Snooker

It's a daft game, and one I can frivolously watch now that studies have been put on hold until the next academic year. Yes, two men with sticks hit balls into other balls on a big green table, in the hopes that they will go into pockets and sometimes be replaced by the referee. It's also a fascinating game which plainly demonstrates the sheer futility of our puny human existences, and the importance of bow ties. You stick those coloured balls in the pockets, and then they reappear over and over, until they sudden disappear as if they were never there at all. Plinkety plonk.

The geometry of snooker is wonderful, and it is one of the most fundamentally Newtonian of sports. Force and counter-force, impulses and contacts, spin and drag, and the relentless threat of chaos theory combine to make something special. It used to be better before the players and referee were walking billboards, though, and it was less of a relentless quest for money. Perhaps I'm just being oversensitive to an imagined hollowing out of civilization by capital though? Back to snooker. Is there a current practitioner of the banana shot, I wonder?

One of the interesting things about snooker is that each frame has a finite number of points available within it, and if you get far enough ahead, then it becomes mathematically impossible for your opponent to win unless he forces you to foul and thus get awarded penalty points. This means there are two radically different extremes in games of snooker. There are spells of rapid sequential point scoring, which aren't all that interesting if they're not interrupted from time to time, and there are frames of intense tactical play, which can be indefinitely protracted and totally break or shift the path of destiny. Also, since only one contestant can play at a time, there is a deep character study in watching the passive one of the two deal with losing a frame without ever getting to the table. It's difficult to lose through no fault of your own, without ever having a chance to take part. While wearing a bow tie.

Snooker has suffered through numerous periods of intense domination by single players in the past, which have often deterred us here at the QM, but maybe it's worth another chance. It's wonderfully silly and profound at its best, when it's not a foregone conclusion who will win. This final of the (sponsor omitted) Masters is certainly shaping up to be a nail-bitingly close game. Let's see what happens.

Snooker truly is remarkably relaxing to watch. Let's all be snooker loopy.

O.