Better than Mozart: Ronnie O’Sullivan, the man who plays snooker like a computer

At a time when gentlemen, scholars and Jeremy Kyle are concerned about computers leaving the human race in the dirt, the sport of snooker is striking back to avoid being left behind the eight ball.

Blade Runner of the green baize 2017 is alive, well and not kicking judging by the quite astonishing happenings at an English Open tournament smuggled away in the Yorkshire outpost of Barnsley over the past week.

In Ronnie O’Sullivan, 25 years a professional man and boy fighting out of Chigwell, the game appears to boast a mere mortal who is wired up to play his sport with as much accuracy as a machine.

"If you programmed a computer to play snooker, this is how it would play if you programmed it correctly," said the Eurosport commentator Dave Hendon on Sunday night. "Pretty much unplayable."

If you think such a statement is balderdash and piffle, you obviously did not witness the sporting metronome perform his art at Barnsley’s Metrodome Leisure Complex. Anybody who wonders what snooker would resemble if it was played by machines should have clamped themselves onto O’Sullivan’s 9-2 walloping of the poor, unsuspecting Kettering lad Kyren ‘The Warrior’ Wilson.

It was all there in a 41-year-old bloke dubbed the Rocket, who astonishingly appears to be more at one with the table than when he made the fastest 147 in the game’s history 20 years ago clocked (officially) at five minutes and 20 seconds. It was officially quicker.

The only edge that has come off O’Sullivan’s game in the intervening two decades is when he needs a tip change. Or when he desires a fresh pair of running shoes. Is he the greatest player to play snooker? Most definitely. As good as an electronic brain programmed to play it? Quite possibly.

The only difference being is that he sees the shot quicker.

In the same year O’Sullivan was racing around the crucible for his trademark maximum, the world chess champion Garry Kasparov was losing to Deep Blue, a computer orchestrated by IBM to provide evidence that a machine can be built to defeat the intellectual wares of a chess grandmaster.

Deep Green would be given short shrift by O’Sullivan. The same with Google's DeepMind Go machine. Artificial intelligence has got nothing on the only way is Essex.

The T-1000 Liquid metal model from Terminator 2 would have burned through a hole in its chair if it had been playing O’Sullivan on Sunday, beaten and crushed before it had even formed.

There is nothing any machine can do when it is left idle. Especially when a machine wearing an evening suit and a pair of Saucony trainers is dominating the table.

O’Sullivan, sporting runners instead of shoes due to a dodgy ankle, played 11 frames, enjoyed a pot success rate of 98 percent and won nine of them while missing only six pots. Most of them came in the third frame, a frame he won on the black for a 2-1 lead after a slight malfunction. After that, he never looked back as he devoured the balls with as much glee as Stephen Lee brandishing a betting slip.

He made four centuries and five breaks over 50 with Wilson failing to pot a ball in five of the 11 frames over two hours and 38 minutes. 115, 54, 131, 77, 87, 96, 50, 127 and 132 simply bamboozled Wilson, whose contributions of 74 and 109 showed he was hardly in bad nick.

O’Sullivan is a bloke who lives his life in fits and starts. One minute Ronnie talks about loving snooker, the next he wants as far away from the table as a child who ruined its appetite with treats.

He has toyed with the idea of playing on his own tour, but what is the point of that when the current tour is already between you and the rest?

Snooker is his domain, a sport he transcends, a game he makes look as easy as slotting pool balls in a pub.

Even amid the copious threats to retire, like a compulsive gambler, it keeps drawing him back.

The lure of making money is a huge draw for someone who places a large emphasis on the folding stuff, but it can’t be the solitary reason to confine yourself to a darkened room for days on end trying to solve the equation. Money is not the sole reason to do anything in life.

Judging by his Twitter behaviour, O’Sullivan loves attention and adulation, but he also knows deep down that nobody can or will play the game to his level.

A labour of love? His pride, pain, joy and guilty pleasure, most certainly. O’Sullivan’s passion for snooker should not be underestimated amid the soap opera and the mood swings that make one him one of the most compelling champions of our times.

Through his life and times, the one constant has been snooker. It has never abandoned him even when he decided to go take a year off to work on a farm in between winning his fourth and fifth world titles in 2012 and 2013.

His battle with his mental demons are not unique. Everybody in life has their crosses to bear, some more than others.

Snooker is a microcosm of life. It is you against yourself. The race is always against yourself, nobody else. It is unforgiving and uncharitable. And the pay is negligible if you are not winning.

You come into the world alone, and you are going out of it alone. In between, you have to find something else to do with your time.

Despite being surrounded by various characters that one could be forgiven for thinking snooker is a form of pugilism, O'Sullivan's success comes down to himself. Naturally gifted, but also a natural grafter. For someone apparently eccentric, O'Sullivan knows what he is good at. And sticks at it.

Sports psychologist Dr Steve Peters can offer so much, but performing comes down to the individual in sport. Mental stamina is needed as much as physical alertness.

And when he does what he does best, he probably deserves a bigger audience than a leisure centre in Yorkshire. But these are the rules of supply and demand.

Snooker is not as rich as tennis or golf, but then they are sports who do not possess the narrative of O’Sullivan. Attention spans are dwindling, but O’Sullivan’s excellence at snooker is a skill that should be appreciated as much as hitting a 59 over the Old Course.

O’Sullivan spoke about his craft over the weekends. It is a craft. O’Sullivan in Barnsley on Sunday was the epitome of a skilled craftsman at work. A black belt of the green baize.

The broadcaster, comedian and raconteur Stephen Fry once described O'Sullivan as the Mozart of snooker. Quite apt, but it is debatable if Mozart composed to the same level as O'Sullivan pots balls.

O'Sullivan does not merely play snooker, he performs it. At 41, he is revelling in a view that looks golden from atop his ridge.

The O'Sullivan Opus is some way off completion.