The most pressing question of the new snooker season: What will happen to the Class of 92?

These are all important questions, but most of them come up at the beginning of each season. But this year, there’s already a question about what will happen to members of the Class of ’92.

That is, how it performs Ronnie O’Sullivan, John Huggins And Mark Williams. Or more precisely, the question is whether any of them will be eliminated from the top 16 in the world rankings.

Because none of them performed well last season, especially in terms of scoring tournaments. O’Sullivan has won two tournaments, but both were invitational, so he did not receive ranking points for these successes. He amassed a total of 113,500 points last season, with most of his points collected in his two scoring Triple Crown tournaments, the World Championship and UK Championship, both of which he reached the quarterfinals. Aside from that, he could appear in another quarter-final of the Welsh Open, and his other results are arguably very mediocre.

For comparison, the ranking points of 113,500 points are slightly more than it takes to reach the World Championship semi-finals and the UK final (100,000 points respectively). Who performed last season is important because the official world rankings are calculated based on the results of two years.

With this, Raketta is ranked 18th in the expected preliminary standings for the end of the season. In Hungary, if he does not get things together, he could fall out of the top 16. This had never happened to him before when he started competing. This year, during the lost season of 2012/2013, he fell out of the top 16, but it did not matter, because on the one hand he did not play in tournaments, and on the other hand, as the current world champion, he could have been the second seed. Then, of course, he won the 2013 world title and returned to racing in one form or another.

However, it is Higgins, not O’Sullivan, who has the real problem among the three. The four-time Scottish world champion produced a very poor season last year. He was saved from disaster by reaching the top eight at the World Championships, thus rising to 26th in the preliminary rankings (he had been outside the top 50 before). With 94,000 points, he is within striking distance, meaning that if he wins a race, he will almost certainly remain in the top 16.

The only problem with that is that he hasn’t won a race in the last two seasons. The tournament’s point-scoring champion played 31 times in four points-scoring finals two seasons ago, but last year he was a long way from such results. However, if his best performance of the current season is, say, the final of a medium-sized tournament, in which he will collect, say, 35,000 points, his membership in the top 16 for next season will not be guaranteed.

Williams is in the best position among the three, as it occupies 13th place in the preliminary standings with 130,500 points. This includes the 23,000 points earned in the season-opening Championship League Final. Another run or two might be enough for him, but if he produces a season like Higgins did last year, he could be in trouble.

So it’s worth watching upcoming competitions from that perspective as well. There will be plenty of opportunities to score points, as we currently see 17 races on the calendar this year, and that number could rise. Just as that number rose from 16 to 17 that day, when World Snooker announced it for March 11-17. The World Open will be held between, which means there will be four Chinese Grand Prix in the season, three of which will be points.