All you ever wanted to know about SNOOKER !

Tweet

In the old days of what was called the 'British Raj' .. British officers stationed in India combined the games of Pyramids (a betting game using 15 red balls) with Life Pool (a rather complicated game which had as many reds as there were gentlemen playing it) .. the officer responsible for the new game of Snookers Pool is supposedly Col. Sir Neville Chamberlain. When those gentlemen officers game home to England on leave they 'introduced' the new game of Snookers Pool into their Gentlemens Clubs .. and at that time they were only using four coloured balls, yellow, green, brown and blue, along with the reds. (pink and black added in 1906). On 11th December 1900 snooker was officially recognised as a sport and was soon to become more popular than the traditional English billiards game .. for quite a number of years there were two sets of slightly differing rules as both the Billiard Association and the Billiards Control Club had their own versions .. so in June 1919 the two bodies amalgamated. Originally the game was very much a game to 'snooker' your opponent and make it as hard as possible for him to play a ball ... then in the 1920's the legendary Joe Davis started playing the game, the 1st Professional Snooker game was held in 1927, entry costs were a whopping 10 Guineas (£10.50) with the first prize only being £6 10s (£6.50) .. Joe Davis made a top break of just 57 but pocketed (nice pun) the winnings and took the trophy. The rest is history Snooker balls which were once made from Ivory are now made from Crystallite. The Earth is smoother than a snooker ball if you made them both to the same scale In 1980 Canadian Bill Werbrniuk became the first snooker player to split his pants during a championship game ... and no undies either !! Willie Thorne once made a 147 break at his Leicester club with both legs in plaster after a go-kart accident 1984/85 Fred Davis arrived at Warringtons, Spectrum Arena, for the qualifiers to find that a chimpanzee from a local circus had wandered into the snooker area .. he calmly asked if that was his opponent .. on being assured it wasn't he famously replied "Well, there are so many new professionals these days, I dont know half of them." Cliff Thorburn was the first player to get a 147 break on TV .. it started with a fluke shot and took a nerve racking 15mins 10secs to complete ... During the final of the 1997 Benson & Hedges Masters snooker's first streaker - Lianne Crofts entered the play area and stopped play for a short while Heheeh .. and you thought it was just a boring old game of pushing a few coloured balls around .. !