🎱Rules & Play

A maximum is the highest break available in normal play. There are fifteen reds on the table, each worth one point, and after every red the striker may nominate a colour. Taking the black, worth seven, after all fifteen reds gives 15 times 8, or 120 points. When the reds are gone, the six colours must be potted in order for another 27 points: yellow 2, green 3, brown 4, blue 5, pink 6, black 7. That totals 147. Breaks above 147 are possible only when a free ball is awarded after a foul while reds remain, which is how Jamie Burnett made a 148 in 2004.

The tournament moved to the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield in 1977, at the suggestion of promoter Mike Watterson, whose wife had seen a play there. It was a practical choice for a sport with a small audience, but the venue turned out to suit television perfectly. It seats fewer than a thousand people, places the front row within a few feet of the table, and for the first week splits the arena so two matches run side by side. That intimacy makes it intensely uncomfortable to play in and compelling to watch, and it has become inseparable from the event's identity despite regular speculation about a move to a bigger or better-paying venue.

You are snookered when another ball blocks your path, so that no part of any ball you are allowed to hit can be struck in a direct straight line from the cue ball. Because jump shots are illegal in snooker, the only escape is to bounce the cue ball off one or more cushions and still make first contact with a legal ball. Fail, and you concede at least four points, and the opponent can hand the same shot straight back. Laying snookers is how players recover large deficits: each failed escape adds points and usually another chance to lay the snooker again.

It depends entirely on the round. Early rounds of ranking events are often best of seven and can finish in under ninety minutes. The World Championship starts at best of nineteen and escalates to a best-of-35 final played over four sessions across two days, typically finishing late on a Monday night. A single frame usually takes fifteen to twenty-five minutes, but there is no shot clock in standard competition, and tactical exchanges can extend one enormously. The record is a frame between Fergal O'Brien and David Gilbert in 2017 that lasted 123 minutes 41 seconds on its own.

The two candidates are Ronnie O'Sullivan and Stephen Hendry, who share the modern record of seven world titles. O'Sullivan leads on every other measure: more than 40 ranking titles to Hendry's 36, 23 Triple Crown titles to 18, more than 1,200 career centuries to 775, and 15 maximum breaks to 11, achieved across a career spanning four decades. Joe Davis's fifteen world titles between 1927 and 1946 are numerically unmatched, but he invented the championship and faced a professional field of a few dozen. Most modern assessments place O'Sullivan first, Hendry second and Davis in a category of his own.

They are three separate games played on different tables. Snooker uses a twelve-foot table, twenty-two balls and rounded pocket openings barely wider than a ball, and requires alternating reds and colours in a fixed sequence. Pool, in its American forms, uses a smaller table, larger balls, wider cut pockets and fewer balls, and rewards shot-making over long sequences. English billiards is played with just three balls on a snooker table and scores through cannons, pots and in-offs, and it was the dominant professional cue sport in Britain until snooker overtook it in the 1930s. Snooker demands the finest cue ball control of the three because of the table size and the pocket templates.