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Mark Selby begins his new Eurosport-Yahoo! blog by revealing he was 'gutted' to miss out on the Bahrain Championship last week.

I'm gutted because it would have been nice to go out to Bahrain for the first ranking event out there and experience a different place.

It is a shame that it was in the same week as the Premier League event at Haywards Heath.

But it was only fair that, having signed a contract saying I would take part every week, I honour that by appearing in Sussex. I had to show loyalty.

Normally a ranking event would take priority.

I can't imagine that many players on the tour were happy with the scheduling. With the likes of me, Ronnie O'Sullivan, John Higgins and Ding Junhui missing for a ranking event, the others wouldn't have been happy either - and of course we wanted to play in Bahrain.

The snooker calendar is picking up a bit at the moment. There are a lot more events on the calendar than there have been for a long while and there is a lot of interest.

John Higgins has started up the World Series of Snooker this year in countries like Germany, Poland and Russia, as well as Jersey.

It is difficult to get something like this off the ground straight away and there is a lot of learning to do, but it has been good and the attendances have stood up too.

I'm not taking anything away from the UK because snooker is very popular here.

I'm just not sure why World Snooker are putting ranking events on elsewhere but not in Europe. There are plenty of lower-level tournaments in Europe.

I'm not sure if the way the calendar is administered will change, despite the formation of the players' union.

It is better that we have got more of a say because if it was me myself that went to World Snooker not happy about something, they'd probably just brush me off.

It is good that we have got more clout by putting our names together.

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