Snooker is a cue sport played on a rectangular billiards table covered with a green cloth called baize, with six pockets, one at each corner and one in the middle of each long side. First played by British Army officers stationed in India in the second half of the 19th century, the game is played with twenty-two balls, comprising a white cue ball, fifteen red balls, and six other balls—a yellow, green, brown, blue, pink, and black—collectively called the colours. Using a cue stick, the individual players or teams take turns to strike the cue ball to pot other balls in a predefined sequence, accumulating points for each successful pot and for each time the opposing player or team commits a foul. An individual frame of snooker is won by the player who has scored the most points. A snooker match ends when a player reaches a predetermined number of frames.
Pankaj Arjan Advani is an Indian billiards and professional snooker player. He is a 25-time International Billiards and Snooker Federation (IBSF) world champion. He has won 17 billiards world titles, the IBSF World Billiards Championship on 16 occasions and the World Team Billiards Championship once. In snooker, he won the IBSF World Snooker Championship three times, IBSF World six-red championship twice and the IBSF World Team Cup and IBSF World Team Championship one time each. He has the record number of IBSF world championships. He became a snooker professional in 2012/2013.
Wayne Cooper is an English former professional snooker player. He first qualified for the main tour in 2001, and was a professional until Summer 2002. Cooper regained his place on the 2008/09 pro tour by finishing top of the EASB Pro Ticket Tour rankings. He won three matches during that season: in the Northern Ireland Trophy, in the Welsh Open and in the World Snooker Championship.
James Cahill is an English professional snooker player from Blackpool. Cahill first turned professional in 2013, aged 17, after winning the European Under 21 Championships, but returned to amateur status in 2017.
Ahmed Saif is a former Qatari professional snooker player. He was the first professional player from Qatar. Saif was a professional between 2013 and 2015, reaching a highest ranking of 113 in the world.
Lucky Vatnani is an Indian former professional snooker player. He is from Hyderabad, India, but was based in Sheffield, England during his snooker career.
The United States National Snooker Championship is an annual snooker competition played in the United States and is the highest ranking amateur event in the country
The 2015–16 snooker season was a series of snooker tournaments played between 7 May 2015 and 2 May 2016.
The 2017–18 snooker season was a series of professional snooker tournaments played between 4 May 2017 and 7 May 2018. The season began with the pro–am Vienna Snooker Open in May 2017 and ended with the 2018 World Snooker Championship in April the following year. Ronnie O'Sullivan earned a joint-record five ranking titles in the season. He joined Stephen Hendry (1990/1991), Ding Junhui (2013/2014), and Mark Selby (2016/2017) in winning five ranking titles in the same season.
The 2018–19 snooker season was a series of professional snooker tournaments played between 10 May 2018 and 23 June 2019. The season was made up of ranking tournaments, non-ranking tournaments and variant tournaments. In total, 54 events were competed in the 2018–19 season, beginning with the pro–am 2018 Vienna Open, and ending with the 2019 World Snooker Championship.
Joe O'Connor is an English professional snooker player from Leicester. He was the 2018 English Amateur Champion and a ranking event finalist at the 2022 Scottish Open.
Fan Zhengyi is a Chinese professional snooker player. He won the IBSF World Under-21 Snooker Championship in 2017, and turned professional in 2018. He had a breakthrough season in 2021–22 when he reached his first ranking quarter-final at the 2022 German Masters and then won his first ranking title at the 2022 European Masters, defeating then six-time world champion Ronnie O'Sullivan 10–9 in the final. He became the fifth Chinese player to win a ranking title, following Ding Junhui, Liang Wenbo, Yan Bingtao, and Zhao Xintong.
David Lilley is an English professional snooker player. He turned professional in 2019, after 30 years as an amateur.
The World Seniors Tour is the snooker tour for senior players. Its events are open to male and female players who are aged 40 or older and ranked outside the top 64 in the snooker world rankings. Founded in 2017 by Snooker Legends, the tour has been run since 2018 by World Seniors Snooker, a subsidiary company of the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association. Winners of the UK Seniors Championship and World Seniors Championship earn places in the World Snooker Championship qualifying rounds.
Ben Mertens is a Belgian professional snooker player. He won the World Open Under-16 Snooker Championships in 2018.
Chang Bingyu is a Chinese former professional snooker player who, in 2023, received a two-year ban from professional competition after committing match-fixing offences.
The 2021–22 snooker season was a series of snooker tournaments played from July 2021 to May 2022, including the professional World Snooker Tour but also featuring events for female, senior, and Q School players. The season saw a record five players claim their first professional ranking titles: David Gilbert, Zhao Xintong, Hossein Vafaei, Fan Zhengyi, and Robert Milkins. Nutcharut Wongharuthai won her first World Women's Snooker Championship, becoming the only player besides Reanne Evans and Ng On-yee to win the women's world title in 19 years. Ronnie O'Sullivan won the World Snooker Championship, equalling Stephen Hendry's modern era record of seven world titles and becoming the oldest world champion in snooker history at the age of 46 years and 148 days. Lee Walker won his first World Seniors Championship.
Dean Young is a Scottish professional snooker player.
The 2022 World Seniors Championship was a snooker tournament that took place from 4 to 8 May 2022 at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England. The event was the 13th edition of the World Seniors Championship, first held in 1991, and was organised by the World Seniors Tour, which is open to players over 40 who are not in the top 64 of the world rankings. Qualifying rounds were held from 14 to 19 December 2021 and 8 to 13 February 2022 at the Crucible Sports and Social Club in Reading. Players who had qualified for that season's cancelled Seniors Masters and Seniors Irish Masters events—Bob Chaperon, Wayne Cooper, Gary Filtness, Michael Judge, Rory McLeod, Darren Morgan, and Patrick Wallace—were invited to compete at the World Seniors Championship instead. Referees for the event were Roy Gannon, Leo Scullion, Michaela Tabb, and Andy Yates.
Wayne Brown is an English former professional snooker player having played on the World Snooker Tour between 1994 and 2005. He later won the English Seniors national title in 2019.
United States 