Ronnie O'Sullivan article

[westcoast]

The NY Review of Books published an in depth profile of O'Sullivan in the most recent edition of the magazine. Quite an interesting read. I never knew of the tough experiences he had (the incarceration of his father and mother).

The author also provides thought provoking analysis about the physical genius of a player like O'Sullivan and other great athletes:

Angles of Approach | Sally Rooney

What makes Ronnie O’Sullivan the greatest player in the history of snooker? It isn’t just statistical dominance—it lies in his style, in the difference between thinking and acting.

www.nybooks.com

Angles of Approach

Sally Rooney

March 27, 2025 issue

Ronnie O’Sullivan is the greatest snooker player in history—what he can do, no one has ever been able to do. And no can even explain how he does it.

Reviewed:

Unbreakable

by Ronnie O’Sullivan

London: Seven Dials, 262 pp., $19.99 (paper)

Ronnie O’Sullivan: The Edge of Everything

a documentary film directed by Sam Blair

Ask almost any snooker fan to name the greatest player in the history of the sport, and they will tell you it’s Ronnie O’Sullivan. This isn’t really a matter of facts and figures, although O’Sullivan, whose professional career has now spanned over thirty years, does indeed come out on top by almost any statistical measure. If you really want to know why he’s considered the greatest, you have to watch him play the game.

Snooker is related to, but distinct from, other cue games like billiards and eight-ball pool. One key difference between snooker and pool is that snooker tables are bigger. A lot bigger. Two reasonably tall men could lie down end to end along the length of a snooker table and still not reach the corners. A standard pool table has a total playing area of about twenty-seven feet; a snooker table’s surface is about seventy-two square feet. What’s more, the pockets on a snooker table are actually smaller—about three and a half inches wide.

But the basic premise of the game is simple. A player uses a cue to strike the white ball in such a way that it will make contact with one of the fifteen red balls, causing the red to roll into a pocket, which earns the player a single point. Then they do the same again, but this time aiming for one of six other colored balls, each worth a different number of points—yellow, green, brown, blue, pink, or the highest-value black ball at seven points. Then it’s back to red. Any time the player fails to make a pot, the break comes to an end, and their opponent gets a turn at the table. When either player racks up a sufficient number of points so that their opponent can no longer draw level, they win the frame; the match ends when one player has won a certain number of frames—best of three, best of seven, or, in the case of the World Snooker Championship final, best of thirty-five.

If this all sounds feasible, or even fun, then I’m afraid my description has been misleading. Faced with a real-life snooker table—unless you’ve already had years of practice—you probably wouldn’t be able to do almost any of the things I’ve just described. Your cue would slip; the cue ball, moving over the gigantic surface of the table, would strike the wrong object or nothing at all; the object ball would careen off in the wrong direction. And of course, when you finally managed to make a single pot, the cue ball would end up in such an awkward position afterward that you wouldn’t stand a chance of making another.

Most mainstream sports, while awe-inspiring at the professional level, also tend to serve as fun and accessible pastimes for amateurs, even young children. Think soccer, tennis, basketball. Snooker declines to lend itself so readily to the amusement of dilettantes. The cultural status of the game stems therefore not from mass participation but from mass viewership. Bad snooker would be painful to watch; mediocre snooker is notoriously boring; but great snooker is sublime. And it is generally agreed that even among those legends of the game who have astonished and delighted the viewing public, one player stands alone.

At his best, Ronnie O’Sullivan conducts his games with something like orchestral splendor, arranging and rearranging the balls across the table’s surface in hypnotically precise passages of play. Each frame becomes a kind of logic puzzle, an intricate question with a thrillingly simple answer, an answer only one person can see. An apparently chaotic jumble slowly reveals its hidden form: the cue ball charts a single path, from red to color and back again, spinning, swerving, ricocheting, or stopping dead as required, until everything is neatly cleared away. No, no, you think, it isn’t possible—and then, rebounding from the right-hand cushion, the red sails over the colossal width of the table and slots down neatly, inevitably, into the minuscule middle left pocket.

