Sport _ Snooker

Snooker is an extensively popular sport which owns the second largest television audience in UK. It is generally adopted that snooker originated in the latter half of the 19th century. Colonel Sir Neville Chamberlain, a British Army officer, devises the sport in India during 1874 or 1875. And then Joe Davies moved the game from a pastime activity into a more professional field. A major leap occurred in 1969, snooker has become a mainstream sport as a result of the development of color televisions.

Although the rule of snooker is complicated, there is still have a lot of audience in UK. It was interesting phenomenon that many famous snooker players are British, such as Stephen Hendry, John Higgins, Mark Williams, Ronnie O'Sullivan. People call them “four emperors of snooker”. They also have a lot of fans in China, such as me.
The participation of some new sponsors has led to the popularity of the sport in the Far East and China in recent years, with emerging more established players such as Marco Fu and Ding Junhui. They are ranking at 8th and 13th of worldwide separately during 2009 to 2010.

In recent years, more and more snooker players go to China to participate snooker tournaments, such as China Open, Shanghai Masters. These two tournaments currently take place at the Beijing University Students Gymnasium and the Shanghai Grand Stage separately. An increasing number of young audiences like the sport and try to join it. For example, I once spent a whole month’s time to learn snooker; however, snooker is really not the good sport for girls, because the snooker table is too big to hit the ball for girls. Therefore, I have changed snooker to “British Pool”. The size of pool table is perfect for girls.