Some of snooker’s most recognisable players have signed up for a new 900 event taking place during UK Championship qualifying this month.
As the top 16 in the world head straight to the Barbican in York, where the main stages start on November 29, those players are able to play in other tournaments during the qualifiers.
This has allowed John Higgins, Neil Robertson, Mark Selby, Mark Williams, Barry Hawkins, Xiao Guodong and Gary Wilson to all sign up for an event dubbed The Crucible Cup in Reading.
The event is to be played on November 24-25 and boasts a prize fund exceeding £70,000.
It will be an eight-player knockout tournament played in the 15-minute, 20-second shot clock format of Snooker 900 frames, with each match a best-of-11 until the final when it extends to best-of-13.
The quarter-finals will be played over two sessions on Monday afternoon and evening, with the semi-finals on Tuesday afternoon and the final on Tuesday night.
The eighth player in the event is still to be confirmed.
The event will be shown on Pluto TV, as will a tournament the week before from 17-19 November, also featuring some legendary names.
Jimmy White, Ken Doherty, Stuart Bingham, Reanne Evans and Robert Milkins are all involved as they play for the weekly title in a round robin format.
As those dates are not during the UK Championship qualifiers, instead during the invitational Riyadh Season Snooker Championship, those professional players are able to compete.
Pluto Snooker 900 launched as a dedicated snooker channel last month, led by Jason Francis and backed by Ronnie O’Sullivan.
Snooker 900 creator Francis said ahead of the channel’s launch: ‘When I came up with Snooker 900, the dream was to create a format that could bring snooker to a new generation while still thrilling the purists.
‘To see it now become the focus of the first dedicated snooker channel on Pluto TV – and to have Ronnie O’Sullivan backing it – is beyond anything I imagined.’
The Rocket suggested he would play on the channel in future, but is not involved in the upcoming event.
‘Obviously I’m going to be involved quite a lot and just want to see it grow,’ O’Sullivan told Metro. ‘I just want to see where it can go. And who knows? I might even make a few appearances.
‘I still and I’m always going to love the game. I’m always going to be like Jimmy White and Steve Davis who love to play, but obviously, you know, you can only play against people that you feel like you can compete against. Another five, six, seven years, I might still love playing and there’ll be a channel there where I can still play and put on events.
‘That’s if people still want to see me play, they might think, you know what, we’ve had enough of him, you know? But it’s nice. It’s a snooker channel and it will be for all types of snooker and it’s for the people that love snooker.’