Take the last frame of the 2014 Welsh Open final. The footage is available online, courtesy of Eurosport Snooker: if you like, you can watch O’Sullivan, then in his late thirties, circling the table, chalking his cue without taking his eyes from the baize. He’s leading his opponent, Ding Junhui—then at number three in the world snooker rankings—by eight frames to three, needing only one more to win the match and take home the title. He pots a red, then the black, then another red, and everything lands precisely the way he wants it: immaculate, mesmerizing, miraculously controlled.

The last remaining red ball is stranded up by the cushion on the right-hand side, and the cue ball rolls to a halt just left of the middle right-hand pocket. The angle is tight, awkward, both white and red lined up inches away from the cushion. O’Sullivan surveys the position, nonchalantly switches hands, and pots the red ball left-handed. The cue ball hits the top cushion, rolls back down over the table, and comes to a stop, as if on command, to line up the next shot on the black. O’Sullivan could scarcely have chosen a better spot if he had picked the cue ball up in his hand and put it there. The crowd erupts: elation mingled with disbelief. At the end of the frame, when only the black remains on the table, he switches hands again, seemingly just for fun, and makes the final shot with his left. The black drops down into the pocket, completing what is known in snooker as a maximum break: the feat of potting every ball on the table in perfect order to attain the highest possible total of 147 points.

Watch a little of this sort of thing and it’s hugely entertaining. Watch a lot and you might start to ask yourself strange questions. For instance: In that particular frame, after potting that last red, how did O’Sullivan know that the cue ball would come back down the table that way and land precisely where he wanted it? Of course it was only obeying the laws of physics. But if you wanted to calculate the trajectory of a cue ball coming off an object ball and then a cushion using Newtonian physics, you’d need an accurate measurement of every variable, some pretty complex differential equations, and a lot of calculating time. O’Sullivan lines up that shot and plays it in the space of about six seconds. A lucky guess? It would be lucky to make a guess like that once in a lifetime. He’s been doing this sort of thing for thirty years.

 

[westcoast]

What then? If he’s not calculating, and he’s not guessing, what is Ronnie O’Sullivan doing? Why does the question seem so strange? And why doesn’t anybody know the answer?

O’Sullivan first entered public life under almost unbelievably sensational circumstances. Born in the West Midlands in 1975, he had grown up outside London and played snooker since his early childhood; his father and mentor, Ron Sr., used to refer to the snooker hall as his “crèche.” Then, after turning professional in 1992, he immediately went on a historic winning streak, taking seventy-four of his first seventy-six snooker matches, including a record-breaking thirty-eight consecutive wins. He began appearing regularly on television, his image beamed directly into millions of households. That same year his father was sentenced to life in prison for stabbing a man to death. At the time of these events, Ronnie O’Sullivan was sixteen years old.

In the years that followed, O’Sullivan went on to produce some of the finest snooker ever played. He also—as he details in his recent memoir Unbreakable—struggled with severe depression, developed substance abuse problems, and spent time in a psychiatric hospital and rehab. During the 2005 World Snooker Championship, returning as the defending champion, he shaved his head mid-tournament, climbed onto the furniture, clawed at his face with his fingernails, and crashed out of a quarterfinal after losing eleven of his last fourteen frames. The Independent described his performance at the tournament as “public emotional disintegration.” He told the press that he could not go on playing snooker professionally for much longer. “Physically and mentally,” he said, “I will probably end up killing myself.”

Twenty years later, he’s still playing. Recently—in his book, in the 2023 documentary film Ronnie O’Sullivan: The Edge of Everything, and in the related publicity—he has tried to present himself as an older and wiser person, an addict on the long road to recovery. He says that he has learned to stop chasing perfection; that he’s no longer worried about winning or losing; that he continues playing snooker only for the love of the game. But this apparent transition to wise elder has been, at least, inconsistent. Just this January, visibly frustrated with his performance in an invitational tournament, he slammed his cue against the table and later walked out of the competition. On various occasions, including very recently, he has described snooker as a “bad sport”; openly derided the abilities of younger players; claimed that he only continues playing for the money; and dissuaded would-be enthusiasts from getting involved in the game. His Twitter bio used to include the line “I have a degree in snooker and I am a genius.. haha.”

