London: Ronnie O’Sullivan will begin his defence of the Dafabet World Championship he won for the fifth time last year with “professional snooker players feeling like they have a full-time job again”, according to 1997 world champion Ken Doherty. Boasting total prize money of £1.214m and a record £300,000 cheque for the winner, the 17-day tournament will be televised in over 70 countries, with World Snooker chief Barry Hearn having made great strides in arresting the sport’s decline by tapping huge markets in China and India, as well as assorted other countries not previously renowned for their snooker loopiness.

In less than four years at the helm, Hearn has extended the world snooker calender to 50 weeks a year, packed it with tournaments and almost trebled available prize money from 3m to 8.5m. “Barry’s been a complete inspiration since he took over the game,” says Doherty, the world No. 28 and part-time BBC pundit, who qualified for the televised stages of this year’s tournament earlier this week having missed out last year. “Previously, we had only six tournaments in a season and now we have 20 or more. It’s great to be spoilt for choice with regard to the snooker calender.”

The Hearn revolution has not always been popular. O’Sullivan, unquestionably the sport’s biggest box-office star, threatened to retire after winning the 2012 world title because he believed players were being blackmailed into exhausting themselves with a schedule he described as “onerous”. Instead, he took a sabbatical before returning to reclaim his crown last May and is expected to swat aside Finland’s Robin Hull in this year’s first round.

Now cherry-picking whichever competitions he wishes to enter, O’Sullivan begins this one playing arguably the best snooker of his career, having won this season’s Paul Hunter Classic, Champion of Champions, Welsh Open and The Masters. His victory at Alexandra Palace was his fifth success at the famous invitational tournament, where he made headlines by trouncing world No.10 Ricky Walden 6-0 in a quarter-final that lasted less than an hour.

“Ronnie is the man to beat,” says Doherty, who will begin his Crucible campaign against world No.6 Stuart Bingham. “He is the man to look up to, because nobody can touch him when he’s on form. But this sport has a funny way of throwing up some very strange results, so no player is totally infallible.”

Not content with redrafting snooker’s schedule, Hearn has also revamped the format of many of the sport’s ranking events, although the World Championship remains one of three exceptions, for the time being. His changes mean the game’s top-16 players are no longer guaranteed a place in the latter stages of eight different ranking tournaments and are instead forced to muddy their spats in the early rounds with over 112 lesser ranked fellow professionals.

In a sport once ludicrously protective of its elite, the changes have been poorly received by many players who are adversely affected by it financially. Whereas previously a member of the top-16 could make a decent living in losing prize money without actually potting a ball, now he must win matches to make money.

But as the risk of embarrassment at the hands of unknown giant-killers has increased, so too has the amount of prize-money for those who avoid it. “For the new breed of young players, it gives them a better opportunity to get their faces on the TV,” adds Doherty. “Also, at the top end, the players get to pick and choose which tournaments they enter, which means the calender won’t be so arduous for them.”

At 44, Doherty will be the most senior cue-man competing at the Crucible Theatre and the Irishman laughs as he describes himself as “the oldest potter in town”. The laughter stops when he says “nothing less than victory” on the final day in Sheffield will leave him satisfied this year. “Apart from Ronnie ... and me, of course, I would keep an eye on the regular winners on the circuit,” he says, when asked for his idea of a decent bet for the title.

“Ding Junhui has won five ranking tournaments this year and I think the stage is set for him to make a big push. You’ve also got Neil Robertson and Mark Selby in the mix as well ... but you never know. The world championship always throws up a few surprises and I saw Kyren Wilson beat Graeme Dott in the qualifiers. Graeme was playing very well and lost, so Kyren may be one to watch.

“I think it’s going to be a very interesting tournament and from my own point of view I can’t wait. I’m really looking forward to the challenge and walking out in front of that fantastic crowd.”