He won six world titles (1981, 1983, 1984, and 1987-1989) and competed in the most-watched snooker match, the 1985 World Snooker Championship final, which he lost to Dennis Taylor. The winner of the World Women's Snooker Championship now receives a two-year tour card to the main professional tour. This event has been taken out of the tour since 2013, when the Champion of Champions was established. The event saw players qualify by virtue of winning other events in the season, with 16 champions competing. Several players, including Ronnie O'Sullivan, Mark Allen and Steve Davis, have claimed that there are too many tournaments in the season, causing burnout of players. Today, nitrate film projection is rare and normally highly regulated and requires extensive precautions, including extra health-and-safety training for projectionists. Non-professional snooker (including youth competition) is governed by the International Billiards and Snooker Federation (IBSF). Despite its name, American snooker is not governed or recognised by the United States Snooker Association, what is billiards but by the Billiard Congress of America. Billiards and Snooker (Reprint ed.). While the main professional tour is open to female players, there is also a separate women's tour organised by World Women's Snooker (formerly the World Ladies Billiards and Snooker Association) that encourages female players to participate in the sport.

Introduced at the 1959 News of the World Snooker Plus Tournament, this variant failed to gain popularity and is no longer played. The Snooker Shoot Out is a variant snooker tournament, first staged in 1990, featuring single-frame matches for an accelerated format. Power Snooker was a short-lived cue sport based on aspects of snooker and pool, which was first played competitively as the 2010 Power Snooker Masters Trophy and again in 2011, but the format failed to gain widespread appeal and was discontinued. World Disability Billiards and Snooker (WDBS) is a WPBSA subsidiary that organises events and playing aids in snooker and other cue sports for people with disabilities. Frankly, I shouldn’t even be playing. Create an obstacle course that even Frankenstein will enjoy. Certainly, no single impact is going to do all the course changing you'll be wanting to pull off. At the start of the game, the single red is positioned halfway between the pink ball and the side cushion and the break-off shot cannot be used to pot the red or place the opponent in a snooker.

When black is the only object ball remaining on the table, the striker can claim the frame if more than seven points ahead of the opponent. Snooker is played by two independent players or by more than two players as "sides", e.g. four players constituting two sides of two players. On the women's tour, the leading tournament is the World Women's Snooker Championship. Fred Davis won the tournament every year from 1952 to 1956, but did not enter the 1957 event. John Pulman won the 1957 event and was the most successful player of the 1960s, won the event seven times between April 1964 and March 1968 when the World Championship was contested on a challenge basis. Players had twenty-five seconds to take each shot, with five time-outs per player per match. Nearly 200 teams of six players each may arrive for this tournament to challenge each other for the kubb throne.

Play continues until only the six colours remain on the table. The term colour is understood to mean one of the six remaining object balls that are not red, i.e. yellow, green, brown, blue, pink, and black. A yellow and black ball worth ten points was added between the blue and pink, and the game had a slightly revised set of rules. Sinuca brasileira (or "Brazilian snooker") is a variant of snooker played exclusively in Brazil, with fully divergent rules from the standard game, and using only one red ball instead of fifteen. A game called pyramid pool, like pyramids, was also played on a billiard table in England prior to 1850. The rules of these two games were very similar. Snookerpool is a variant of snooker that is played with traditional snooker balls on an American pool table with the larger pockets (11 ft × 5.5 ft or 3.4 m × 1.7 m). The shot-timed Premier League Snooker was held between 1987 and 2012, with seven players invited to compete at regular United Kingdom venues, and was televised on Sky Sports. Although some success was achieved with this format, it did not receive the same amount of press attention or status as the regular ranking tournaments.