Snooker Phenomenon, the English snooker with 500 million fans

Since 1977, the Crucible has been the permanent home of the World Cup, a theatre that for 17 days is transformed into a gambling hall. The green table has eight legs and six holes, and is wider and longer than the mats used in Italy for five-pin bowling, carom or boccia. Around the table revolve the referee and players. The former wears dinner jackets and white gloves to arrange the game's protagonists: 22 marbles of eight colours. The fifteen red ones are arranged in a triangle for the initial break, when the cue ball first touches the white marble, which is assigned to caress its coloured colleagues and send them to the hole. The most coveted is the black ball, the one with the highest score. If the shot is perfect there is applause, every mistake is followed by disappointment. Snooker is both attack and defence. When the game opens, the goal is to pocket so as to clear the table; when the game is closed, the goal is to obstruct the opponent by covering the white ball, an action in English called 'to snooker'.

The World Cup participants are professionals who train eight hours a day and travel the planet to participate in tournaments with big money.

They sport striped trousers and black or white shirts, have heeled shoes and bow ties around their necks. The names of the sponsors appear on their waistcoats, some of them in Chinese, a market where snooker moves more business than in the UK. Outside the theatre those without tickets watch the challenges on the big screens, while children are introduced to the art.

In the foyer of the Crucible, bookmakers quote the winner, the final score, the score of each heat and the number of 'hundreds': each time the hundred-point wall is broken, signs with the words 'ton up' appear in the stands.

To score the perfect shot, players act as equilibrists: sometimes they bow to study the position of the marbles, sometimes they climb up with one leg on the table, sometimes they extend the cue with an addition or use the rest, a club on which to slide the cue. Being an endurance sport, the Guinness Book of Records tells of a 1985 match that lasted 890 minutes and a 1983 evening session that lasted until 3.51am. With the audience yawning, but strictly silent.