Peter Devlin's Numbers Don't Lie: The Uncomfortable Truth About Snooker's Tiered Tour
A Tale of Two Paydays
Imagine winning 17 matches across a professional snooker season. Seventeen. You travel to venues, survive qualifying rounds, grind through best-of frames against other hungry professionals, and do it again and again. Now imagine a colleague — a five-time world champion, granted, but a colleague nonetheless — winning just five matches in ranking events across the same period and walking away with more money for his trouble. That is the scenario Peter Devlin put before the snooker public this week, and it is not an easy one to dismiss.
Devlin, who earned his place on the World Snooker Tour by coming through Q School in 2020 before dropping off the circuit two years later, took to X to voice his frustration with the current tiered structure that now governs much of professional snooker. His post was pointed and, crucially, it came with receipts. "Liam Davies — qualified for six venues. Won 17 matches this season. £38,900. Ronnie [O'Sullivan] — won five matches this season in ranking events. £48,000," he wrote. Then came his conclusion: "Having to win three or four matches to get to the big names, then lose to them, and they earn more points than you is crazy in my book."
How Did We Get Here?
To understand why the tour looks the way it does today, it helps to rewind to 2010, when Barry Hearn arrived and immediately set about flattening the structure. Out went the tiers. In came a largely open draw where a player ranked 128th in the world could find themselves facing Ronnie O'Sullivan in round one. That system had its own flaws — chief among them the logistical headache of accommodating the full professional field at a single venue across a single week — but it did at least mean every match, on paper, was worth the same.
Over time, though, dissatisfaction crept in from a different direction. Critics argued that the flat draw was its own kind of unfair lottery, one that sent the lowest-ranked players straight into a wall of elite opposition with little chance to build momentum or earn meaningful prize money. Gradually, World Snooker Tour began edging back toward a tiered model — the kind of structure that was standard before Hearn's revolution.
Today, several of the sport's biggest events operate with seedings that shield the top players from the qualifying stages. The China Open, for instance, saw the world's top 16 seeded directly into the last 32, joined by 16 qualifiers in a format not unlike the World Championship or UK Championship. The Home Nations Series — the Welsh, Scottish, Northern Ireland and English Opens — allows the top 32 seeds to skip qualifying entirely, leaving those outside that bracket to navigate a two-round preliminary phase in the cubicles before they even reach the venue.
The Maths That Makes Uncomfortable Reading
Devlin's figures crystallise an awkward tension at the heart of this system. Liam Davies, the young Welsh professional and reigning World Under-21 Champion, has been one of the tour's more productive performers in terms of raw match wins this season. Yet the financial return on those 17 victories — hard-fought matches, many of them in qualifying conditions rather than the television lights — amounts to less than what a player of O'Sullivan's stature earns for five ranking event appearances.
Part of this is simply the reality of prize fund distribution: the later rounds carry exponentially higher rewards, and the top seeds enter there by design. It is also worth noting that professionals must win at least one match at a tournament to collect any ranking points at all, regardless of which round they enter. A top-16 player who enters at the last 32 and loses immediately earns nothing from that event in ranking terms — cold comfort, perhaps, but a structural check nonetheless.
And yet the optics of Devlin's comparison are difficult to argue away. A system that can produce such a stark disparity between effort and reward will always invite questions about fairness, particularly for those scratching out a living at the margins of the professional game.
A Debate That Isn't Going Away
What Devlin has done — perhaps unintentionally — is reframe an old argument with a very modern clarity. The debate between flat draws and tiered structures is not new; snooker has been having it, in various forms, for decades. But the specificity of his numbers gives it fresh urgency.
The World Snooker Tour will point to the prestige the tiered system brings to later-round matches, to the television appeal of protecting marquee names for the televised stages, and to the fact that prize funds overall have grown substantially in recent years. Those are legitimate points. But so is this: if a player can win 17 professional matches in a season and earn less than someone who won five, the sport owes its lower-ranked members a proper conversation about what "professional" actually means.
