#snooker

[persephoneisqueeer]

Oh to be rich and carefree.

[eudaemon-m]

snooker 🔴

[dozydawn]

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

[scavengedluxury]

Billiard game, 1942. From the Budapest Municipal Photography Company archive.

[fuzzyghost]

[museify]

[eightiesfan]

1986

[afrotumble]

[sunshineandlyrics]

🎱 2017 / 2024.

[krumpkin]

Another AI image I did ( Berti the Ball ) 😁

[dozydawn]

[higherentity]

[scavengedluxury]

Playing pool, 1938. From the Budapest Municipal Photography Company archive.

[earhartsease]

we're a little bit obsessed (again) with snooker at the moment, and we realise not everyone here will be familiar with this quirky game so

picture a pool table, but the pockets are a bit smaller and the table is 12' long instead of 7'

you have:

10 red balls (worth 1)

6 "colour" balls - yellow, green, brown, blue, pink, black - worth respectively 2-7

at start of play the reds are in a little triangle at one end of the table, with the black below them, the pink just above them, the blue in the centre, and the yellow, brown, and green in a line across the top part (where the cue ball also starts out)

the game is this:

using the white cue ball, you pot a red first, then any colour, then a red and so on until the reds are used up and you've potted any colour after the last red (up to this point, the colours go back on their appointed places on the table)

then you pot the colours in their value order as seen above

simple, right? except what makes snooker snooker is that a part of the game strategy is to make the other player's life difficult by hiding their next available ball from them behind other balls on the table (or hiding the cue ball behind another ball) - this is called "being snookered" and it's so cool watching people skilled at creating snookers, and people skilled at "escaping" them too, sometimes bouncing off multiple side cushions, or putting spin on the cue ball to make it move in a curve

anyway we've always been fascinated by this game and how sort of understated it generally is, and how friendly the players are with each other even at world competition level - and we sometimes wonder how the game evolved to this point over time - how did exactly this combination of balls and rules come about?

if you're interested to see it in action you could do worse than looking up Judd Trump on youtube - he's a Bristol boy, child snooker prodigy, and he's a monster on the table (and very unlucky with his surname)

[museify]