If you’ve never watched, or even heard of snooker, I am sure that you are not alone. Snooker is a cousin of the more popular (at least in the U.S.) pool, a different type of billiards. It’s an interesting game, whose pace and aura most resemble golf— there is a quiet reverence about the arena when shots are being made, players dress up, and everyone plays on a green surface. Snooker seen on TV is an incredible juxtaposition from billiards played in bars, lounges, and clubs across the world, and interesting sciences pervade the game.
If ever you watch a snooker match on TV or in-person, you may notice what looks like a digital clock attached to the underside of the table. This display is not a timer, or scoreboard, it is actually a thermometer readout. Many, if not all professional snooker tables are heated from below, the felt essentially sitting on a giant skillet. These heating elements moderate the moisture of the playing surface. Humidity in the felt surface of a table has a few different effects, stemming from an increase in rolling resistance and sliding coefficient of friction, as well as a decrease in the coefficient of restitution with the rails of the table.
Much like putting in golf, a snooker table plays slower when it damped. Although humidity effects are most likely indistinguishable for the average snooker player, for pros, the speed of a table must be constant to ensure fairness. This “slower” play-surface is the result of increased rolling resistance between the ball and the felt when the ball is rolling, as well as an increase in the coefficient of sliding friction between the ball and the felt when the ball is skimming. Similarly, these two movement resistances decelerate a ball out of spin quicker, altering strategies and shots. Finally, the humidity may cause the bumpers or rails of a table to return less energy to a ball upon contact, thus lowering its kinetic energy, a result of a decrease in coefficient of restitution as compared to dry bumpers or rails.
Moving beyond the play surface though, billiards has an interesting materials science history as well. Ball manufacturers used to create products made entirely of coated ivory, a clear problem that required a solution. The hunt for an alternative material for billiards balls actually led to one of the first ever “materials” patent in the United States, a patent for Celluloid, a plastic-like polymer with some interesting behaviors…..
These celluloid pool balls would actually spontaneously combust from time to time, setting other balls, and snooker tables on fire. Scientists and enthusiasts plowed through this setback and developed and utilized newer polymers that had better mechanical properties, and also did not explode when struck with a cue. Most modern snooker balls are made from solid Phenol Formaldehyde Resin (PHR), a material also used to waterproof plywood. It’s a surprising but sensible material choice, as it offers durability, scratch resistance, and overall ease of manufacturing. The use of PHR, a material with mainly industrial applications, is another example of quirky science and pseudo-science that goes into snooker. Everything from humidity to ball properties to cue feel affect the professional game.
P.S. If you needed another reason to watch snooker, it has its very own Happy Gilmore in the form of Ronnie “The Rocket” O’Sullivan (albeit a bit less wild):