Snooker is all about maths.
To the causal onlooker, it might at first appear to be a random smacking together of coloured balls with the hope of pocketing one, but it isn’t.
Each successful shot needs the player to calculate, to minute precision, the angle, speed and level of spin the cue ball needs to strike the intended colour so it not only ends up in the right pocket, but also ends up positioned perfectly for the next shot.
The average shot time – or the time taken to decide which shot to play – in the latest World Championship final was under 30 seconds.
While it’s not rocket science, it is related. Having watched the film adaption of the book Hidden Figures, which tells the story of the black female mathematicians whose work was crucial to achieving the US’ first moon landing, a few weeks ago, I certainly spot the similarities.
So, why is it that so few snooker players end up in financial services? To be able to work out the trajectories of various shots, select and discard a range of options within 30 seconds seems to be the kind of skills we need in an industry struggling for both new ideas and new talent.
Maybe it is because they have never been asked?
In a Sheffield pub, as we waited for doors to open to our session of the World Championship semi-finals, we watched the last frame of the previous round work to its eventual (and rather dramatic) finale.
Next to us sat a local, who was explaining each shot to his girlfriend, along with the reasons why the player had chosen it and why it had worked or what he’d failed to do in the execution if it hadn’t.
He also often beat the professional/ex-player commentators to predict which the next shot would be and why.
With each ball scoring a different number of points, he was also calculating which balls each player would have to pot to win the frame – and it was a close match.
However, when he looked at the scores on the screen, he asked my husband how many points the winning player was ahead. “I can’t do the maths,” he said.
Because the score was expressed in numbers, it had thrown him. When my husband told him the shortfall, he instantly worked out the balls the trailing player needed to pot to win, including snookers.
He just couldn’t do it looking at the numbers.
As someone who struggled with maths at school, I can completely understand this. For me, there was no applicability of the numbers. Why did we learn about vectors? When have I ever needed Pythagoras’ theorem? It turns out, in snooker you use them all – and this guy was great at applying them. He just didn’t realise he was doing it.
I’m going to hazard a guess that he was never selected for an internship at a bank or offered the chance to spend a summer on a trading floor. I’m also going to posit that he had limited opportunity to find out this world even existed sitting in a comp in Chesterfield 30 years ago.
He may not have wanted it, in any case – but there are plenty who do, who could bring the new ideas and enthusiasm our industry so desperately needs.
Social mobility isn’t about picking the highest achieving students from the schools that have the time and resources to put them forward, it’s about really taking the time to understand the breadth of skills on offer that don’t fit the standard mould.
That takes effort. And time. And there will be failures – but there are failures anyway.
As some of the world’s largest asset managers celebrate their intake of seven (yes, seven) degree apprentices in London (yes, just London) a year, it’s difficult to believe these programmes aren’t about simply getting a badge or pleasing stakeholders.
Talent is everywhere – from the City of Dreaming Spires to snooker halls. You just have to be willing the play the game to find it.