In the UK and Ireland, O’Sullivan is a very famous man. People who have never even watched a game of snooker profess strong opinions about his life and personality: he’s arrogant, he’s obsessive, he’s actually a really nice guy. Part of what makes him such a compelling figure is that, despite his notorious habit of contradicting himself, he always seems to believe what he is saying at any given time. On April 23 last year, asked about his purported status as the greatest snooker player ever, he told the press, “I don’t regard myself as the greatest. I’m one of them, maybe.” A mere two days later he felt differently. “I’ve had the greatest career of any snooker player…. I have to really give myself a pat on the back because I don’t, I am hard on myself. Nobody has achieved what I have achieved on a table statistically.” For what it’s worth, I think he was right the second time.

The British media have been reporting on O’Sullivan’s emotional instability for decades, sometimes calling in psychological experts to opine on his state of mind. The turbulence of his family life—a few years after his father was convicted, his mother went to jail for tax evasion, leaving twenty-year-old Ronnie to take care of his young sister—has been picked over in detail. (“He is desperate to prove something and also make psychological recompense for what his parents did,” according to one Professor Cary Cooper.) But O’Sullivan’s extreme volatility has always seemed to exceed mere circumstance. The mercurial temperament, the absurd talent, the lurching highs and lows: it all just goes together. Even when he plays badly, there’s something wild and demented about his approach to the game; and when he’s at his best, he looks like the favorite of heaven.

What goes through your mind when you throw a ball at a target? I mean the question literally. You’ve picked up a ball, you’re holding it in your hand, looking at the target, and now you’re throwing. Maybe you succeed, or maybe not. But in your mind, in that moment, holding the ball, and then not holding it anymore, watching it move through the air: What are you thinking? Are you thinking at all?

Maybe you believe the answer is no. We’ve all probably had the experience of catching something without thinking: a reflex action, done before we even know we’re doing it. So we know this kind of thing—action without thought—is possible. But throwing a ball at a target is different. You’re consciously performing a specific task. You weigh the ball in your hand, you assess your distance from the target, you consider angles and speed. If you were asleep or drugged, unable to think, you couldn’t do any of that; anything that interfered with your mental clarity would interfere with the accuracy of your throw. But, you might protest, that doesn’t mean you think about the throw, in the way that you would think about a mathematical problem or a word puzzle. You feel the weight of the ball, you see your distance from the target. But what distinguishes feeling from thinking? Can seeing be a kind of thinking? And what about the throw itself?

When you pick up a ball and throw it, some process undoubtedly takes place in your brain. Maybe that process doesn’t feel to you like thinking. But is there a better name for it? You saw where you wanted the ball to go, and then you moved your arm to make it go there. Who knows how many millions of nerve endings were sending you information about the ball, about the target; who knows how many muscles in your shoulder, arm, and hand were activated when you made the throw. Like remembering a song and then singing it. You don’t need to make any mental calculations about the resonance frequencies of your vocal cords. The song comes into your head, and you can sing it, or maybe you can’t.

You see the target, you throw the ball. It’s so simple, it doesn’t seem worth thinking about. Until you try to think about it: and then maybe it does.

In the 1980s snooker was a major cultural phenomenon in Britain and Ireland. Top players were household names, and their rivalries were the subject of national conversation. In the decades since, however, the sport has been in decline. Viewership has plummeted, and when O’Sullivan isn’t at the table, it drops even further. There are signs of a rebirth for the game in East Asia—competitions there attract bigger and younger audiences—but as yet the majority of top players are still British. Outside these regions, not many people watch or play snooker, or even really know what it is. In the course of writing this essay, I spoke to various friends and strangers in the UK and Ireland about its subject: each and every one of them had heard of Ronnie O’Sullivan, and many wanted to tell me precisely what they thought of him. My North American friends, by contrast, had no idea who I was talking about.

The specificity of snooker is not only geographic but, visibly, socioeconomic. In terms of both its players and its viewership, professional snooker has always been a working-class game. Sports like tennis and golf, with their wealthy international fan bases and high-end brand partnerships, convey in their on-screen presence an atmosphere of rarefied luxury. The World Snooker Championship, on the other hand, is sponsored by an online used-car dealership. Tournaments take place in darkened leisure centers and theaters, the tables bathed from above in a uniform glare of artificial light. At some competitions, players are still required to wear the traditional bow tie and waistcoat; at others, they sport black polo shirts, shiny and synthetic, emblazoned with the logos of betting companies or local hardware suppliers in provincial British towns.

