The World Snooker tour has published the Average Shot Times of the 131 players competing on the tour in 2017/18 and it reveals some enlightening facts. Firstly, to no-one's surprise, the Rocket Ronnie O'Sullivan is the fastest player on the tour, with an AST of 16 seconds. The slowest player on tour is Lee Walker - with an average shot time of 34 seconds. There are 11 players on the tour with an AST of 30 seconds or more.

These are the players who need to just think about their AST and adjust slightly to creep back within the 30 seconds. The second joint fastest players on tour are Thepchaiya Un-Nooh and Jack Lisowski.

The player from Thailand and England's Lisowski both have an AST of 17 seconds. Interestingly, players who you would think would be outside of the 30 seconds shot time are actually within them.

For example, Sunny Akani, the talented Thai player with his exaggerated but very effective pre-shot routine that suits him is just inside the 30 seconds. However, surprisingly, when it comes to the top 10, there are no Chinese players within the top 10 and Ding is just outside with a 19 second shot time - just under 20 seconds in fact - one second off 20.

Iran's Soheil Vahedi is inside the top 10 with over 19 seconds. Earlier on this week, World Snooker chairman Barry Hearn said there would be a three-monthly publish of offenders who consistently "breach" the 30 second rule - even though there is no actual shot clock on the tour as such.

Mixed Views from Snooker Fans

Fans on social media have had mixed feelings about this new "feature". One on a Facebook snooker fan group, wrote: "If it rids the sport of gamesmanship then I am all for it. But if a player purposely is wasting time by slowing the game down in order to impact the form of his opponent, surely the referee already has the powers to intervene and warn the player?

Another fan commented that it probably wouldn't affect the majority of the tour anyway and another wrote: "Will make players play worse as they'll have to take a shot they didn't intend to play as they'll be worried about the clock."

Average Tour Shot Time for 2017/18

Next snooker season will be interesting to see whether the 11 players at the "slower" end of the 30 seconds and those outside the 30 seconds shot time can adjust and put themselves just inside the shot time clock.

After calculation of the Average Shot time of the entire 131 players on the tour for 2017/18, the average is well inside the 30 seconds shot clock - at 23 seconds.

This means the tour as a whole is not slow by any means, and, indeed, as the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Chairman Jason Ferguson tweeted earlier on when the news broke about players' shot times being monitored, historically, it has been around 25 seconds for the whole tour.

For the full 131 lowdown, go to World Snooker Live Scores on the website and then click on AST to see the full SP. Watch as Mark Williams makes a daring promise if he wins the whole Betfred World Snooker Championship for a possible third time.