Snooker (Amsoft Video Game)

Snooker (pronounced , ) is a cue sport played on a rectangular billiards table covered with a green cloth called baize, with six pockets: one at each corner and one in the middle of each long side. First played by British Army officers stationed in India in the second half of the 19th century, the game is played with 22 balls, comprising a white , 15 red balls and six other balls—a yellow, green, brown, blue, pink and black—collectively called ''. Using a snooker cue, the individual players or teams take turns to strike the cue ball to other balls in a predefined sequence, accumulating points for each successful pot and for each committed by the opposing player or team. An individual of snooker is won by the player who has scored the most points, and a snooker ends when a player wins a predetermined number of frames.

In 1875, army officer Neville Chamberlain, stationed in India, devised a set of rules that combined black pool and pyramids. The word ''snooker'' was a derogatory term used to describe inexperienced or military personnel. In the early 20th century, snooker was predominantly played in the United Kingdom, where it was considered a "gentleman's sport" until the early 1960s before growing in popularity as a national pastime and eventually spreading overseas. The standard rules of the game were first established in 1919 when the Billiards Association and Control Club was formed. As a professional sport, snooker is now governed by the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association.

The World Snooker Championship first took place in 1927, and Joe Davis, a key figure and pioneer in the early growth of the sport, won fifteen successive world championships between 1927 and 1946. The "modern era" of snooker began in 1969 after the broadcaster BBC commissioned the television series ''Pot Black'', later airing daily coverage of the World Championship which was first televised in 1978. The most prominent players of the modern era are Ray Reardon (1970s), Steve Davis (1980s) and Stephen Hendry (1990s), each winning at least six world titles. Since 2000, Ronnie O'Sullivan has won the World Championship seven times, most recently in 2022.

Top professional players compete in regular tournaments around the world, earning millions of pounds on the World Snooker Tour—a circuit of international events featuring competitors of many different nationalities. The World Championship, the UK Championship and the Masters together make up the Triple Crown Series and are considered by many players to be the most highly valued titles. The main professional tour is open to both male and female players, and there is a separate women's tour organised by World Women's Snooker. Competitive snooker is also available to players, including seniors and people with disabilities. The popularity of snooker has led to the creation of many variations based on the standard game but with different rules or equipment, including snooker, the "snooker plus" and the more recent Snooker Shoot Out version.

History

Snooker originated in the second half of the 19th century in India during the British Raj. In the 1870s, billiards was popular among British Army officers stationed in Jubbulpore (now Jabalpur), India, and several variations of the game were devised during this time. A similar game, which originated at the Officers' Mess of the 11th Devonshire Regiment in 1875, combined the rules of two pool games: pyramids, played with 15 red balls positioned in a triangle, and black pool, which involved potting designated balls. Snooker was further developed in 1882 when its first set of rules was finalised by British Army officer Neville Chamberlain, who helped devise and popularise the game at Stone House in Ootacamund on a table built by Burroughes & Watts that had been sent to India by sea. At the time, the word ''snooker'' was a slang term used in the British Army to describe new recruits and inexperienced military personnel; Chamberlain used the word to deride the inferior performance of a young fellow officer at the table.

The new game of snooker featured in an 1887 issue of the '' Sporting Life'' newspaper in England, which led to a growth in popularity. Chamberlain was revealed to be the inventor, 63 years after the fact, in a letter to '' The Field'' magazine published on 19 March 1938. Snooker became increasingly popular across the Indian colonies of the British Raj and in the United Kingdom, but it remained a game played mostly by military officers and the gentry. Many gentlemen's clubs with a snooker table would refuse entry to who wished to go in and play snooker; to cater for the growing interest, smaller and more open snooker clubs were formed. The Billiards Association (formed in 1885) and the Billiards Control Club (formed in 1908) merged to form the Billiards Association and Control Club (BA&CC) and a new, standardised set of rules for snooker was first established in 1919. The possibility of a drawn game was abolished by the use of a as a tiebreaker. These early rules are similar to those used in the modern game, although rules for a minimal point penalty were imposed later.