 

[westcoast]

There’s also the specificity of gender. Women do play snooker—the World Women’s Snooker Championship takes place every year, and all tournaments are theoretically open to women participants—but men continue to dominate the game. A female player has never broken the top fifty of the overall world rankings. Televised snooker thus offers up the spectacle of a particular kind of masculinity. But what kind? Unlike team games, with each player a model citizen of a real or imagined nation-state, snooker evinces no sense of camaraderie, no collective spirit. And unlike solo sports—tennis, swimming, gymnastics—it presents the viewer with no exemplary body at which to gaze in envy or longing. It’s not really a sport in that sense. Professional players are visually indistinguishable from ordinary people, except that almost all of them are men.

The closest cultural neighbor of snooker is probably the game of darts. Both are British, male-dominated, traditionally working-class pursuits, and both have some relation to what are called “pub games.” But as televisual displays, the two could hardly be more different. At darts tournaments, the actual gameplay is mostly secondary to the raucous party atmosphere. The crowd jeers and chants continuously; some sections jeer other sections for not jeering enough. Female dancers in cheerleader costumes are brought on to entertain the audience during breaks. Snooker is, by comparison, a cerebral and restrained affair. Play takes place in strictly enforced silence and stillness. Applause may break out between shots, but quiet is inevitably restored with a single gesture of the referee’s white-gloved hand. If a darts tournament has the atmosphere of a chaotic lager-fueled party, a snooker tournament has something more like the atmosphere of a classical concert hall, with the soloists in formal dress, aloof, unspeaking.

Ultimately, the theatrics of snooker have no precise equivalent elsewhere. The neuroticism of high-level professional play, its fussy perfectionism—players asking for an apparently spotless ball to be recleaned by the referee, or refusing to take a shot if a single audience member is moving—is not, as in other sports, offset by any compensatory display of physical strength and vigor. Snooker dramatizes obsession in a very pure form, hyperfixation made visible. Its televised matches do not convey any impression of luxury or high living, nor of boisterous fun and friendship, nor even of freshness and good health. There is something gloomy about the game’s kinetic glamour, all that darkness, all that solitude, the watching and waiting. “Snooker’s just a really, really tough sport,” O’Sullivan said in 2021. “Stuck indoors, no natural light, draw the curtains, in there for five or six hours, you don’t talk to anyone. That’s not healthy. That’s not a good way to spend your life.”

In 2010, at the World Open in Glasgow, O’Sullivan stops play at the beginning of a frame to ask the referee, Jan Verhaas, a question. In response Verhaas nods his head, and then turns to another official and murmurs, “Can you find out what a max pays?” O’Sullivan stops and waits to find out what the prize money will be if he completes a maximum break. At this point in the frame, he has potted only two balls.

The commentators—former professionals John Virgo and Dennis Taylor—are audibly baffled, laughing, but the laughter is uneasy. Taylor describes O’Sullivan’s behavior as “bizarre.” Virgo says, “I’ve seen some things in the game of snooker, but I’ve never seen anything quite like this.” Most professional players might make a handful of maximum breaks in an entire career; some never make any. At the time, O’Sullivan had already made nine, a world record he shared with Stephen Hendry. To predict a maximum, publicly, after potting only two balls, is ludicrous; to ask about the prize money seems almost obscene. “Well, we’ll try and find out for him when he gets down to the last black,” Taylor jokes indulgently.

O’Sullivan does, of course, get down to that last black. By then, the tone of the commentary has shifted considerably. “We’re watching, what has to be said, a genius at work,” says Taylor. O’Sullivan has since been informed that there is no special reward for making a maximum, beyond the £4,000 highest break prize. So, with the final black still on the table, he shakes his opponent’s hand and goes to leave the auditorium. The referee intervenes, approaching O’Sullivan and saying, “You want to knock it in for the fans? Come on.” Only then, apparently relenting, does O’Sullivan pot the final black and complete his record-breaking tenth maximum break.

Days of controversy and discussion ensued. Would he really have left that final black on the table if Verhaas hadn’t stepped in? Was he obliged to attempt the shot, or did he have every right to leave it behind if he wanted? Was this a protest about prize money, or something else? Barry Hearn, then chairman of the World Snooker Tour, said O’Sullivan would have faced disciplinary action had he not potted the black ball. In response, O’Sullivan told Hearn, “If you like, this is my last frame of snooker ever. I’m quite happy to walk away.”

