has been informed by an official from the World Snooker Tour that all Chinese ranking events this season will feature a tiered draw format of some description.

This represents a big shift from the school of thought that Barry Hearn explained several years ago about ‘meritocracy’ and the fairness of adopting a flat draw system.

In recent seasons, we have seen this formula start to be phased out. The UK Championship reverted back to a 32-player ‘main draw’ in 2022, and in the last couple of seasons, all four Home Nations Series events and the German Masters used the same format as the aforementioned Wuhan Open qualifiers for this campaign.

Having a tiered draw format means that players further down the rankings need to win more matches than the top seeds in order to win the tournament. For example, in the China Open, one of the lowest seeds may have to win 9/10 matches to claim the title, meanwhile one of the world’s top 16 will only have to negotiate five matches.

However, there have been calls from players at both ends of the rankings spectrum to bring back tiered draws.

Under tiered draw guidelines, for the game’s lesser lights, their opening match is against someone who is near them in the world rankings, instead of potentially being drawn against one of the very best, first up.

Also - if last season’s prize money payouts are anything to go by - more players will earn at least something compared to a flat draw system. In a flat draw situation, 64 first round losers went home with nothing, now, this only applies to 32 first round losers.

Snooker’s top stars - who get an extended ‘off-season’ break - will surely be delighted with this new arrangement. They all go straight through to the main events in the Far East, and are guaranteed to be on prize money there (although they still need to win their opening matches in order for it to be added to their world ranking tallies).

The big names now know months in advance that they will definitely be in the Far East for such events, and can plan their diaries - and other corporate/exhibition opportunities - accordingly.

It is unknown whether this was something that the recently-founded Professional Snooker Players’ Association (PSPA) had been pushing for.