indiana wrote:

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Re that vastly reduced qualifying, ( more ) flippin heckers.

You need at least challenger points to make any ATP rankings progress ( apart from pretty small points from reaching the very late stages of 25Ks and 25K+Hs until the end of 2019 only ) and it seems it will be much more difficult for many to get into challengers.

I haven't though yet looked into whatever hoops you have to go through to get onto challenger entry lists beyond ATP rankings re say other rankings.

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I hadn't appreciated that the challenger main draws were up to 48. But still ...

As things stand we will just have 12 players ( one of whom, Alex, has retired ) carrying forward any ATP challenger+ points plus 5 more carrying forward just small 25K/25K+H late stage points ( and 25K/25K+H points won't be counted at all after 2019 - I'm not sure if such points won in 2019 will be carried forward into 2020 or just lost as ATP points at 2019 year end just as other futures points were lost as ATP counters at 2018 year end? )

17 British ATP ranked players in total so my A4 page where I manually list and record ranked players and their additions and subtraction for 2 week periods at a time has become half a page for the first 2 weeks of 2019 as opposed to approximately the top 30 Brits last year.

I will watch but have no intention of manually keeping up the ITF ranking moves so it already feels a kind of break from a big group of players. But hopefully it will be a bit less in sight but far from out of mind.