This was a conversation about what a gifted individual owes to the public. With only the black left to pot, the frame and match were already over: O’Sullivan had won. In other sports, the sphere of play is coterminous with the sphere of competition—players are not obliged to do anything in excess of trying to win matches. But snooker is different. Professionals are expected to continue past the point of competitive advantage, until the internal logic of the frame itself has been exhausted, and the table has no more to give. All maximum breaks—indeed all breaks over seventy-five or eighty—have this quality of aesthetic excess, of formal purity, snooker for snooker’s sake. O’Sullivan had already gone far past mere competition by getting down to the final black. In walking away, or trying to, he seemed to be asserting his right to decide how far past that point he wanted to go.

But what was missing from the resulting furor was a simple question. How on earth did O’Sullivan know, with nineteen balls still on the table, that he was going to make a maximum break? Could he see the sequence already, the way the cue ball would move around the table, each red, each black, each pocket? Did it flash before his mind’s eye all at once? Was it just instinct? What was going on in his head?

In the course of writing this essay, I asked quite a few people to try and describe what goes on inside their minds when carrying out perceptual-motor tasks like catching or throwing. And some told me that the answer was: nothing important. When presented with a given physical task, anyone can see, just by looking, what they would like to accomplish—where they want the ball to go, what kind of shot they want to make. In response to a given task, our minds will give us all the same instructions: athletes can just obey those instructions more quickly, efficiently, and precisely than the rest of us.

In certain cases, sure. When it comes to competing in a sprint, for instance, it’s fair to say that we all know what we would like to do—that is, to run faster than anyone else—but our bodies can’t necessarily follow suit. And almost all sports involve some testing of these hard physical limitations: speed, strength, balance, and so on. But now let’s imagine you’re just holding a ball again. You try to make a throw, and you miss your target. Do you feel that you somehow got the throw right in your mind but that your arm went wrong? Sometimes I suppose you might feel that way—if the ball slipped out of your hand, for instance. But most of the time, it probably just feels like you missed the target. Right? You, your brain, and also your arm and hand, at the same moment, in the same way: you just missed.

 

[westcoast]

That we find ourselves discussing a distinction here at all is evidence of a certain way of thinking about cognition. We have the brain, which takes in data and administers decisions and commands; and we have the body, which conveys data to the brain and then carries out its orders. This is the predominant model of human consciousness, the metaphor that structures our thinking about thought. And the parameters of this model seem to require us to decide, more or less, where athletic talent is located. In the brain, or in the body? Well, when you put it like that, the question is easy. Mathematicians and physicists have cognitive gifts; athletes have physical gifts.

But when you throw that ball, you’re not setting yourself a difficult physical challenge. The ball isn’t heavy, the target isn’t far away, and you don’t need to throw very fast or hard. You just need to run the calculation and make the correct throw. And at that moment, doesn’t it feel as if running the calculation is making the throw? The calculation happens in the brain of course: but also, somehow, in the arm. The throw is itself the calculation. Maybe you imagined, maybe you thought about it in advance, but the final decision was the action. The brain is, after all, part of the body: and could it be that the body is also part of the brain?

In a 2015 New Yorker profile, Ronnie O’Sullivan was compared to “a savant, able to perceive mathematical solutions without knowing how or why.” In the London Review of Books last year, Jon Day wrote, “Part of Ronnie’s charm is his complete inability to explain how he does what he does.” But it surely takes nothing away from O’Sullivan’s considerable charm to point out that nobody else can explain what he does either.

Indeed, it would be strange if any athlete in any sport could really explain what they do. Certainly we don’t expect them to start theorizing the conservation of angular momentum. And yet we also don’t tend to describe most sportspeople as “savants.” Why not? Perhaps because their abilities—throwing, jumping, catching—basically strike us as exaggerations of our own. Watching someone like O’Sullivan just feels different. What he can do no longer reminds us of what we can do. His abilities just seem to demand an explanation. But what would such an explanation even consist of? What field of study could articulate the answer—physics, cognitive science, psychology, philosophy of mind?

