Snookered

If this all sounds feasible, or even fun, then I’m afraid my description has been misleading.

The description in question is by Sally Rooney, in an essay in the New York Review of Books, and it’s a description of playing snooker, aimed at an American audience familiar with the exponentially easier game of pool.

A standard pool table has a total playing area of about twenty-seven feet; a snooker table’s surface is about seventy-two square feet. What’s more, the pockets on a snooker table are actually smaller—about three and a half inches wide.

You can attempt the math, but honestly, the only way to understood how painfully difficult snooker is is to try it. Best of luck…

This piece is the first Sally Rooney I’ve read and she’s a very good describer. Here she is on the contrast between snooker and darts, two pub games whose televising “could hardly be more different”:

If a darts tournament has the atmosphere of a chaotic lager-fueled party, a snooker tournament has something more like the at…