The 10 professional players who have qualified for the 2024 Riyadh Season Snooker Championship

First held in March earlier this year - known then as the Riyadh Season World Masters of Snooker - the event was the first professional snooker tournament ever to be held in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The invitational competition features a gold ball - worth 20 points - that can be potted at the end of a successful 147 attempt to make a ‘golden maximum’ of 167. Besides this unique element, the rest of the action is played to traditional matchplay snooker rules.

Held in Riyadh, the upcoming December edition will once again feature 12 players. This field consists of the world’s top 10 cueists from the professional rankings following the 2024 UK Championship, and two local amateur wildcards.

The ‘regular’ prize fund will be £785,000, with a top prize of £250,000 going to the eventual champion.

However, on top of this, there is a special $1 million bonus prize for the first person to compile a 167 golden maximum. This huge pot has been doubled from the first staging.

During the inaugural outing, no-one managed to make an historic 167, with John Higgins going the closest after potting 15 reds and 15 blacks before missing a very tricky cut on the yellow.

Following the result from the opening Triple Crown event of the season in York, the world rankings have been updated and the top 10 players who will be invited to the three-day event in the Middle East later this month are:

• Judd Trump
• Kyren Wilson
• Mark Selby
• Ronnie O'Sullivan
• Mark Allen
• Mark Williams
• Luca Brecel
• Shaun Murphy
• Ding Junhui
• Zhang Anda

The two local wildcards will be announced in due course.

Gary Wilson finished on the bubble in 11th place, having picked up no ranking points from the 2024 UK Championship due to losing in the opening round at the Barbican Centre as a seed player.

Wilson and Zhang Anda - who was a quarter-finalist last week - swapped places in the rankings following the latest update.

UK Championship runner-up Barry Hawkins would have gone up to ninth if he defeated Judd Trump and lifted the trophy, which would have pushed Zhang out of the top 10 places.

It is believed that the format for this second edition of the event will be the same as the first, with five staggered rounds of competition in total.

Players ranked 9 and 10 will meet the two amateur wildcards in the opening round. The winners of those matches then face the professionals ranked 7 and 8.

The winners of those second round fixtures go into the quarter-finals where the top six ranked players begin their campaigns. The event from there on in is played in a traditional manner with semi-finals and a final to follow.

Ronnie O’Sullivan is the defending champion having defeated then reigning world champion Luca Brecel 5-2 in the final. ‘The Rocket’ was incredible for a lot of that tournament, eliminating John Higgins 4-0 and Judd Trump 4-1 in his other matches en route to the final. O’Sullivan compiled six century breaks in the 16 frames he played there.