World championship being a "young man's game"
Found it interesting during the worlds that there was talk about the tournament being more of a young man's game now, particularly Zhao and Wu both winning before their 30th birthdays (well before, in Wu's case).
So I decided to take a look and see how true that was, at least in terms of making the world final. Obviously you could go deeper with this - I didn't check quarter or semi final runs, and obviously other events also matter a lot, particularly the UK and the Masters. But I just fancied having a surface glance at least, and thought it was pretty interesting.
Since 1969 - the beginning of the modern era when the world's permanently settled on its current knockout format - I had a look at the ages of every winner and losing finalist, and found:
- Only four men have won a world championship past the age of 40 since that year: Ray Reardon (5 times), John Spencer, Ronnie O'Sullivan (twice) and Mark Williams.
- We've also had a dozen losing finalists over that age in that time, with special mention to poor John Higgins, who's the only multiple time loser at that age from 2017-19.
- 2018 was the only final since then where both finalists were in their 40s.
With 58 editions of the world's taking place since then, when putting it all together, 21 out of 58 finals have featured at least one finalist over the age of 40 - around 36 percent of the time.
What's very interesting though, is that of these 21 finalists, 13 of them were the same four people: the class of 92, and Ray Reardon.
So it seems that in terms of at least making the final, nevermind winning it, the odds are very much against you once your 40th birthday hits - but that it's also not *too* uncommon for 40+ sometimes to make deep runs, albeit with a handful of the greatest players ever skewing the numbers. Appreciate this is something we already knew, but interested to see if anyone has any thoughts.