The Fascination of Snooker

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Many years ago I wrote an essay entitled ‘The Fascination of Chess’. Now I am writing a similar essay about snooker. The trigger for this essay is the World Snooker Championship, which I am watching on TV. The semi-finals finished yesterday – Saturday April 30^th 2022 – and the final begins today. Ronnie O’Sullivan will be playing Judd Trump.

The standard of play in this world championship has been very high. Three seasoned old pros – O’Sullivan, John Higgins and Mark Williams - have been playing near or at their absolute best. In a semi-final that will live long in the memory, Judd Trump, a mere stripling at 32, vanquished Williams 17-16. Williams was trailing 1-7, and later 5-12, but, incredibly, took a 16-15 lead, before Trump won the final two frames and the match. Definitely one of the greatest comebacks in the history of the world championship, it reminds me of two world finals. In 1973, Ray Reardon, 0-7 down after the first session, found his form to defeat Eddie Charlton 38-32, and, in 1985, Dennis Taylor, after trailing Steve Davis 0-8, fought back to win 18-17.

Like chess, snooker is both simple and complex. The rules are straightforward but, to play either game well, great skill is required. One difference is that snooker is a sport, demanding hand-eye coordination, whereas chess is entirely non-physical and therefore a game. One similarity is the need to think ahead. A chess grandmaster will, routinely, see 10 or more moves ahead; a snooker professional will calculate the optimum position of the white ball for the next and following shots.

Another difference is the fact that I am a piss-poor snooker player but half-decent at chess. If I had wanted to, I could have been an FM (FIDE Master). My current blitz rating is 1500 and I have been as high as 1720. This compares - not all that unfavourably - with Magnus Carlsen’s blitz rating of 2832. By contrast, my highest break in a game of snooker is around 30 – which compares dismally with Ronnie O’Sullivan’s 15 maximum breaks and 1166 century breaks.

As a youth, I was rarely able to play snooker on a full-size table. There is no doubt I would have been a better player if I’d had the opportunity to practise more. I possess good natural hand-eye coordination (witness my skill at table tennis, tennis and squash), but finding a full-size snooker table was always difficult. Instead, I played snooker, billiards and bar billiards on small-size tables. A few years ago I discovered nine-ball pool, a simple game compared to snooker, and enjoyed beery sessions with my friends Toby and Nick in the incomparable old Cave pool hall (at 102 Nam Ky Khoi Nghia in Ho Chi Minh City).

Snooker is, I think, superior to billiards (especially carom, the boring pocketless variety that the Vietnamese enjoy) or pool. It is a game – sorry, sport – fit for the gods.

Basically, snooker is all about building big breaks. After each pot, the cue ball should end up perfectly placed for the next pot. To achieve this, one has to control the cue ball, making it stop stone dead or run on or spin to one side. I was a good potter who seldom thought beyond the next shot. My positional play with the cue ball was abysmal. The finest snooker players are expert at controlling the cue ball, thereby obviating the need for long spectacular – and speculative - pots. They combine good potting with great positional play. It goes without saying, too, that they are blessed with good temperaments and massive powers of concentration.

As with all sports, the history of snooker revolves around its champions. Snooker was first televised on BBC in 1950, but it wasn’t until the invention of colour TV that snooker became a popular spectator sport. The big breakthrough occurred in 1969 with BBC’s 'Pot Black', featuring the greatest players of the day including Ray Reardon, John Spencer, John Pulman and Fred Davis. Nowadays, thanks to Youtube, it is possible to relive the big snooker tournaments of the past.

I am an armchair sports fanatic and love to watch football, cricket, boxing, tennis and snooker. I have my favourite snooker players and my favourite breaks. My all-time favourite player is Ronnie O’Sullivan, closely followed by Alex Higgins. I like them because they are colourful and charismatic – exciting to watch and interesting personalities away from the snooker table.

O’Sullivan is prodigiously gifted, a snooker phenomenon. Six times world champion, and bidding for his seventh title tomorrow, he is nicknamed ‘The Rocket’ because of the speed at which he pots the balls. His record 15 maximum breaks (all of them on Youtube) include the fastest maximum ever seen – lasting a mere 5 minutes and 15 seconds. He is a natural right-hander but can also play left-handed. There is no finer sight in snooker than O’Sullivan in full flow. Moreover, he is articulate and forthright, occasionally spiky – a complex and intelligent man with many interests outside of snooker.

Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins won the world snooker championship at his first attempt in 1972 and again in 1982. He was a flamboyant character who drank alcohol and smoked while playing and had an unusual cueing technique. Unlike most snooker payers, who are deadpan and composed, Higgins was a mass of tics and twitches, visibly anxious, wearing his heart on his sleeve. He was the bad boy of snooker, often in the headlines for unsavoury reasons - arguing, head-butting an official, peeing into a potted plant during a tournament, threatening to have an opponent killed. He was an erratic genius - usually no match for his contemporary, the robotic Steve Davis - but on his day as good as anybody. The crowd loved him for his eccentric brilliance, and he gloried in the epithet ‘the People’s Champion’. I remember him for two breaks on his way to victory in the 1982 world snooker championship.

The first was in the semi-final against Jimmy White. White was leading 15-13 with three frames left and had 59 points on the board against Higgins’ 0. Now Higgins compiled a spectacular break of 69 to win the frame. He was scarcely in position until the colours, but his long potting was sublime. The highlight was potting the blue into the green pocket, screwing the cue-ball onto the side cushion to bring it back towards the black/pink area with extreme left-hand side-spin – an unbelievable shot. He went a little too far for ideal position on his next red, but the match-saving break was still alive, and Higgins made no mistake. This break encapsulates the unorthodox brilliance of Higgins. Another player – an O’Sullivan or a Steve Davis – would have been in position throughout, and the break would have looked simple, but Higgins, typically, gave himself mountains to climb and, on this occasion, climbed them all.

The other break I remember Higgins for was more orthodox. It was the clinching break of the 1982 world snooker final against Ray Reardon. Higgins made no mistakes as he clinically compiled 135 to become world champion for the second time. That was the only world final that Reardon, a consummate match player, ever lost.

Only three players from outside the British Isles have won the world snooker championship – Horace Lindrum of Australia in 1952, Cliff Thorburn of Canada in 1980 and Neil Robertson of Australia in 2010. All the other champions have been either English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish or Northern Irish. This, however, is probably about to change because of snooker’s popularity in China.

It is estimated that 50 million Chinese play snooker. 1500 snooker clubs have been built in Shanghai alone, with an additional 1200 in Beijing. Many young Chinese prospects are coming onto the professional circuit (four of them qualified for this year’s world championship), so it is only a matter of time before the world snooker champion is Chinese.

No matter who the snooker champion is – English or Chinese or Eskimo – I will be watching top-class snooker until the day I die. Like chess, it is a never-ending source of pleasure for me. To watch one of O’Sullivan’s 147’s or to relive Higgins’ 1982 masterpiece against White is armchair sporting theatre at its best.

Postscript Monday May 2nd 2022:

Tonight Ronnie O'Sullivan cemented his claim to be called the GOAT by beating Judd Trump 18-13 in the final of the World Championship. O'Sullivan has now equalled Stephen Hendry's record of 7 world titles.

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