Played in 1926 and 1927, the first World Snooker Championship—then known as the Professional Championship of Snooker—was won by Joe Davis. The Women's Professional Snooker Championship (now the World Women's Snooker Championship) was created in 1934 for top female players. Davis, himself a professional English billiards and snooker player, raised the game from a recreational pastime to a professional sporting activity. He retired from the world championships in 1946, having won all fifteen tournaments held up to that date. Snooker declined in popularity in the era; the 1952 World Snooker Championship was contested by only two players and was replaced by the World Professional Championship, which was also discontinued in 1957. In an effort to boost the game's popularity, Davis introduced a variation known as "snooker plus" in 1959, with the addition of two extra colours, but this version of the game was . A world championship for top amateur players, now known as the IBSF World Snooker Championship, was founded in 1963, and the official world championship was revived on a challenge basis in 1964.

At the end of 1968, the World Snooker Championship reverted to a knockout tournament format, with eight competitors; the tournament concluded in 1969 with John Spencer winning the title. The BBC had first launched its colour television service in July 1967; in 1969, David Attenborough, then the controller of BBC2, commissioned the snooker tournament television series ''Pot Black'' primarily to showcase the potential of the BBC's new colour television service—the green table and balls provided an ideal opportunity to demonstrate the advantages of the new broadcasting technology. The series became a ratings success and was, for a time, the second most popular show on BBC2 after Morecambe and Wise. Due to these developments, the year 1969 is taken to mark the beginning of snooker's modern era. The World Snooker Championship moved in 1977 to the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, where it has been staged ever since, and the 1978 World Snooker Championship was the first to receive daily television coverage. Snooker quickly became a mainstream sport in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and much of the Commonwealth, and has remained consistently popular since the late 1970s, with most of the major tournaments being televised. In 1985, an estimated 18.5 million viewers stayed up until the early hours of the morning to watch the conclusion of the World Championship final between Dennis Taylor and Steve Davis, a record viewership in the UK for any broadcast on BBC Two and for any broadcast after midnight.

As professional snooker grew as a mainstream sport, it became heavily dependent on tobacco advertising. Cigarette brand Embassy sponsored the World Snooker Championship for thirty consecutive years from 1976 to 2005, one of the longest running deals in British sports sponsorship. In the early 2000s, a ban on tobacco advertising led to a reduction in the number of professional tournaments, which decreased from 22 events in 1999 to 15 in 2003. The sport had become more popular in Asia with the emergence of players such as Ding Junhui and Marco Fu, and still received significant television coverage in the UK—the BBC dedicated 400 hours to snooker in 2007, compared to just 14 minutes 40 years earlier. However, the British public's interest in snooker had waned significantly by the late 2000s. Warning that the sport was "lurching into terminal crisis", ''The Guardian'' newspaper predicted in 2010 that snooker would cease to exist as a professional sport within ten years. In the same year, promoter Barry Hearn gained a controlling interest in the World Snooker Tour, pledging to revitalise the "moribund" professional game.

Over the following decade, the number of professional tournaments increased, with 44 events held in the 2019–20 season. Snooker tournaments were adapted to make them more suitable for television audiences, with some tournaments being played over a shortened duration, or the Snooker Shoot Out, which is a timed, one competition. The prize money for professional events increased, with the top players earning several million pounds over the course of their careers. During the pandemic, the professional tour was confined to events played within the United Kingdom and Ireland. In the 2022–23 season, only two professional ranking tournaments were played outside the UK, the European Masters in Fürth and the German Masters in Berlin, while lucrative Chinese events remained off the calendar.

Snooker referees are an integral part of the sport, and some have become personalities in their own right. Len Ganley, John Street and John Williams officiated at seventeen of the first twenty World Snooker finals held at the Crucible Theatre. Since 2000, and female referees have become more prominent in the sport; Dutch referee Jan Verhaas became the first to referee a World Championship final in 2003, while Michaela Tabb became the first woman to do so in 2009. Tabb was the only woman refereeing on the professional tour when she joined it in 2002, but tournaments now routinely feature female referees such as Desislava Bozhilova, Maike Kesseler, and Tatiana Woollaston

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