Snooker has been dying for decades. “It just feels boring,” said Ronnie O’Sullivan, the most talented man to play the game, in 2009—the equivalent of Roger Federer opening a press conference with “Tennis sucks.” The days of the 1980s, when one in three Britons would watch the final of its world championship, are gone. By the 2000s a cottage industry lamenting its demise had emerged. In 2010 the Guardian predicted snooker would be an amateur sport by 2020.