Snooker Legends
A couple of guys from the Mt. Rushmore of snooker, for very different reasons.
Snooker, the Basics
Before we get to the subjects of the fact, I figured it would make sense to cover the rules of snooker for those who don’t know. The game is similar to normal 8/9-ball pool, where you are trying to sink the object balls by striking the cue ball. The difference comes in the scoring. The table is a bit bigger than a normal pool table, and is set up like this:
A snooker match is split into an odd number of frames (say 7, for reference). A player wins the match by winning the majority of the frames (4, in the example), and you win a frame by scoring more points than your opponent in that one. To begin a frame, the designated “starting” player places the cue ball in D-Zone and breaks. In snooker, you have to pot a red ball, then colored ball (black, pink, blue, brown, green, yellow), then red ball, then colored ball, etc. Once all the red balls are sunk, the colored balls have to be sunk in ascending order of points.
Once a red ball is potted, it stays off the table, but colored balls come back out and are replaced in their initial spot as long as there are any red balls remaining on the table. Red balls are worth 1 point, and the colored balls are worth 2–7 points, marked by the diagram above. So, for example, if you broke and sunk a red ball and then the black ball, you would have scored 8 points, and would need to sink a red ball next. If you failed to do so, then it would be the other player’s turn.
You go back and forth like this until all the balls are sunk, and whichever player has accumulated more points has won the frame. The maximum points in a frame (without fouls) is 147, with 15 red balls (1*15=15), 15 follow-on potted black balls (15*7=105), and then each of the colored balls at the end (2+3+4+5+6+7 = 27). So 15+105+27 = 147.
Because you can score a ton of points consecutively, often players will concede a frame if their opponent has accumulated more points than there are feasibly left on the table. In a no-foul game, 75 points is enough to lock the game up, but because the potential for fouls exists (and correspondingly points awarded to the other team), the standard for a concession-worthy score is 100. If you score 100 points in one trip to the table, it’s called a century break, and is a mark of an absolutely world-class player. A maximum break is all 147 points in one trip to the table, and has only happened 131 times in professional competitions in history.
Bill Werbeniuk
Big Billy B was a Canadian snooker and pool player known for his hulking stature. His father was a notorious petty criminal in Canada, and Bill’s childhood was riddled with “armed robberies, drug peddling, and every larceny in the language” committed by his dad. Bill grew up playing snooker for money, both in his dad’s shady tavern (called Pop’s Billiards) and while traveling around the country hustling fools.
One of Bill’s claims to fame was his physique. Most snooker players are slight, but Bill certainly was not. At his peak, he weighed in around 280 pounds. One of his most memorable moments was during the World Team Tournament. Bill reached across the table to attempt a tricky shot, but his girth was getting in the way. Finally, physics couldn’t take it any more, and the seat of his pants split straight in half, revealing his hairy backside to the onlooking crowd.
Bill was pretty good at snooker, and climbed all the way to 8th in the world in the early 1980s. Unfortunately, he had a bit of a treacherous health issue throughout his career, as he had developed a benign tremor in his shooting arm. Given the precision required in snooker, this was a tough break for Big Billy B. He figured out an innovative, DIY solution to calming the tremor though — alcohol. Lots of it.
Bill was a legendary drinker. Before every match, his pregame ritual included 6–8 pints of lager. A normal match would include 1 beer per frame, and in total, it was estimated he drank 40–50 pints of lager a day. Given that the alcohol was his DIY tremor solution (which allowed him to do his job, playing snooker), he audaciously, and successfully, claimed the pre-game pints as a tax deductible expense in the UK.
He has a long list of all-time accomplishments — in the 1970s, in his mid-20s, he broke his personal record by drinking a verified 76 cans of lager during a snooker match against John Spencer in Australia. In 1990, when he was 43, he downed 28 pints of lager and 16 whiskies during an 11 frame match (around 3 hours) against Nigel Bond. He lost this match unfortunately, and apparently Bond found him at the bar an hour later, most of the way through an entire bottle of scotch that was “drowning his sorrows.” Perhaps his best story comes from a match against Scotsman Eddie Sinclair. As it was recounted by Stephen Hendry, arguably the GOAT snooker player, it was “the game of the century.” It was a non-competition match, and the all-day snooker match had a bit of a twist — it was part snooker, part drinking competition. Basically, it was a marathon to see which of the two players could be the last one standing playing snooker after they went drink for drink all day. The final score — Bill 43 pints, Eddie 42. Best of all, Bill saw Eddie passed out on his back after getting part way through his 43rd pint, looked at Stephen Hendry, and said “I’m away to the bar for a proper drink.”
