Six Disciplines Under One Name: Why 'Billiards' Cannot Be Analysed as a Single Block

On the screen is a frame of snooker. On the floor, four metres away, is a 9-ball table. In the corner of the room, a table covered in darker green cloth, with bigger balls and shallower pockets — Chinese billiards. Three matches running at the same time inside a small club in Liverpool, on a November evening. Nobody in the room gives them three different names. They are all 'billiards'. I sat there for two hours. What bothered me was not any single shot, but the way we name things. In more than thirty years of watching this industry, I have heard the phrase 'billiards is growing' or 'billiards is declining' countless times. Not once has anyone asked back: which billiards? One sport family, six disciplines 'Billiards' is not a sport. It is a sport family. At least six disciplines live under that roof: snooker, American 9-ball, American 8-ball, Chinese billiards (Heyball), three-cushion carom, and Russian pyramid. They share exactly one thing: the cue, the ball and the table. Everything else differs. The rule system differs. The core technique differs. The scoring differs. The way players are developed differs. And most importantly — the commercial structure differs. Snooker is the game of long frames, where a player can score a hundred points in a single visit and a match can last hours. 9-ball is the game of short racks, where the break decides nearly half the match and mistakes are punished immediately. Carom has no pockets, so the entire game revolves around contact angles and the path of three balls. Chinese billiards blends 8-ball and snooker, demanding both long-range control and Western-style tactical thinking. This is the point most commentary skips, and also the point that makes any 'compare this billiards player with that billiards player' argument technically meaningless. You cannot compare two things that do not share a unit In snooker, a player is measured by centuries — scores of 100 or more in a single visit — and by maximum 147s. In 9-ball, those metrics do not exist. Players are measured by break success rate, pot rate after the break, and the ability to escape a passive position. Placing these two sets of metrics side by side to compare is a methodological error. It is like comparing the speed of a marathon runner with the throwing power of a shot-putter, then concluding one is better than the other. The numbers may look good. But they do not measure the same thing. I once tried the opposite. Years ago, I built a spreadsheet comparing the performance of top players across three different disciplines, hoping to find a common 'capability index'. After three weeks, I deleted the whole thing. Not because the data was wrong, but because the question was wrong. You cannot find a common index for games with different rules. The power map: Britain keeps the heritage, China builds a parallel ecosystem If you separate the six disciplines, the power map of world billiards becomes far clearer than when they are bundled together. Snooker is the territory of England and the United Kingdom. The World Championship has been held at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield since 2026, and it remains the benchmark of the sport. Ronnie O'Sullivan, with seven world titles, is the most commercially magnetic player snooker has ever produced. But Britain's strength lies in the system: a long-established governing body, a stable calendar, and a loyal audience base. China has taken a different road. Rather than only waiting for snooker players, it has built a discipline of its own — Chinese billiards, or Heyball — with its own tournament system, prize money and infrastructure. Ding Junhui is the trailblazing face of Chinese snooker, but the next generation does not necessarily have to follow that path. This is what Western analysts often miss. They look at the Crucible and assume China is 'taking over' snooker. The reality is more complex: China is building a parallel ecosystem, where Chinese billiards prize money can gradually pull young talent away from snooker without ever touching snooker. In Asia, the Philippines and Taiwan are the two cradles of 9-ball. Efren Reyes, the Filipino player, is regarded as one of the greatest ever in the discipline. In Europe, three-cushion carom has its own tradition, with the Netherlands and Belgium as two centres — Dick Jaspers of the Netherlands is the biggest name in that line. Four power centres, four disciplines, four ecosystems. Bundling them into 'billiards' erases the entire structure. The value chain: from the pool hall to the collectible The billiards industry runs along a value chain that can be split into three tiers. Upstream is the club system, tables, cues and equipment. This is the least noticed tier, yet it decides the survival of the discipline. No pool halls, no players. No good tables, no elite technique. In Britain, snooker clubs were once the backbone of the sport; the decline in the number of venues over the past two decades is a signal the media barely reports. Midstream is players, tournaments and broadcast. This is the glamorous tier, where stars and broadcasting rights generate most of the revenue. Downstream is sponsorship, derivatives and the collectibles