The Tour Championship is a professional

snooker Snooker (pronounced , ) is a cue sports, cue sport played on a Billiard table#Snooker and English billiards tables, rectangular table covered with a green cloth called baize, with six Billiard table#Pockets 2, pockets, one at each corner and o ...

tournament first held in

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. The event features eight participants, the highest ranked players from the one-year

ranking A ranking is a relationship between a set of items such that, for any two items, the first is either "ranked higher than", "ranked lower than" or "ranked equal to" the second. In mathematics, this is known as a weak order or total preorder of o ...

list beginning at the start of the season. The Tour Championship is the third and final tournament that makes up the Players Series. The event features a prize fund of around £380,000, with the winner receiving £150,000. The tournament is broadcast by

ITV4 ITV4 is a Television in the United Kingdom, British free-to-air television channel which was launched on 1 November 2005. It is owned by ITV Digital Channels, a division of ITV plc, and is part of the ITV (TV network), ITV network. The channel h ...

in the United Kingdom and

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across the rest of Europe. The reigning champion is Australian

Neil Robertson Neil Robertson (born 11 February 1982) is an Australian professional snooker player who is a former world champion and former world number one. The only Australian to have won a ranking event, he is also the only player from outside the United ...

, who won the

2022 Tour Championship The 2022 Tour Championship (known as the 2022 Cazoo Tour Championship for sponsorship reasons) is an upcoming professional snooker tournament, taking place from 28 March to 3 April 2022 at Venue Cymru, Llandudno, Wales. Organised by the Wor ...

with a 10–9 win over

John Higgins John Higgins, (born 18 May 1975) is a Scottish professional snooker player. He has won 31 career ranking titles, placing him in third position on the all-time list of ranking event winners, behind Ronnie O'Sullivan (39) and Stephen Hendry ( ...

in the final.

History

The tournament was announced in April 2018, and was scheduled to be played for the first time in March 2019. The event was organised as the third and final event to make up the Coral Cup (now Players Series), tournaments sponsored by bookmakers

Coral Corals are marine invertebrates within the class Anthozoa of the phylum Cnidaria. They typically form compact colonies of many identical individual polyps. Coral species include the important reef builders that inhabit tropical oceans and sec ...

which use the rankings exclusively from the season prior. The tournaments in the Cup featured declining player entries, with the first event, the World Grand Prix having 32 participants, and the Players Championship 16. The Tour Championship is the tournament with the lowest number of entries of any tournament on the calendar, with just eight participants. The tournament is broadcast by

in the United Kingdom,

across Europe. The event also airs on Sky Sport in New Zealand,

NowTV Now (formerly Now TV and often stylised as NOW) is a subscription over-the-top internet television service operated by British satellite television provider Sky. Launched in the United Kingdom in 2012, the service is now also available in Ire ...

in Hong Kong, and Superstars Online in China. The first edition of the tournament was played in 2019 at

Venue Cymru Venue Cymru is a theatre, conference centre and arena in Llandudno, Conwy County Borough, North Wales. Formerly known as the Aberconwy Centre and the North Wales Theatre and Conference Centre, it is now a large arts, conference and events ven ...

Llandudno Llandudno (, ) is a seaside resort, town and community in Conwy County Borough, Wales, located on the Creuddyn peninsula, which protrudes into the Irish Sea. In the 2011 UK census, the community – which includes Gogarth, Penrhyn Bay, Craigsi ...

, Wales after the Players Championship was moved from Llandudno to Preston in 2019. The 2019 Tour Championship was the first event since the

2010 UK Championship The 2010 12BET.com UK Championship was a professional ranking snooker tournament that took place between 4–12 December 2010 at the Telford International Centre in Telford, England. Ding Junhui was the defending champion, but he lost 8–9 aga ...

(and other than the

World Snooker Championship The World Snooker Championship is the longest-running and most prestigious tournament in professional snooker. It is also the wealthiest, with total prize money in 2022 of £2,395,000, including £500,000 for the winner. First held in 1927 Wor ...

) in which every match was played over multiple , with two in the quarter-finals and semi-finals, and three sessions in the final. The best-of-25-frames final, held on 23 and 24 March, was the first non-World Championship match of this length or longer since the 1992 UK Championship final. The 2019 final was played between

Ronnie O'Sullivan Ronald Antonio O'Sullivan (born 5 December 1975) is an English professional snooker player who is the current world champion and world number one. Widely recognised as one of the most talented and accomplished players in the sport's history, ...

and

, who had also met in the Players Championship final two weeks prior. O'Sullivan lead 5-3 after the first session and later won the match and the tournament 13–11. The win also gave O'Sullivan the Coral Cup for the 2018–19 season. The

2020 Tour Championship The 2020 Tour Championship (officially the 2020 Coral Tour Championship) was a professional snooker tournament that took place from 20 to 26 June 2020 at the Marshall Arena in Milton Keynes, England. Organised by the World Snooker Tour, it ...

was moved in both date and location due to the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...

. Matches were also shortened with all matches being either best-of-17 or best-of-19 frame matches. It was originally organised to be played from 17 to 22 March 2020 but on the morning of the first day, it was postponed. On 5 June 2020, the tournament was rescheduled to be held between 20 and 26 June 2020 and moved to a different venue, the

Marshall Arena The Marshall Arena (formerly known as Arena MK, also Milton Keynes Arena) is a multi-purpose arena in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England, located beside Stadium MK. The multi-use event space is positioned over three floors and anticipates m ...

Milton Keynes Milton Keynes ( ) is a city and the largest settlement in Buckinghamshire, England, about north-west of London. At the 2021 Census, the population of its urban area was over . The River Great Ouse forms its northern boundary; a tributary ...

, England. Due to the pandemic,

Ding Junhui Ding Junhui (; born 1 April 1987) is a Chinese professional snooker player. He is the most successful Asian player in the history of the sport. Throughout his career, he has won 14 major ranking titles, including three UK Championships (2005 ...

was unable to participate, and was replaced by

Stephen Maguire Stephen Maguire (born 13 March 1981) is a Scottish professional snooker player. He has won six major ranking tournaments, including the 2004 UK Championship, and has twice since reached the finals of that event. Maguire turned professional i ...

. Maguire reached the final, where he defeated

Mark Allen Mark may refer to: Currency * Bosnia and Herzegovina convertible mark, the currency of Bosnia and Herzegovina * East German mark, the currency of the German Democratic Republic * Estonian mark, the currency of Estonia between 1918 and 1927 * Finn ...

10–6 in the final, to win his first ranking title since the 2013 Welsh Open. The 2021 event was also held with no live audience but was held at the

Celtic Manor Resort Celtic Manor Resort is a golf, spa and leisure hotel and resort in the city of Newport, Wales, Newport, South East Wales. Owned by Terry Matthews, Sir Terry Matthews, the resort is located on the south-facing side of Christchurch, Newport, Christ ...

in Newport, Wales with all matches as the best-of-19 frames. Defending champion Maguire did not qualify for the event, having not scored enough ranking points during the season. The final was between the two players who contested the 2019 event, Robertson and O'Sullivan. Robertson won the event with a 10–4 win in the final. O'Sullivan commented he could not compete with Robertson's performance, saying "I've never seen anyone play as well as that."

Winners

Below is a summary of the results from the previously held tournaments.

References

External links

* {{Snooker tournaments * Recurring sporting events established in 2019 Snooker ranking tournaments Snooker competitions in the United Kingdom 2019 establishments in the United Kingdom