Snooker and carom: two other branches.

Snooker's invention: the official story

The WPBSA, snooker's governing body, says the game was invented in 1875 by British Army officers in Jubbulpore (now Jabalpur), India, when Lieutenant Neville Chamberlain (not the later Prime Minister) added colored balls to a game called black pool. The name comes from "snookers," slang for first-year cadets at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, which Chamberlain used to tease a fellow officer about his play.

Chamberlain later served on the staff of General Sir Frederick Roberts, spending summers at Ootacamund ("Ooty"), where the Ooty Club posted the rules; the WPBSA says the club is still said to have an original table from the period. Wikipedia dates Chamberlain's finalized rules to 1882 at Ooty.

Why historians are cautious

Chamberlain's authorship only surfaced in 1938, more than sixty years later, in a letter to The Field, and writer Compton Mackenzie publicized it in 1939. The account rests on recollections written decades after the fact, mostly by his supporters. Snooker USA calls the origin a mystery and points out inconsistencies in the timeline, and Britannica says only that snooker arose, presumably in India, in the 1870s.

From India to England

English champion John Roberts Jr. met Chamberlain in India in 1885 and brought the game back to England. The Billiards Association (formed 1885) and the Billiards Control Club (1908) later merged, and in 1919 the combined body standardized snooker's rules, introducing the re-spotted black. The first amateur championship was held during World War I.

The professional game

• 1927: Joe Davis organized and won the first professional world championship in Birmingham.
• 1930s: snooker overtook billiards as the UK's most popular cue sport.
• 1950: the BBC's first outside broadcast of snooker.
• 1957 to 1969: the world championship lapsed for lack of interest, returned as challenge matches in 1964, and went back to a knockout in 1969.
• 1968: the WPBSA was founded.
• 1969: Pot Black first aired on BBC2, conceived by controller David Attenborough to show off color television; Ray Reardon won the first event, and it ran until 1986.
• 1977: the world championship moved to the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, where it has been held every year since.
• 1985: Dennis Taylor beat Steve Davis 18 to 17 on the final black, watched by about 18.5 million BBC2 viewers.
• 2010 onward: under Barry Hearn, elected WPBSA chairman in 2010, prize money grew from £3.5 million in 2009/10 to close to £20 million by 2024.

Carom: straight rail and balkline

Straight rail, a three-ball game with no pockets, is the forerunner of all carom games. Top players learned to "nurse" the balls along a rail for huge runs; in 1879 Jacob Schaefer Sr. scored 690 points in a single inning. Rules to curb nursing followed. Balklines, lines drawn on the cloth that limit how many points you can score in one area, were proposed in 1875 and adopted for tournaments in 1883. The names give the line distance and limit: 18.2 means lines 18 inches from each rail with two points allowed per space. Even so, in 1912 William Spinks ran 1,010 points at 18.2 balkline.

Three-cushion

Three-cushion evolved from one-cushion billiards in the 1870s; its exact origin is unclear, though Wayman Crow McCreery of St. Louis popularized it and is credited by at least one publication with inventing it. The first three-cushion tournament was held in St. Louis in January 1878 and won by Leon Magnus. Balkline faded in the 1930s, and Billiards Digest says three-cushion replaced it as the championship carom game in 1928. The Union Mondiale de Billard was founded in Madrid in 1959 to govern carom worldwide. Sweden's Torbjörn Blomdahl won seven world titles between 1987 and 2019, and Belgium's Raymond Ceulemans holds the record with 21.