As many of you will no doubt be aware by now, today saw the WPBSA announce the staging of a brand new tournament over in Brazil – not the most obvious place to take the sport at first glance but as the rise of new professional Igor Figueiredo has demonstrated, not a country entirely without snooker pedigree…
For all the details of the event then please click here to view the press release over at WorldSnooker.com.
In summary however, the key points are as follows:
- The inaugural Brazilian Masters will be staged in Sao Paulo, Brazil between the 14th and 17th September 2011.
- The tournament will initially be an invitational event, seeing 12 players invited in addition to four wildcards, with a view to expanding to a full ranking event in future years.
- There will be prize money of at least $200,000.
- The event will be straight knock-out with all of the match to be played on one match table. The first two rounds will see matches staged over the best of seven frames, with the semis and final over the best of nine.
This is not the first time that the staging of a tournament over in Brazil has been mooted but this time it would appear that there is a real commitment to making this happen and it will be very interesting indeed to see how the tournament, indeed the sport is received by the people of Brazil.
As David Hendon has already said on Snooker Scene Blog, it is a shrewd move on Barry Hearn’s part to make the initial staging of this event an invitational one, particularly in the light of the failure of the inaugural Bahrain Championship a couple of seasons ago to capture the imaginations of the locals. Beyond the final, the matches in involving Stephen Hendry and the matches involving the local wildcards, spectators were few and far between.
Hopefully if the players can go over there and whilst trying to win, at the same time entertain and put on a show at the same time, as well as promoting the sport, it will help to generate further interest in the sport and establish a real fanbase.
There may be other more obvious places where it would be good to see a new event staged but ultimately for me if snooker is to call itself a global sport, as the name World Snooker would suggest, it is important that at the very least such opportunities are to be pursued.
Thoughts?