Tour Championship

The Tour Championship is a professional snooker tournament first held in 2019. The event features the twelve (previously eight) highest ranked players on the one-year ranking list, which reflects prize money won at ranking events since the beginning of the season. The Tour Championship is the third and final tournament in the Players Series, following the World Grand Prix and the Players Championship. The event features a prize fund of £380,000, with the winner receiving £150,000. The tournament is broadcast by ITV Sport in the United Kingdom and Eurosport across the rest of Europe. The reigning champion is Shaun Murphy, who won the 2023 Tour Championship with a 10–7 win over Kyren Wilson in the final. History The tournament was announced in April 2018, and was scheduled to be played for the first time in March 2019. The event was organised as the third and final event to make up the Coral Cup (now Players Series), tournaments sponsored by bookmakers Coral which use the rankings exclusively from the season prior. The tournaments in the Cup featured declining player entries, with the first event, the World Grand Prix having 32 participants, and the Players Championship 16. The Tour Championship is the tournament with the lowest number of entries of any tournament on the calendar, with just eight participants. The tournament is broadcast by ITV4 in the United Kingdom, Eurosport across Europe. The event also airs on Sky Sport in New Zealand, NowTV in Hong Kong, and Superstars Online in China. The first edition of the tournament was played in 2019 at Venue Cymru in Llandudno, Wales after the Players Championship was moved from Llandudno to Preston in 2019. The 2019 Tour Championship was the first event since the 2010 UK Championship (and other than the World Snooker Championship) in which every match was played over multiple , with two in the quarter-finals and semi-finals, and three sessions in the final. The best-of-25-frames final, held on 23 and 24 March, was the first non-World Championship match of this length or longer since the 1992 UK Championship final. The 2019 final was played between Ronnie O'Sullivan and Neil Robertson, who had also met in the Players Championship final two weeks prior. O'Sullivan lead 5-3 after the first session and later won the match and the tournament 13–11. The win also gave O'Sullivan the Coral Cup for the 2018–19 season.