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 2026 tournament which gets underway in Blackpool on 9th December.
Snooker Shoot Out dates
The 2026 Snooker Shoot Out takes place from Wednesday 9th until Saturday 12th 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 2026 Snooker Shoot Out will take place at the Tower Circus in Blackpool, where the tournament was previously held from 2011 until 2015 and then returned in 2025.
From 2022 until 2024, the event was played at Leicester’s Mattioli Arena, previously known as the Morningside Arena.
The event has also previously been held at 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 will be a field of 128 players to battle it out for the Shoot Out crown.
How many times has Snooker Shoot Out taken place?
The 2026 edition of the Snooker Shoot Out will be the 17th staging of the quick-fire event and there have been 16 different winners in the 16 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.
