When Zhao Xintong made history by becoming the first Chinese world snooker champion in some style back in May, it seemed the sport may have a new dominant figure. Such was the way the 28-year-old, nicknamed ‘The Cyclone’, blew the rest of the field away at the Crucible, it wasn’t hard to envisage him lifting trophy after trophy in the months and years to follow.
He may still go on to do that but instead of Zhao grabbing snooker by the scruff of its neck and taking over, the first half of the new season has gone in the complete opposite direction – with a new winner emerging almost every week.
Remarkably, the 14 tournaments contested in this 2025-26 campaign have seen 13 different champions crowned – a list that doesn’t even include current world No 1 Judd Trump, the greatest player of all-time Ronnie O’Sullivan, four-time world champion John Higgins or Chinese icon Ding Junhui.
Mark Selby is the lone man to win more than once, claiming the Champion of Champions trophy in his home city of Leicester in November before triumphing at the UK Championship three weeks later for a first triple crown title since 2021.
In fact, not only are we seeing a wide variety of tournament winners but even an unprecedented array of finalists. Trump is the only player to reach three finals (losing them all) so far this year, with Selby, Shaun Murphy and Neil Robertson making two each. That means an incredible 23 different players have appeared in a showpiece this term, of the just 28 spots available.
This level of parity at the top of the game is a marked shift away from how snooker has traditionally functioned, where a small group of top players, sometimes even just one, have dominated.
Steve Davis owned the 1980s, Stephen Hendry the 1990s before the ‘class of 92’ – O’Sullivan, Higgins and Mark Williams – took over heading into the 21st century, with Selby and Robertson ascending in the 2010s and Trump just after them.
Even as recently as two years ago, the 2023-24 season saw just eight different winners from the first 18 events, a far cry from this year’s 13 in 14. So why are snooker’s best so suddenly bunched?
Seven-time world champion Hendry is on record as saying the depth in the game is where the biggest improvement is, meaning even the best players are more to trip up early in tournaments.
“The standard generally is very high, but it’s down the rankings where it shows to me more than anywhere else,” explained the Scot. “When you go from ten to 30 or 40 in the rankings, that’s where it’s gone up a hell of a lot.”
On the flip side, O’Sullivan has previously suggested that the quality of player is declining and that’s why there’s now a wider variety of winners.
“I think it’s easier to win tournaments now than it ever has been to be honest with you,” he said last year. “I won five [in 2023] playing absolute rubbish stuff. It’s not because the standard’s higher. It’s just what happens.”
‘The Rocket has also been critical of young players breaking through, with the ‘class of 92’ still able to win tournaments into their 50s – something that is unprecedented to this point in snooker history.
“You look at them [the young players] and think, ‘I would have to lose an arm and a leg to fall out of the top 50,’” he said in 2020. “That is why we are still hovering around, because of how poor it is down that end. If you look at the younger players coming through, they are not that good really... They are so bad.”
The increase in the number of tournaments over the years also naturally lends itself to more winners emerging, with players unable to peak for all of the 20 or so ranking events in a season, and often choosing to skip some of them. In the 2005-06 campaign for example, there were just six ranking event and even the 2015-16 season had just 10 – a number which has now doubled.
The variation in winners does lead to more stories emerging, with the likes of talented 22-year-old Wu Yize, six-time losing finalist Jack Lisowski and 49-year-old journeyman Alfie Burden all claiming their first ranking event triumph this season.
That can only be good for a sport that is always fighting an uphill battle to get eyeballs on the product in a crowded marketplace. Whether this extreme level of parity is a positive for snooker in the long run is up for debate though.
It’s the quandary that tennis currently faces. Is it better to be like the men’s game, where two dominant players (Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner) transcend the sport, produce iconic matches and are global superstars but render the first ten days of every grand slam a slightly pointless procession or to be like the women’s game, where there are dozens of players who could win any given grand slam, creating a sense of jeopardy and excitement, but there is no superstar who has true, cross-sport recognition in the way someone like Serena Williams did?
The era of Hendry or Davis winning more than 50 per cent of the ranking events in a single season is long gone and even the time of a handful of top players largely splitting the victories between them may also have passed.
Unless a new force emerges to pick up the mantle from past greats, this is a shift that is set to fundamentally change snooker – creating an ocean of possible winners in any given week. It means 2026 is setting up to be a fascinating year on the baize.
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