Johnnyt said:
There will never be a good National Tour for the pros that has dues, membership fees, and run by a non-pro.
This may or may not be true. Today's meany deadlocks in tour formation are a function of the fact that it takes a little blind faith to get the ball rolling for any tour to succeed.
Every proprietor of a pool tour wants to be able to promise the participation of a specific field of players to any possible venue sponsor because it makes it easier for the proprietor to sell the event and easier for the venue sponsor to market it ...... But what pool proprietor is in a position to make such a promise unless some top players have made commitments to them? ..... And what top player will make a commitment to a proprietor that has no planned events? .......... so nothing ever gets done because the proprietors and the players can only move forward if they have some blnd faith in each other.
Unless a proprietor can guarantee a lot of income to players prior to receiving any commitments (see KT and the IPT) or the players will make binding commitments while a tour is still forming (as many did in the case of CJ Wiley's PCA tour in the late 1990's), it's always tough to get a new tour started.
And who can blame the players for their distrust of proprietors when they aren't even always getting paid the prize money due them. Incidents like the 2006 IPT Reno event and the 2008 World Ten Ball Championship erode the spirit of many pro players ...... still, the truth remains that they'll have to have a renaissance of faith in the pool investor to jumpstart their sport. As a policy, "show me the money" won't, in my opinion, work for pool players.
Johnnyt said:
There are way too many players that call themselves pros that are not. Maybe there are 300 real pro in the US, tops. What's needed is a National Tour that has qualifiers for the best 200 players to compete on the big tour. The rest can compete on the amateur level of the same tour. If some players can't cut the big tour they are sent down to the amateur tour and the replaced with top player on the amateur tour. There should also be qualifiers to get on the amateur tour. KT had part of it right, he just had purses too high (probably 50% too high at least) and entry fees in qualifiers were way too high. If he had handled it a little differently who knows how big it could have grown?
In a perfect world, only the most elite would play on the biggest stages. Unfortunately, such an arrangement would, for now, be incongruous with one of pool's greatest realities of the moment ---- little added money. Shane Van Boening managed to take home $16,000 from the low-entry-fee Derby City nine ball event because well over 400 people played in it and most of them bought back into the field at some point.
But this is the real world, and you can't have an elite-only tour in which the players can make a solid income without either a very high entry fee (which would hurt player earning prospects) or a lot of added money. But, in the eyes of most proprietors and would-be proprietors, you can't have a lot of added money without the promise of a lot of revenue, so until pool can demonstrate its ability to deliver the revenue, proprietors may be slow to invest heavily in the sport,
Pool's business model needs work, as most of us already understand.