According to convention, all the greatest snooker players fall into one of two camps. First, the consummate professional: levelheaded, consistent, technically polished, emotionally restrained. Exemplars of this type include Ray Reardon in the 1970s, Steve Davis in the 1980s, and Stephen Hendry in the 1990s. The second variety is what might be called the chaotic type: enthralling but erratic, on and off the table. Into this category we can sort the “Hurricane” Alex Higgins and the “Whirlwind” Jimmy White, players whose dazzling style went hand in hand with unpredictable behavior. Traditionally, the first type of player won trophies—Reardon and Davis took home the world title six times each and Hendry a record seven times—but the second type won hearts and minds.

There’s always been something obliquely political about the distinction. At its height, during the Thatcher era, the world of snooker could be seen to project a certain image of social mobility: working-class boys making big money through decent, respectable hard work. Sometimes the politics weren’t so oblique. In 1983 Steve Davis actually made an appearance at a Conservative Party rally. Against that backdrop, players like Higgins and White—brilliant, unreliable, never quite living up to their potential—seemed to express a little rebellion against the cult of respectability and hard work.

O’Sullivan alone has managed to take both paths. At first, with his defiant attitude and stylish, fast-paced play, he must have seemed a natural successor to Alex Higgins. But in time, his talent showed itself to be of another order. He has enjoyed record-breaking success, equaling Hendry’s seven world titles, but his fans go on rooting for him as if he’s the underdog. And you won’t spot him canvassing for the Conservatives. O’Sullivan joined the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and now appears to have left again over the party’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza. His perennial conflicts—with snooker’s governing bodies, with the media, with referees, with other players—are of a piece with his broader isolation, in snooker and in British public life. There just isn’t anybody quite like him.

 

[westcoast]

Another question: Why can computers beat human beings at chess, but not (yet) at snooker? This time there’s an answer. In computational terms, snooker is simply a lot more difficult than chess. An ordinary phone or laptop has more than enough computing power to find an optimal chess move in almost any given position within a few seconds or less. But for a computer to play snooker, even with a perfectly accurate robotic arm, it would first have to calculate how exactly to strike the cue ball. And to do that, it would need access to a model or engine that could simulate the real-world physics of the table and balls and predict precisely the result of any given shot. That would take quite a bit more computing power than your phone can provide.

Pool and snooker simulations do exist—various video games depend on them, including the now-defunct World Snooker Championship series—but the underlying physics engines rely on simplified models. When a snooker ball hits a cushion, for instance, how does the simulation know what’s going to happen next? Well, it doesn’t. Even complex models of the ball–cushion interaction have to assume that the collision between ball and cushion is instantaneous, which it isn’t, and that the cushion won’t compress significantly on impact, which, as any snooker fan knows, it can. And the best existing formulas are still too complex to be useful for a video game simulation. For the moment, any computer that wants to play snooker has to rely on a more simplistic model with less accurate results.

From a mathematical perspective, then, snooker presents a much harder problem than chess, involving more difficult calculations and many more variables. But that just brings us back to our first question: If the physics of snooker is so complicated, why should human beings be able to play it better than computers can? And relatedly: How is it possible for a snooker player to predict the outcomes of complex interactions in physics, with millimeter-level precision—without appearing to perform any calculations at all?

Let’s say you’re throwing that ball again. Scientists have some theories about that. In 2013 a team at MIT proposed that the human brain intuitively runs something quite like the physics engine that runs in the background of a video game. Inside our minds, all the time, without knowing it, we are simulating real-world conditions and using our simulations to predict the results of complex interactions. When you see an unstable stack of dishes, for instance, your intuitive engine instantly models whether and how the dishes might fall, without resorting to any conscious calculation.

The researchers who first proposed this framework took care to stipulate that the human brain’s physics engine, if indeed it exists, must have major limitations. The engine would have to sacrifice accuracy in favor of “speed, generality, and the ability to make predictions that are good enough for the purposes of everyday activities.” Like game consoles, our brains only have so much computing power available, so our physics engines must be correspondingly rough and simplified. The outcomes are nowhere near as accurate as real mathematical calculations would be, but they are (usually) accurate enough for the demands of everyday life.

