Milton Keynes? Really?

That's the latest rumour that's been thrown about in terms of the Matchplay, seemingly in the venue where they're currently holding some worthless snooker event. Whatever they need to get it on I guess, if they're working on a no crowd scenario then maybe it mitigates it, maybe they need to push it back and the existing venue isn't available. Who knows. Hopefully by the end of the week we know a lot more as to what the hell is going on with the schedule.

First group of the German Superleague is done, Clemens obv won by a mile, if I was picking one of the other cardholders to get through I'd have gone with Bunse over Siepmann, a little bit of a turnup for the books I think, not yet thrown the stats into the master computer but I don't see a massive rush to do so. Münch and Unterbuchner also got through, if it's not Bunse then these are probably the players with the greatest pedigree, Stein was a bit unlucky to miss out on a playoff spot (three players from 3rd-5th were tied and split by, I assume, leg difference), Gotthardt also had a decent showing. Kniest seemed a fair bit out of his depth, but if he was one of the guys that got called up late then it's perhaps understandable.

One thing I think they should consider doing next year is to bar tour card holders from entering this, and have them simply get a bye through to the finals stages (if they want it - it'd be understandable if Hopp or Clemens gave it a miss as neither should need the help to get into the worlds), which should keep the initial league stages a lot more competitive. Probably need to change the finals format and increase the number of players to 12 - if they were to do that this season, you'd have the five guys that had a card plus seven that didn't, do something like two pools of six on a Saturday, have the winners go straight through to the semis and 2nd/3rd play off in a quarter finals. I think that'd work quite nicely. Another thing they could try for the league as a whole is to not keep the same lineup every week - if you've got 16 players, only have the top 12 keep their spot for a previous week, and the other four spots are filled out by a qualifier the previous evening. Or from a parallel 2. Liga that runs in an alternate week or something like that. There's lots of things that you could try.