The Hindu : Sport / Billiards & Snooker : New format in snooker soon

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Sport - Billiards & Snooker

New format in snooker soon

Principal Correspondent

HYDERABAD: The Asian Confederation of Billiards Sports (ACBS), at its Executive Committee meeting recently, decided in principle to introduce a new format of six-red snooker instead of the traditional 15-red game to make the sport more popular and spectator-friendly.

Capt. P.V.K. Mohan, Director, ACBS, told The Hindu that this was one of the major decisions taken at the meeting and more importantly the players too welcomed the proposal.

“As part of our efforts to promote this in a big way in Asia, all the national federations have been asked to hold as many tournaments as possible in the near future to get the players and the spectators acquainted to the new format. It is likely to generate more interest because it will give scope to create big upsets,” he said.

“In fact, as the first step, the new format will be introduced during this year’s Vietnam Indoor Games. We are also planning various measures to make it popular as quickly as possible so that it can lure more sponsors into the sport,” Mohan added.

Another significant decision is to discard the time format in the World billiards. The first move in this direction will be to re-introduce the 150-up format in the Bangalore edition this year. “It may be recalled that when we hosted the World billiards championship in Hyderabad, we stuck to the 150-up format for several reasons, and not to the time format,” he said.

The BSFI chief also pointed out that these decisions resulted from a series of discussions with the international players across the world.

“And all of them are for these changes,” he said.

“Essentially, the primary objective is to see that whatever sponsorship money we get for the cue sports percolates down to the needy within the sport,” Mohan added.

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