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Comment by osrec | Hacker News Reader

A more difficult variant is snooker, played on a 12ft x 6ft table with tighter pockets and smaller balls.

It can be frustrating to play well, but when you "get it", it really is a beautiful game to play, and a real mental workout.

For anyone interested, Ronnie O'Sullivan is the best ever player, and his YouTube highlights are worth a watch: https://youtu.be/PE8XPHnCNpg - makes the game look incredibly easy, but I assure you, it's not!

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Wow! Never saw Snooker before. It was awesome to slowly realize what he was trying to do, then watch him sink shot after shot after shot… the really impressive thing to me was the placement of the cue ball. He wasn’t just shooting balls into pockets. He was doing in a way that perfectly set up the next thing he wanted to do.

Cue ball control is the key. Anyone can pot balls when the cue ball is in the right place, but keeping that cue ball under control is what most people struggle with.

I agree that Ronnie O'Sullivan is great; I especially love watching his record fastest Maximum break [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/9D2rFMPN9js

Ronnie might be the best but I’ve always enjoyed Mark Williams style of play more. The whole of the “Class of 92” are beyond special though.

Class of 92 are indeed very special. Williams is still doing amazingly well - just got to the final of the Saudi masters, and nearly clinched the deciding frame. Not bad for someone nearly 50 years old!

Wow this felt magical to watch, thank you for sharing it.

TLDR: the article posted is not really about billiards at all. But I guess HN culture has degenerated to such an extent that the top comment is a response to the title, not the content. Not that your comment is incorrect, I've played snooker a few times on a full size table but also wasted countless hours of a UK childhood watching it on TV. It's just... not really in any way relevant to what the article is actually about.

Have you read the full article? It is using billiards as a metaphor for an intrinsic understanding of physics.

Billiards doesn't have pockets. Pool ("pocket billiards") has pockets.

You can see a billiard table in the background of the photo, behind the pool table.

English billiards does in fact have pockets, carom billiards does not.

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