Ronnie O’Sullivan
The other day, I was trolling Reddit and I came across this ridiculous snooker shot.
The shot is absurd, and I went to the comments to get a little more context about all this goodness I just saw. Interestingly, instead of marveling at the shot by Murphy itself, most of the comments focused on something else. For example:
“Doing this vs O’Sullivan is some fucking brass balls shit. Amazing.”
“O’Sullivan is ready to go Super Saiyan on his ass”
“[O’Sullivan] could do that shot one-handed blindfolded missing a leg if he was in the mood to do it.”
Needless to say, I needed to figure out who this Ronnie “The Rocket” O’Sullivan character was. According to another Reddit comment, he is “the best to ever pick up a cue. Nobody comes close.” Let’s investigate.
O’Sullivan was a snooker prodigy growing up. At age 10, he completed his first century break. At age 13, he was the British under-16 champion. He turned pro when he was sixteen, and won 74 of his first 76 professional matches. One stretch of these was 38 straight victories, the current record for a winning streak in international snooker. He won the 1993 UK Championship as a 17 year-old, a record for the youngest ever Triple Crown title that still stands today.
He earned his nickname as “The Rocket” because of his rapid, almost reckless playing style. Normally, players will study the table and carefully plot their shots, especially given how important it is to move your cue ball appropriately after sinking red balls in snooker. Ronnie just zips through his shots.
In Triple Crown events (similar to grand slams in tennis or majors in golf), O’Sullivan has won 28 titles (of the 72 that have happened since he turned pro). This puts him in joint second place of all time behind the aforementioned Stephen Hendry, and O’Sullivan is still going.
O’Sullivan’s reputation as the best player of all-time hinges on the claim that, at his best, no one, including Hendry, could even touch him. The issue is that his interest in the game sometimes wanes, and he doesn’t necessarily lock-in to his “final form” all the time. But when does… whoa.
His “mercurial temperament” is best evidenced by a couple of iconic examples. He has repeatedly taken long sabbaticals from the game and threatened to retire entirely. In one match, he had scored 140 straight points, with only one shot left to sink the black ball and lock in another legendary maximum break. O’Sullivan asked the match umpire how much the bonus money prize was for a maximum break at this event. The judge told him it was around $15,000, and O’Sullivan was insulted by that small sum of money. So, he purposely missed. His opponent, with only 7 points left on the board to O’Sullivan’s 140 point total, conceded, and O’Sullivan left. Essentially, this was the equivalent of having thrown 8 and 2/3 innings of no-hit, no walk baseball, and with the final hitter down 0–2 in the count, you intentionally bean him, tell the umpire to “fuck off,” and ask to be replaced by the closer.
In the 1996 World Championship, he was playing Alain Robidoux, and randomly chose to hit a shot left-handed. Robidoux was infuriated by this display of arrogance and showmanship, and lodged a formal complaint after the game to the disciplinary board. The board asked O’Sullivan to show for a disciplinary hearing and his defense was that he was as good with his left hand as anyone else was with their right, so he should be allowed to switch back and forth if he wanted. The board called his bluff. Unless he could demonstrate a competent level of play left-handed in an official match, he’d be reprimanded. So, O’Sullivan faced off against former world championship runner-up Rex Williams in a three fame game, shooting left-handed, and… Ronnie won 3–0.
The best examples of how good his Super Saiyan mode could be draw from his all-time highlights— most professional snooker players would be psyched if they had one maximum break in their careers. O’Sullivan has 13, almost 10% of all that have ever been recorded. For comparison, Nolan Ryan leads MLB history with 7 no-hitters — this is less than 3% of those that have happened in the modern era.
Not only does O’Sullivan have 13 of these, but he also has the three fastest ever. His best maximum break took only 5 minutes and 20 seconds. Total. He sunk 37 balls in that time, averaging less than 9 seconds per shot, including the time of the balls traveling on the table. Nutty. Check it out, it’s mesmerizing.
Needless to say, Ronnie is a legend. Because we can’t catch Big Billy B in action (RIP), we owe it to these guys to see Ronnie in action before his (next) retirement.
Bonus: here’s Ronnie’s all-time highlight video for reference:
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