A historic variant dating back to 1925 with a smaller table, bigger balls, and even bigger points for fouls, with an eye-watering 14 points at stake for making contact between cue and cloth.
Half a century after Joe Davis’s attempts to revive snooker, this was Barry Hearn’s pitch for a ‘faster and more exciting’ game, which was almost equally short-lived (2010-11). Played out for a set 30 minutes it has a shot clock, nine reds in diamond formation, and a red-and-white Power Ball.
An almost exclusively Brazilian variant, with only a solitary red ball in play. It disrupts the sacred symmetry of the snooker table, sitting cheekily to the right of the pink.
Very similar to regular snooker except, as you might guess, with six reds instead of fifteen – meaning shorter frames but no centuries.
Ten-minute, one-frame knockout games, with shots played against the clock. A current ranking event with, sadly, no waistcoats.
Created for ITV and running for just one series/tournament in 1995, ‘the snooker of the 90s’ featured a diamond of reds nestled around a yellow-and-black ‘tenball’. Youthful hosts Phillip Schofield and Steve Davis will acquaint you with the game over on YouTube – thanks to whoever had the foresight to upload such a thing.