A Snooker Incident

Sporting Chronicle, Saturday 14 December 1907

A STORY of snooker pool, vouched to be strictly true in substance and detail, comes from an old hand at the game. He knew pool and pyramids before these old-fashioned sidelights of billiards were blended and turned into the modern snooker pool. What is more, he holds very strong opinions that it should only be played as a single-handed game. He says over and over again that as a round game, in which three or more players take part, it was only invented for the express purpose of putting the comparatively poor performer on a level with the expert practitioner. Nor can you get him to mend his ideas on the subject. It was in July last year that he tried to combine a little business with pleasure-making at Yarmouth. His efforts hardly realised the success he had expected. He found on one particular evening when he dropped into “The Standard,” his worst suspicions concerning a round game of snooker pool more than confirmed. Without in the least expecting it he was a party, if not exactly aiding and abetting, to what must rank as something of a record at the game. He knows the ins-and-out of all pool games with the next best man going; he can hole a ball with deadly precision, and yet find time to do a bit of opportunist snookering.

But his talents availed him nothing on this occasion in the face of a perfect avalanche of pot-shots, all of the highest and beat kind, too. He agrees that he met his “snooker” Waterloo in his Yarmouth game. He was playing three much, inferior players to himself. All that he could manage to do in the course of the first bout—there was not a second one, by the way—was to capture one red and a very much-needed black. The only satisfaction be may have had rested with the fact that he was not quite at the bottom of the list. Another of the quartette merely claimed a total of seven points—a red and a pink—the other two did any amount of damage. One of them totalled 68 and the other 62 points. A full total of 145 was thus made, between the four players, out of a possible 147. Not one single miss occurred, nor an in-off or a snooker.

“Well, if 15 reds, 13 blacks, and 2 pinks don’t constitute a record in one game of snooker, then I’m a Yarmouth bloater!” is the way the individual mentioned who went out to slay so unsuccessfully always winds his story up. He says it vary feelingly.