This picture seems to make some sense. In fast-paced sports like soccer, accuracy is important, but speed is king. The ball is a lot smaller than the goal, after all, so minor errors in trajectory are unlikely to make a critical difference most of the time. It makes sense to think of a footballer using a quick, rough mental simulation of the ball and goal in order to make a split-second decision on the pitch. In slower-paced mental games like classical chess, on the other hand, while speed is still a factor, accuracy is a bigger one. For a chess player, no rough estimate can compete with good old-fashioned calculation, the intentional consideration of an array of possible moves.

Snooker players are a different case. Speed is not much use in snooker, except psychologically, since the game imposes no formal time restrictions. Players can in theory take as long as they like to make a shot: twenty seconds, thirty seconds, a minute, two. Precision—which is to say, predictive validity—is all that matters. And yet, unlike chess players, snooker professionals do not and cannot consciously calculate their moves. The mathematics would, as we’ve established, be too complex; but it is also very possible that the mathematics would not be sufficiently precise. If it’s a case of trying to strike a cue ball in a certain way to achieve a certain outcome, and Ronnie O’Sullivan is competing against a physicist with a calculator, my money is on Ronnie every time.

But the point isn’t so much that snooker is special, or even that O’Sullivan is. The point is that in trying to explain the apparently extraordinary, we quickly reach the limits of what we can explain about ourselves, about the ordinary human mind. The theory of the mental physics engine seems useful at first, because it explains how we might roughly simulate simple problems like throwing a ball at a target. But it only makes sense if the simulation uses less computing power and outputs less accurate results than a more laborious mathematical solution. If the physics engine in our heads can solve problems just as accurately as a Newtonian formula, then the idea of the engine explains nothing. It’s just a conceptual curtain over the same unanswered question.

That question being: How does Ronnie O’Sullivan do what he does? The kind of problem that mathematicians and engineers have to labor over with differential equations—the kind of problem complex enough to make a laptop overheat and crash—simply discloses itself to him at a glance. The puzzle presents itself in the form of its own solution, a task that, in the act of calculation, completes itself. The calculation is there in the gesture of his arm; and the gesture becomes the shot, the tap, the click, the ball rolling neatly into the pocket.

Ludwig Wittgenstein posed the same question another way: “Calculating prodigies who get the right answer but cannot say how. Are we to say that they do not calculate?”

In 2016, at the Welsh Open, O’Sullivan finally did decline a maximum break on purpose. With the black ball available, he deliberately potted the pink instead, for a total of 146 instead of the maximum 147 points. That time, the prize for a maximum was £10,000. Afterward, O’Sullivan said the money wasn’t good enough. But then, as so often, he appeared to change his mind.

“When you get to forty, and you’ve been doing this for twenty-five years, you kind of have to start to enjoy it at some point,” he said on television the following day. “You know, I used to make 140s in practice and deliberately not pot the black, because I just—” Here he struggled to complete his thought. “It was like, more—it was more impressive to do that.” The host pointed out that others had described his 146 break as disrespectful. “If it’s disrespectful,” O’Sullivan answered, “then if anyone else can go and put in a performance like that, there’s my cue, there’s my chalk, there’s my waistcoat. Tell them to go and do it.”

Naturally, no one could, or can. Despite the deliberate miss, O’Sullivan still holds the record for most maximum breaks ever completed: fifteen. Maybe if the prize money had been higher at the 2016 Welsh Open, that record would be sixteen. But £10,000 isn’t nothing. And throwing it away—for no reason, just out of mischief, just because you’re the only person in the world who can—that isn’t nothing either. Watch the frame back and you can see O’Sullivan smiling. He really looks happy. What he can do, no one else on earth has ever been able to do. And no one can even explain how he does it. What other word could suffice? We’re in the presence of genius.

O’Sullivan was forty then; this year, he’ll turn fifty. After an exceptional performance last season, he’s struggled to find form in recent months and pulled out of multiple tournaments, prompting concerns that he might be nearing retirement. Maybe, maybe not. I hope not. In any case, in the course of his career so far, he has delivered more captivating performances, more technical perfection, and more sheer formal beauty than most artists ever manage. I want to write books the way he plays snooker. I know I never will. But even just wanting to is enough.

Sally Rooney

Sally Rooney is an Irish writer. Her novel Intermezzo was published last year. (March 2025)