World Grand Prix snooker moves to new state-of-the-art venue in Hong Kong

Prior to this announcement, the dates and venue for the latest edition of the World Grand Prix were unknown, although speculation had been rife in recent months with online reports suggesting the event was heading to the Far East.

Today, via their website, the World Snooker Tour clarified this, with the 2025 edition of the tournament set to be played at the 4,000-seater Grand Hall within the Kai Tak Arena between March 4-9.

The 2025 World Open ranking event in Yushan, China was originally scheduled for between March 3-9, but this will now be moved to the week before with dates soon to be released.

In terms of qualification for the 2025 World Grand Prix, it will remain the same as it has done since its introduction on the professional circuit in 2015, with only the top 32 players from this season’s one-list being invited to it. There were initial rumours that local Hong Kong players - such as Marco Fu - could be invited to the tournament, but this is not the case. Of course, Fu could still qualify via the seasonal list.

The World Grand Prix will still be part of the Players Series, representing the first leg of that three-pronged sequence alongside the Players Championship (Telford, March 17-23) and Tour Championship (Manchester, March 31-April 6).

Another significant change to the next WGP staging is the huge increase in prize money on offer. The overall prize fund has gone from £380,000 to £700,000, with the champion’s purse upped from £100,000 to £180,000.

It will be interesting to see if the top prizes at both the Players (£125,000) and Tour (£150,000) Championship events will also rise; they may have to in order to keep the Players Series status quo, with those events fielding fewer players and seen as ‘more elite’ than the World Grand Prix.

There is no information, as yet, on who will televise the 2025 World Grand Prix. Since 2015, the event has been extensively covered by ITV in the United Kingdom, but it appears they will not be the host broadcaster in Hong Kong with no mention of the event when they recently released a statement about a one-year contract extension for their snooker and darts coverage.

It will be the first time in over 35 years that Hong Kong will host a professional snooker ranking event. In 1989, Mike Hallett ousted Dene O’Kane 9-8 in the final to win the Hong Kong Open - the only staging of that competition.

In more recent times, the city has held the eight-player Hong Kong Masters invitational; in 2017 Neil Robertson defeated Ronnie O’Sullivan in the final, while O’Sullivan denied home hero Fu in the 2022 title match in front of a record 9,000 spectators.