Snooker’s governing body has announced it will launch a new short form of the game, provisionally called ‘Super6s’, in a bid to shake-up and modernise the sport.
UK newspaper The Guardian reports that the Snooker World Championship, which gets underway in Sheffield, England later this month, is also to see its venue move as part of the plan to attract more and younger audiences back to the sport. Manchester and China are potential new hosts.
The ‘Super6s’ format will have six-minute matches, and will reduce the number of red balls from 15 to 6 to speed up play.
Sir Rodney Walker, the chairman of World Snooker, said, “As an observer of snooker you cannot churn out the same diet year after year.
“Look at what Twenty20 has done for cricket. It brought in a whole new audience so what we have in mind we think would be appealing to a younger audience. We’ll ask [television viewers] to tell us what they think of [the new format] via [digital television services].”
