RANKING EVENTS BY PRESTIGE

Although we've always known that the World Championship, the Masters and the UK Championship are the biggest tournaments in snooker and we call them the triple crown tournaments since the latter two established themselves on tour in the 70's, it was just this year that World Snooker Tour "officalized" the triple crown as a "series" of their own. In fact, the Masters 2020 was the first tournament where players who have won all of those three bigs were allowed to sport a golden crown on their waistcoat (by the way I really the idea).
However, a season that has about 30 events can't be resumed by three tournaments, and in snooker it's not clear how big is each tournament. Every week the marketing is the same, WST announces the upcoming tournament as one of the most pretigious on tour. I personally would like the structure to be like tennis, for example, where you know there are the Grand Slams, than the Masters 1000's, the ATP 500's and the ATP 250's, but at the same time I know that snooker's less prestigious events end up being a lot more interesting than ATP's 250 are in tennis.

What I'll do here anyway, is to rank in tiers where each event stands:

Tier 1
World Championship.
Tier 2
UK Championship, Masters.

You may think I'd put these three in the same tier. But although the Masters and the UK Championship are up there, the World Championship is just something else. Viewing figures, prize money, TV coverage, general interest, backpages, repercussion... It's just in another level compared to ANY snooker event.

Tier 3
Welsh Open, Champion of Champions.

BBC coverage, and a long history since it's inclusion to the calendar in 1992 (the oldest ongoing event apart from the Triple Crown) have made the Welsh Open a traditional stop. 
The Champion of Champions may not have the long history, it was established in 2013, but its unique format of play and qualification, plus the work ITV4 put on it, already makes it be one of the top 5 events in the world. Fans seems to absolutely love it.

Tier 4
Tour Championship, Players Championship, World Grand Prix, English Open, Northern Ireland Open, Scottish Open, International Championship, China Open, Shanghai Masters.

The other events that are on free-to-air television and the four most traditional Chinese tournaments #RIPWuxiClassic

Tier 5
German Masters, China Championship, Paul Hunter Classic, European Masters, World Open.

Some of these events are not being held at the moment due to the pandemic. And the China Championship may not even get back to the tour as far as we know. A lot of money was put into it and I don't feel like the fans reacted the way China expected them too. I think we all had a little bit enough of China launching a new millionaire event every year to try and compete with the Triple Crown series in the UK.
Below tier 5 comes all the other events not mentioned. Although they are still a good watch for snooker fans, they struggle even to attract the top players to take part in. Some examples are the Riga Masters, the Gibraltar Open and the Shoot-Out.
It's worth to point out though, that depending on the field of players taking part in, depending on some headlines created during the event or a strong line-up left for the weekend, any of these events in tier 5 could be promoted to a higher tier. For example, the 2020 German Masters was an incredible event highlighted by its final contested by two of the sport's biggest stars: Judd Trump and Neil Robertson. However, the two qualifying rounds held in England a couple months before the actual tournament have always been a massive joy-killer for the event that is played in probably the best snooker arena in the world, the Tempodrom with its capacity crowd of 2,500 people - the highest in the current snooker caledar. Next year's event will not have Mark Selby, Neil Robertson, Kyren Wilson or Mark Allen, after they lost in qualifying, and Ronnie O'Sullivan, who loves the event but hates qualifiers, did not enter the event either. Merit to those able to qualify, the quality of snooker played there was never to be criticized - but the engagement is reduced a lot when most of the stars are missing. As a snooker blogger myself I know that Ronnie O'Sullivan and Mark Selby are the two players that gather more engagement overall, so from a TV or a sponsor point of view, it's bad not to have them.

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