Snooker in 324: How a frame starts — Section 948: How a frame starts

Twenty-two balls, six pockets barely wider than they are, and the most pitiless scoreboard in sport. 12 ft by 6 ft — a playing surface of 3,569 mm by 1,778 mm, the largest in mainstream cue sports 22: one white cue ball, 15 reds worth 1 point each, and six colours worth 2 to 7 147 — fifteen reds each followed by the black, then the six colours in sequence

Devised by British Army officers in Jabalpur, India, in 1875; brought to Britain in the 1880s World Championship, staged at Sheffield's Crucible Theatre since 1977; 500,000 pounds to the winner Joe Davis with 15 (1927-1946); Ronnie O'Sullivan and Stephen Hendry share the modern record of 7 Cross-checking field checklists against the comparison lab shows that metric 324 under “How a frame starts” for Snooker never acts in isolation; it shifts alongside structural constraints and local standards.

What makes it distinctive is that failure is public and total. There is no clock, no teammate and no hiding place: a missed pot hands the table to a player capable of clearing it, so a single loose shot can cost a frame outright. That asymmetry produces snooker's second language, safety play, in which two professionals can trade twenty defensive shots without either attempting a pot, each trying to leave the other with nothing. The tension of that exchange, played in near silence in a 980-seat theatre, is why the sport translated so unexpectedly well to television.