The GB 9 Ball Tour moves into it’s third year this coming weekend and for the first time the events will be shown live online at Cuesport TV.
The tour that is now backed by SAM Leisure, and will be held exclusively in Barceló Hotels, features the 5 players that won the recent WPA World Team Championships in Germany (Darren Appleton, Karl Boyes, Mark Gray, Imran Majid and Daryl Peach).
Peter Williams, Managing Director of Cuesport TV said, “This is probably the most exciting national pool tour in Europe and the standard of the players is phenomenal. We have been involved with the tour since day one and live coverage was something we always wanted to provide. With the move into Barceló Hotels this is something that can now be done and will be massive boost both for the tour and Cuesport TV.”
Jonathan Mathers, Chairperson of the GB 9 Ball Tour added; “We’re delighted that Cuesport TV are able to broadcast live from one of our events for the first time. We hope that fans around the world can sample some of the great pool being played by the world class players that are a part of GB9.”
The live coverage is available on Saturday 13th March and starts at around 12pm local time. The coverage will include the latter stages of the Pro Cup and also some of the early matches from the main event, which features all 144 players on the GB 9 Ball Tour.
It is hoped that at subsequent tour events the live streaming will be extended to include both days.
The live stream at this first event will be free to view and can be accessed via the Watch Live Now link, found in the On Demand Content section.
Coverage starts at 12pm local time (7am US Eastern Time)
Coverage of the Pro Cup final is scheduled to start a 4 p.m. local time (11am US Eastern time)
Today see’s the final section of the Grand Prix Snooker second round. The pick of the day is obviously Stephen Hendry v Mark Williams.
Yesterday I had a bit of a prediction over the correct score with John Higgins to beat Ronnie O’Sullivan 5-4, I was right, but sadly had no money on it!
I have been mentioning the HD videos that I produced last week quite a lot on my blog, Twitter and Facebook so I thought I would just post one on here. You can see it below but will need about 5meg of download speed.
It’s all a bit of a ploy really as I am thinking of opening up the embed codes for all of our free videos so others can use them on their own websites - what do you think?
The annual Tredegar Constitutional Club Pro-Am Snooker tournament is this year set for Live internet streaming through WebTV channel Cuesport TV.
The event which features two fomer World Champions in Shaun Murphy and Mark Williams will be live every Thursday evening starting on June 25th, there is a one week break on July 23rd with the final being played on August 13th.
In addition to the two players mentioned above the tournament has also attracted other Main Tour players including Ryan Day, Matthew Stevens, Mark Davis, Paul Davies and Daniel Wells. Alongside the star names will be a host of quality amateurs led by last years winner Lee Walker who returns to defend his title.
The overall winner of the event will collect £1750 and the runner-up receives £800, it will act as a great pre-season event for the stars and gives them valuable match practive ahead of the Shanghai Masters in August.
The action starts at 7:30pm UK time and is exclusively available to Cuesport TV subscribers.
A subscription on the channel can be purchased from £2.95 ($4.75) which allows access to the subscription content for a period of 24 hours. Longer subscriptions are available and will work out cheaper.
Ralf Souquet has won the 2009 German Open in Sindelfingen with a 8-4 victory over Britains Imran Majid in the final yesterday evening.
The win further enhances Souquet’s number one ranking position and he is now 550 points clear of Niels Feijen in second. Souquet has been near dominant over the last 7 tournaments and ranking positions are drawn from these seven results on a rolling basis.
It will of course be difficult to maintain this level of form over another twelve months but with three tournament victories in the last 6 event plus a runner-up spot last time out in Italy Souquet is certainly staking his claim for the number one spot for a long period of time.
Another great tournament for the UK players and this result puts Imran Majid up to Number 4 in the European rankings.
The EPBF Eurotour Top 16
Ralf Souquet (Germany) - 3170
Niels Feijen (Holland) - 2620
Nick Van Den Berg (Holland) - 2200
Imran Majid (Great Britain) - 2195
Marcus Chamat (Sweden) - 2135
David Alcaide (Spain) - 2055
Mark Gray (Great Britain) - 1975
Sandor Tot (Serbia) - 1875
Craig Osborne (Great Britain) - 1855
Tony Drago (Malta) - 1845
Mateusz Sniegocki (Poland) - 1845
Dimitri Jungo (Switzerland) - 1800
Christian Reimering (Germany) - 1790
Daryl Peach (Great Britain) - 1775
Thomas Engert (Germany) - 1770
Karl Boyes (Great Britain) - 1735
In the ranking list, which is used to determine places at major International events, Britain has the most players in the top 16 with no less than five. The next event takes place in August, the 2009 Austrian Open.
The eagerly anticipated final tour stop of the 2008 Oracle Super Tour takes place this weekend (22nd/23rd November). The winner of this one will collect a £5000.00 winners cheque.
So far the first three events of the season have gone to three different winners:
Event 1: Jack Whelan
Event 2: Simon Ward
Event 3: Phil Harrison
With the amount of quality on offer on this tour it is difficult to see any player winning more than once. Dangerous players to look out for will be Tom Cousins, Ben Davies, Craig Marsh, Chris Melling, Carl Morris, Ronan McCarthy, Mick Hill and Darren Appleton (to name only a few!)
CueSport TV will be broadcasting the event live all weekend starting at 10:30am each day, to view you will need to be registered and logged in (it is free to do this!)
You can watch some of the previous tour matches by following the links below:
It was always going to be a tough ask for the six individuals from Bahrain that were given wildcard spots in the World Snooker Bahrain Championships.
These siz men have surely used the tournament to gain experience and will have played in front of a good crowd for the first time.
Snooker is of course progressing at a good speed in the middle east but the quality of the players has not yet reached that of other emerging nations such as China and to some extent Thailand. I am sure that Bahrains time will come and should this event remain a fixture on the calendar some of these players may emerge onto the world stage.
Tournaments away from the UK are great news for snooker and the more tournaments from across the globe that become fully-fledged ranking events the better, not only for the players but also for the growth of the sport.
