Snooker Shoot Out: Dates, location, history & more

The Snooker Shoot Out is a unique and fan friendly tournament that is played annually as part of the World Snooker Tour.

Here's everything you need to know about the 2024 tournament which gets underway in Leicester on Wednesday afternoon.

Snooker Shoot Out dates

The 2024 Snooker Shoot Out gets underway on Wednesday 4th December, with the final taking place on Saturday 7th December.

Snooker Shoot Out time

The first-round draw has been made and the 64 opening round matches will get underway at 13:00. 

The first round will be played over four sessions at 13:00 and 19:00 on the opening two days of the tournament. 

Each session will feature 16 matches and 32 players.

Snooker Shoot Out venue

The 2024 tournament will be played at Leicester’s Mattioli Arena, previously known as the Morningside Arena

The event returns to the Leicester setting having previously been held at the arena in 2022 and 2023 and there is a maximum capacity of 3,000 spectators.

The Snooker Shoot Out has previously been held at the Circus Arena in Blackpool, Reading’s Hexagon Theatre and the Marshall Arena in Milton Keynes.

Watford’s Colosseum also had a four-year run of staging the event between 2017 and 2020.

Snooker Shoot Out format

The Snooker Shoot Out sees 128 players battling it out on the baize. It’s a unique event and the format is vastly different to any other event on the World Snooker Tour.

All matches are a one-frame shoot-out and each frame lasts a maximum of 10 minutes. For the first five minutes of the match, players have 15 seconds per shot, but that reduces to 10 seconds for the final five minutes of the frame.

Players must hit a cushion (with any ball) or pot a ball with every shot and all fouls result in ball in hand. Players lag to decide the break and in an event of a tie the blue ball shoot out is used to decide the winner.

The blue ball is placed on its spot and the cue ball can be placed anywhere within the D. Players make alternate attempts, until one potter has sunk the blue more times than their opponent, after taking the same number of shots.

Snooker Shoot Out who is playing?

There is a field of 128 to battle it out for the Shoot Out crown, with Mark Allen, Neil Robertson, Shaun Murphy and Mark Selby amongst the cuemen in action.

How many times has Snooker Shoot Out taken place?

The 2024 edition of the Snooker Shoot Out will be the 15th staging of the quick-fire event and there have been 14 different winners in the 14 runnings of the tournament, including two in 2023.

The unique one-frame format, crowd interaction and random draw element make it tricky to plunder the prize.

The previous winners are:

2011 - Nigel Bond
2012 - Barry Hawkins
2013 - Martin Gould
2014 - Dominic Dale
2015 - Michael White
2016 - Robin Hull
2017 - Anthony McGill
2018 - Michael Georgiou
2019 - Thepchaiya Un-Nooh
2020 - Michael Holt
2021 - Ryan Day
2022 - Hossein Vafaei
2023 - Chris Wakelin
2023 - Mark Allen