anyone else fear for snooker?

Cricket has shown that a non-traditional approach can work, but that appears to be the exception rather than the rule.

Snooker is of limited appeal to the general public even with Ronnie still in the game.  Hardly anyone I know outside of BF land gives two shiny 5hites about it, save maybe for the WC.  It's even worse when you narrow the age range down to the youth of today.  Unless you play yourself, no-one in that younger age bracket cares a jot.  The long format of the game simply holds no kind of appeal to the "instant" generation.  Hell, take away the punting angle, and even I wouldn't follow it anything like I do....

So how should snooker evolve to survive?

Agree about the short matches. Can be over in an hour.

As for Ronnie, the great player he is, he has disrespected snooker for a while now. Can't be arsed to try in most matches, so he won't be a great loss to me when he retires.

Think its not only snooker that might be in trouble. Horseracing,cricket, lower league football all struggle to attract crowds nowadays. Sad when people won't go to live events and just sit staring at their phones all day.

Snookers doing ok, considering. Would say it bottomed out in terms of popularity maybe 5-10 years ago and it's found its level. Can grow a bit in the uk but probably not that much, big interest now in ukraine and places like that so the long term future is heading that way. Crowds were pretty decent up to pandemic time, slow getting back to where they were but they will eventually. Ronnie leaving, which wont be in next 5 years anyway, will hurt but they said same stuff about tiger woods and guess what, golfs getting over it and doing ok.

Can never quite make up my mind if Hearn has saved the game or ruined it!

Not sure if hard core snooker fans will have the attention span for these marathon BO11's that are coming up from York today.

Barry Hearn: "In order to save the village, we had to destroy the village."

It's a good way of putting it, TM, Hearn did some good things and some very bad things. How you weigh them up.

I agree with others on the point about long versus short form snooker. If you think about it, unless you reach finals, the tour championship or last 48 of the worlds, you won't play a single multi (as in more than one) session snooker match. That's probably more than two-thirds of the pro tour. Why condition yourself to play that kind of snooker if you'll never get to experience it? It's why I'd argue scaling down the uk champs is one of the biggest crimes they ever committed.

I am more a casual observer, but hasn't snooker come through a decline, and now has many more tournaments, and more television coverage? What more do you want?

need more players like lisowski and xintong to come through to make it watchable as the likes of  kyren wilson and yan bingtao at times makes me want turn the tv off

Somebody doesn't like Xintong today - Massive drift on The Spectrum.

I even got a massive £6.84 matched at 1.35