World Snooker administrator Barry Hearn declared a change to World Championship capability today, which will please various players on the circuit. The present procedure saw 128 players contending in qualifying, all coming in at the first round and expecting to win three matches to achieve the Crucible. While this was a dimension playing field in capability, it implied that the world number 17 got no advantage at all for their exhibitions in the course of the most recent two years and should come through the same number of matches as #128 or the beginner qualifiers.

This has now been changed and the players closer the main 16 in the rankings will have a somewhat simpler undertaking of achieving the Crucible starting now and into the foreseeable future. 'One year from now's World Snooker Championship will start with 16 welcome cards given to the WPBSA to spread the good news of snooker and reward players around the globe and boost players to take up snooker as a full-time vocation,' Hearn told a Crucible public interview. 

'‘Those 16 players in round one will play the lowest 48 seeds of the 128 (81-128). ‘The 32 winners of that will play the next lowest 32 seeds (49-80) and so on until we get through to the last 16 that will join the top 16 at the Crucible. ‘So this will reward players that have achieved additional ranking success during the year without going into round one. ‘And it also achieves another primary objective, which is spreading the money deeper into the game.