Cue sports a brief history
In the early days of the Snooker Table, the main game played was Billiards. A game of great skill played with just three balls and six pockets.
This game was played to professional standards well over a hundred years ago.
Huddersfield has a great connection to Professional Billiards as a player from Huddersfield won the world billiards championship for the first time in 1904. A certain Charles Dawson who is buried in the cemetery in Almondbury a district of Huddersfield close to the Town and not more that a couple of miles away from this very club.
Billiards peaked as a spectator sport in the 1930s but died out as a mass sport less than yen years later. The best Billiards player who ever lived was Walter Lindrum of Australia who made regular breaks of over a thousand points with a best break in competition of 4.137 made in 1932.
Snooker started life as at least two other games prior to 1870, a game called life pool and another called pyramids which required fifteen red balls were imaginatively combined and snookers pool was born. This game soon became known as Snooker and grew in popularity until the 1940s where is took over from its dad billiards as a spectator and media interest sport.
One of the major reasons that snooker became more popular than billiards is that it is a more accessible game, arguably more sociable and to many a lot more fun.
In 1927 Joe Davis a top billiards player recognising the above mentioned factors and the commercial possibilities of Snooker played for the first World snooker championship, beating a gentleman called Tom Dennis in the final and contributing to buying the first ever trophy for the event, he went on to be undefeated champion for twenty years, donating the trophy that he bought, he retired from championship play and passed away in 1978, just as Steve Davis turned professional. The trophy is still played for in Sheffield every April and has been seen on television by millions of viewers every year.
So what of Pool, remember when I said that Snooker was originally known as Snookers Pool, well Pool referred to any game that was played for gambling purposes, so the pool of money was given to the winner at the end of the game. Modern Pool is played in the UK ll over the British Isles and The Huddersfield and District Pool League is the biggest league in the Country. All of the American games can trace their lineage back to the gambling games played for recreation and a little pool on an English Billiard Table way back to the 18th and 19th centuries.
Some famous players have entered the Top Spot club;
Paul Hunter
Dominic Dale
Ian Mc Culloch
Chris Melling
Kuldesh Johal
See how many of these names you recognise?
Joe Davis Walter Donaldson Fred Davis Horace Lindrum
John Pulman Alex Higgins John Spencer Ray Reardon
Terry Griffiths Cliff Thorburn Steve Davis Dennis Taylor
Joe Johnson Stephen Hendry John Parrott Ken Doherty
John Higgins Ronnie O’Sullivan Mark Williams Peter Ebdon
Shaun Murphy Graeme Dott
All World Snooker Champions.
David Smith
Cues n Views
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