Billiards: Six Rulebooks, Six Money Flows, and a Misused Name

In May 2026, at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, the winner of the World Snooker Championship final collected 500,000 pounds. A few weeks later, in a venue thousands of kilometres away, a world 9-ball champion received a prize worth only a fraction of that sum — even though both were described by the media with the same title: world billiards champion. The gap has a technical cause, and that cause begins somewhere very simple: we are using one word to name six different sports. I open the contract before I open my mouth, and this time I opened the prize-money table first.

The word "billiards" does not describe a sport. It describes a family of games played on a table with balls and a cue. Under that umbrella sit at least six branches: snooker, American 9-ball, Chinese 8-ball, American 8-ball, three-cushion carom, and Russian pyramid. These six branches share almost nothing with one another: no common rulebook, no common tournament system, no common scoring method, and, most importantly, no common money flow.

Snooker was born in British army clubs in India in the late 19th century. 9-ball is a product of 20th-century American pool halls. Three-cushion carom is a speciality of continental Europe and Korea. Chinese 8-ball is a product of the mainland Chinese market over the past two decades. Each branch grew up in a different culture, and each has its own governing body. At the top level, no organisation stands above them all.

When a sport is split into six ecosystems that do not talk to each other, money also flows down six separate rivers. This is the crux: billiards does not lack money, it lacks a mechanism to distribute money. Snooker has the World Snooker Tour, with most events now staged in China and Saudi Arabia — where local sponsors pay for brand exposure on television. 9-ball sits in the hands of Matchroom Sport, a British company that stages events and sells broadcast rights. Three-cushion carom has its World Championship system and invitational events in Korea, where prize money is low but online viewership is surprisingly high.

In Korea, three-cushion carom is one of the most-watched sports, with tournaments drawing millions of online views. But prize money there is far lower than in snooker, and the branch's leading players barely appear in Western media. This is a paradox of value: high viewership does not automatically convert into high prize money, because advertising revenue is retained within the domestic market.

These money flows do not talk to each other. There is no shared ranking. There is no shared tournament. A player can be world number one in one branch and never have appeared on another branch's ranking list. Economically, this is the ideal condition for those who want to control information — because when there is no shared data centre, no one can cross-check.

I once spent six years as a snooker commentator, covering nearly every final of the Steve Davis and Stephen Hendry era. My first-hand watching experience shows something the statistics tables never record: each branch of billiards has a completely different audience rhythm. Snooker crowds are silent, as in a church. 9-ball crowds roar, as at a basketball game. Carom audiences watch on phone screens, with no grandstand at all. These three audience rhythms cannot be bundled into a single television contract, and that is the economic reason the six rivers will never merge into one.

Chinese 8-ball is the clearest example of a closed ecosystem. The branch's biggest events take place mainly in mainland China, with prize money in renminbi and audiences almost entirely domestic. Foreign players who want to take part must adapt to a different rulebook, a different time zone, and a ranking system unconnected to any other branch. The result is that this branch produces champions who are household names at home yet almost invisible on the international rankings — a paradox only fragmentation can explain.

The clearest evidence of this disconnection comes from governance. In June 2026, British snooker's governing body (WPBSA) announced sanctions against ten Chinese players for betting and match-fixing, with Liang Wenbo and Li Hang banned for life. This was the biggest scandal in professional snooker history. But the scope of the investigation stopped within one branch. At the same time, in the other branches, no comparable investigation was announced — simply because no body had the authority to conduct one.

This is where my work — reading contracts and cross-checking money flows — becomes useful. When a sponsor signs with a snooker event in Saudi Arabia, that contract contains no clause binding them to other branches. When a betting company sponsors a 9-ball event, no one checks whether it is simultaneously sponsoring a Chinese 8-ball event. The absence of a shared governing body turns each branch into a legal island. Every sponsorship deal has two readings: one for the audience, one for the tax authority.

Here I must argue against myself, because the easiest hypothesis — that this division is a disaster — may not be right. The most harmless hypothesis is this: the division protects the sport from a single point of failure. If snooker collapsed over a betting scandal, 9-ball and carom would be unaffected. If the Chinese market closed, the World Snooker Tour would lose half its revenue, but Matchroom would survive. Fragmentation, from this angle, is a natural insurance mechanism.

I do not deny that possibility. But its price is something that cannot be cross-checked. When there is no shared data centre, each branch writes its own history. A player can be called a world champion in three different branches without anyone being able to verify whether he truly stands at the top of any of them. In finance, we call that information asymmetry. In sport, we call it media.

What I want to leave behind is not the question of whether billiards should unify. The question is: if a sponsor or a regulator wanted to cross-check money flows across these six branches, where would they begin? At present, the answer is: nowhere. Until there is a shared data table — even just for auditing — every world-champion title will remain a signboard hung in a room with no windows. And I write about sport, but what I dig up always lies beyond the touchline.