... and breathe! With Wuhan Open in the books we have time to catch our collective breaths before the Northern Ireland Open kicks off on Monday the 22nd of October. We hope to see many new players of Fantasy Snooker participate and build a team in that tournament. Note that a few top players (Mark Selby, John Higgins, Un-Nooh, Ali Carter and Luca Brecel) have not entered the tournament due to the Macau 5 incident.

We also apologise for the difficulties to build or change the team the last couple of weeks which were mainly due to the tight schedule of the snooker tour (we hope you enjoyed the snooker at least 😄). We hope to find a reasonable solution to this issue in the future as it will most certainly happen again (already for the Champion of Champions there will be a short transfer window after the International Championship as is visually indicated in the calendar).

New ranking leader

The new leader of the 2023 season is MWSnookergreats led by orkneymark with 1404 points! He cannot be complacent though as he's followed closely by realandrea sitting at 1333 points. Currently 12 players are above 1000 points and within striking distance. No lead is safe, particularly with 3 big tournaments coming up soon (International Championship, Champion of Champions and the UK Championship).

We are planning to make the International Championship and Champion of Champions tier B tournaments.

The top 10 after the Wuhan Open. MWSnookergreats (orkneymark) are leading the way.

Short summary of the short transfer windows

Unfortunately many players found it difficult to build or change their teams before the the English Open and Wuhan Open mainly due to the short transfer windows. It was particularly difficult for Europeans for the Wuhan Open as it started late at night (or very early in the morning) thus not even giving early risers a chance before it kicked off. We are considering various options to tackle the issue, one might be to extend the trading window for as much as 24 hours into the tournament to give players longer time to change their team. Of course, the drawback with this solution is that one will get more information about how the tournament is going at this point, but at least everyone will know about them so in that sense it's fair.

If you have any suggestions, don't hesitate to let us know.

There were also unfortunately some technical difficulties in between the tournaments leading to a delay in the re-opening of the transfer windows. This was tracked down to be caused by cached data, thus the system thought the tournaments were not completed and new points and values were not updated. As painful as it was going through the process of something not working, at least it was insightful, we have learned a ton and adjusted our code. This first proper season is bound to bring some challenges but we are determined to identify the issues, rectify them and move onwards with a better product.

Latest updates

The recent updates has greatly been based around accomodating for the short transfer window and related issues, but we still have managed to find time for other important things.

Here's a rough list of the latest updates:

• more helpful text explaining when transfer windows open and closes
• calendars has visual indications for tournaments which have short transfer windows
• properly determine round numbers matching snooker.org. This fixed some issues in real-time point calculation
• fixed insight feature not showing trades for the upcoming tournament
• custom login page. Gives us the possibility to include more helpful information on the page and it fits more with the Fantasy Snooker design
• support logging in with multiple providers (e.g. Google and Github) with the same e-mail
• more defensive code if underlying API (snooker.org API) is down. Team page should no longer break
• updated almost all dependencies in the project
• implemented better observability enabling us to catch and be notified of several errors
• fixed logic around caching "past" tournament results where not all matches were completed

Short transfer windows are visually indicated by a red hour glass on the calendar page.

Custom login page designed in the spirit of Fantasy Snooker's core design.

Looking forward

Although we experienced some turbulence the last few weeks I do believe Fantasy Snooker is close to entering a fairly stable state. Technical updates and performance improvements is very much desired, but that doesn't necessarily give that much value to the end-user (you guys/gals!). I would really like to implement public team and user profile pages. This would make the game massively more interactive between players (keep an eye out on your closest rival!).

Other than that a ton of ideas, but that's our shortlist.

As always, feel free to interact with us on Twitter/X, Discord, Facebook or other social media.