market. Limited-edition cues, signed balls, final tickets — all are ways of turning fan emotion into cash flow. What stands out is that these three tiers operate differently in each discipline. A Chinese billiards event may carry higher prize money than a ranking snooker event, yet have a far thinner upstream tier. A carom event in the Netherlands may have a smaller audience but a longer tradition. Judging 'is billiards rising or falling' without separating the tiers is a meaningless question. The measurement problem: when a pretty number hides the truth In billiards, as in every sport, there are metrics packaged as measures of effort. Number of breaks, number of table visits, hours of practice — all sound impressive. But my own experience of watching tells me one thing: playing a lot does not equal playing well. A player can hit hundreds of shots a day without improving, if every shot repeats the same mistake. Conversely, a player who practises less but with intent can progress faster. Effort metrics are easy to measure, so they are favoured. Decision quality is hard to measure, so it is ignored. In an industry fragmented into six disciplines, this problem is even more serious, because each discipline has its own way of packaging its numbers. Governance: the borderless problem of match-fixing When prize money rises and betting becomes widespread, the risk of fraud rises with it. This is a problem every discipline in the billiards family must face, but not every discipline has an equivalent oversight mechanism. Snooker has a long-established governing body and relatively complete anti-fraud procedures. The match-fixing scandal involving several Chinese players in 2026-2026 is a reminder that even the most tightly governed sports are not immune. But in disciplines with younger governance systems, the level of transparency is far lower. There is a paradox here: the smaller, poorer disciplines are often the ones most lacking oversight — while they are precisely where fraud is most likely, because player incomes are low. The blind spot: we are watching the wrong stage Western analysts give almost all their attention to the Crucible. Every April, millions follow the snooker World Championship and believe they are watching elite billiards. But the centre of the industry may not be in Sheffield. It may be in the big arenas of China, where a Chinese billiards event draws a television audience a ranking snooker event can only dream of. It may be in the pool halls of Manila, where 9-ball remains the most vibrant street sport in Asia. It may be in the carom events of Europe, where the tradition stretches back a full century. The blind spot is not that we lack data. The blind spot is that we are looking at one stage and mistaking it for the whole theatre. The off-centre diamond only appears when you stop looking at the ball. In billiards, the ball we are looking at is snooker. But the real structure of the industry sits in the disciplines the cameras never point at. The counter-intuitive angle: fragmentation is a strength, not a weakness There is an implicit assumption in most commentary: that billiards should unify, that the six disciplines should converge on one common rulebook to become stronger. I am not sure that is right. Looking at history, it is fragmentation that has kept this sport family alive. Snooker nearly died in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s, but 9-ball and Chinese billiards lived on in other markets. When one discipline fades in one country, another grows somewhere else. Six disciplines are six baskets of eggs. Merging them could create a bigger sport — or it could create a single egg, and put everything into one basket. More data is needed to conclude. But at the very least, we should stop assuming that fragmentation is a flaw to be fixed. The match ends from the eleventh viewpoint In a frame of snooker, you can follow the whole match from a single camera angle. But to understand why a player wins, you need to see it from the opponent's angle — where the real pressure shows. The billiards industry is the same. If you look only from the Crucible's angle, you see a discipline struggling to hold its audience. If you look from the angle of an arena in China, you see an industry expanding. If you look from a pool hall in Manila, you see a living street culture. If you look from a carom event in the Netherlands, you see a tradition being passed down through generations. Four viewpoints, four truths. None is wrong. Only the viewpoint is incomplete. What to watch I do not watch billiards for entertainment. I watch it to decode. And what I want to decode in the coming months is not who will win the Crucible. It is this question: will the rising prize money of Chinese billiards gradually pull young players away from snooker? Will snooker clubs in Britain keep closing? Will the smaller disciplines build anti-fraud mechanisms strong enough before another scandal erupts? Geniuses all leave behind a gap few can measure. With billiards, that gap is a name: we call six disciplines by one word, then wonder why nobody understands where this industry is heading. Next time you read a headline about 'billiards', ask: which billiards. The answer will tell you whether the writer truly understands this sport.