Ridiculous Snooker Competition Format

This year the format for the Championship League Snooker competition is very inequitable.

It works like this. There are twenty-five entrants, of which seven are placed in Group 1. They play a round-robin tournament and the top four then play a knockout to decide the winner of the group. The winner qualifies for the Winners Group, and the remaining other four of the top five progress to Group 2, joining three other players from the original twenty-five. The bottom two are eliminated from the competition. This whole process is repeated until Group 7, when only the winner qualifies for the Winners Group, the other six players getting eliminated. The Winners Group then contains the seven players who won a group. Again, they play a round-robin and the top four play a knockout for tournament winner.

Players win money by winning frames, getting through to the play-offs, winning a group or being runner-up, and by making the highest break in a group. The rates for these are different for the Winners Group.

The reason this format is inequitable is that a player is better placed to win, the earlier they enter the competition, and has increased expected winnings. It's easy to see this if you imagine all the players with equal ability. A player entering at Group 7 has a one in seven chance of qualifying for the Winners Group. A player entering at Group 6 has a one in seven chance of qualifying by winning Group 6 plus an additional chance of progressing to Group 7 and winning that. And so on.

It's easy to analyse the probability of winning a tournament of equally able players depending on entry group number. It's more difficult to analyse the expected winnings, so I wrote a Monte-Carlo simulation. Here are the results.

The competition is now complete, and one of the players who entered in Group 4 never made it to the Winners Group, but earned more than five of the players who did.

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