← Places in Oakhaven

Snooker club

The Baulk Line

Radworth

A 1904 billiard hall: eight full-size snooker tables in two rows under a pitched north-light roof, each lit by its own long canopy light, with high windows down both walls and stools at the far end.

A 1904 north-light billiard hall, built when a room full of tables was a respectable way to spend an evening and lit from above so nobody has to play in their own shadow.

Eight tables under the pitched glass. The lighting is the whole point of the building and the reason it has outlasted most of what was around it.

They are full-size: twelve foot by six, a bed of 356.9 by 177.8 centimetres inside the cushion faces, balls two and one-eighth inches across. The baulk line is twenty-nine inches off the bottom cushion and the D is eleven and a half across, because that is what those things are.

The corner pockets take eighty-six millimetres. A ball is fifty-two and a half. That sixteen and three-quarter millimetres of daylight, split between two sides, is the entire game.

Barry is usually at one of the tables, and Barry plays for money. Pick up a cue and he will offer to make it interesting for a fiver. The other regular is Mervyn, who is tall, quiet and a member of something.

Barry standing between two full-size snooker tables in the Baulk Line with a cue held upright at his side, daylight falling through the north-light roof onto the cloth and high windows down the wall behind him.
Barry, between frames. Ask him about the fiver.

Barry, the snooker hustler. The mechanics are modelled on top players. He plays the same physics and rulebook you do, and that rulebook was checked against an independent oracle in 29,832 cases.

How we made it real

The table on this page is built to the rulebook. We measured every dimension the WPBSA actually specifies, modelled the balls with real sliding, rolling and spin, and put 298 claims about the rules of snooker through an adversarial review that came back with 34 of them wrong. There is a page about all of it.

Read the research →

Elsewhere in Oakhaven