The Australian Goldfields Open is a professional ranking snooker tournament. Australia had previously hosted the 1971 and 1975 World Snooker Championships, as well as several other high profile snooker tournaments and in 1979 the Australian Masters was established. There was an attempt to turn the event into a ranking tournament in 1989 but the sponsorship fell through so it was staged in Hong Kong instead, as the Hong Kong Open, which incidentally became the first ranking tournament to be staged in Asia. The Hong Kong event was discontinued after just one year, but returned to Australia in 1994 as the Australian Open. The tournament reverted to being called the Australian Masters for the following season, but was dropped from the calendar after the 1995 event. In 2011 the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association resurrected the event under the Australian Goldfields Open name and added it to the 2011/2012 calendar. The defending champion is Barry Hawkins.
Read more about Australian Goldfields Open: Winners
Famous quotes containing the words australian and/or open:
“The Australian mind, I can state with authority, is easily boggled.”
—Charles Osborne (b. 1927)
“Wild Bill was indulging in his favorite pastime of a friendly game of cards in the old No. 10 saloon. For the second time in his career, he was sitting with his back to an open door. Jack McCall walked in, shot him through the back of the head, and rushed from the place, only to be captured shortly afterward. Wild Bill’s dead hand held aces and eights, and from that time on this has been known in the West as “the dead man’s hand.””
—State of South Dakota, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)