Top snooker player falls asleep during match
YORK, England -- Still feeling the effects of the coronavirus, a top snooker player fell asleep in the middle of his match in one of the most prestigious events in the sport. “My head went down and I woke up and I didn’t have a clue where I was,” Mark Williams said after his loss to Anthony Hamilton in the UK Championship late Sunday.
Williams, a three-time world champion and one of snooker's most charismatic players, was in his chair and in the lead at 3-2 when he nodded off while Hamilton was at the table.
The 46-year-old Williams said he was “just shattered,” having just returned to action after contracting COVID-19 in October.
“I need to be playing in the mornings, really, or afternoons. The more the day goes on the more tired I get," said Williams, who lost 6-5 at the York Barbican. “Thirty years as a professional," he added, “that’s the first time I’ve ever fell asleep in the chair.”
https://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory/needing-break-snooker-player-falls-asleep-match-81442046
= new reply since forum marked as read
Players take turns, if you sink a ball you get to keep going, otherwise play switches to the other player.
Balls have to be sunk in a particular order and are worth different points. At the start of a frame there are 15 red balls and six "colors." At the start of their turn, the player must always go for a red ball first. If they sink a red, they must then go for a color. If they sink a color, they go for another red. They keep going until they miss.
It's important to note that when a red ball goes down, it stays down. But when a color goes down, it is placed back onto the table. Each color has a particular spot that its placed on after it is sunk. This happens until all the reds are gone, then the colors are sunk in order until all the balls are gone.
Reds are worth 1 point. The colors have different point values:
Yellow: 2 points
Green: 3 points
Brown: 4 points
Blue: 5 points
Pink: 6 Points
Black: 7 points
And after the reds are all gone, the colors are sunk in the order above until the end of the frame, at which point the player with the most points wins. (If one player reaches an overwhelming point total before the end of the frame however, the other player will usually concede and a new frame will begin.)
So the best way to score points is to try to get a red ball, then a black ball, then a red ball, then a black ball, etc. because you get 1 + 7 + 1 + 7 etc.
Here's a player doing that in a video which is pretty much the polar opposite of the one I posted above 
Joe Davis in 1939:
Joe Davis scoring the first televised century in 1962:
More Joe Davis (not sure of the year)
Classic snooker highlights (late 1930s)
Ray Reardon and Fred Davis (1977)
The last one is in color but all the others are in black and white, which can make for tricky viewing when it comes to snooker
I'm not sure the players were better per se back then... hard to know. I think there are a lot more century breaks in competitions these days, but if you took the masters from the 30s and 40s and put them on today's tables with modern equipment, who knows.
If you watched the 1985 final in my post above, I think it's a little deceptive how many mistakes the players make. Those are the two best players in the world (at that moment), but they're in the World Championship final, and it's come down to the final frame out of 35, a gruelling multi-day match which was nationally televised with more than 18 million people tuning in for the final frame. The pressure they were under must have been incredibly intense, so I'm not surprised that they were screwing up a lot!
