From the NYT:

Woman Competes Against Men in World Snooker, and Advances

By VICTOR MATHER APRIL 6, 2017 Top snooker players, at least in England, get the same kind of attention as other sports heroes. They are fixtures on television, appear in advertisements and make tabloid headlines. They can also earn six-figure prizes when they win an event. That is, if they are men. Reanne Evans is an 11-time world champion of women’s snooker; no man has won more than seven. But she is used to picking up checks of four figures, or even three, for her wins. Women’s snooker is seldom televised, and Evans has nothing like the public profile of players like the colorful five-time world champion Ronnie O’Sullivan. Still, snooker, the pool variant with a sometimes bewildering array of 22 colored balls on the table, would seem to be a sport that favors neither men nor women, since strength and size are not major assets. Evans, invited to participate in this year’s world snooker championship in Sheffield, England, struck a blow for the overlooked women’s game by winning her first match on Wednesday, 10-8, over Robin Hull of Finland, the 57th ranked man.

In other words, it’s international news when the completely dominant 11-time women’s world champion narrowly beats the 57th ranked man.

… In 2014, Steve Davis, a six-time world champion, said of female snooker players to the BBC: “The male of the species has got a single-minded, obsessional type of brain that I don’t think so many females have.” He said he did not think a woman would ever qualify for the 32-player main draw of the worlds. Evans is two wins away.

I had a boss in the marketing research business who was a really good billiards player. But his superiority over me was overwhelmingly mental in that he could see many shots ahead. We’d have conversations like this:

“Steve, why did you sink the 4 ball?”

“Uh, because I could, George.”

“But what does it leave you?”

“Uh [considering the question for the first time] … the 10 ball!”

“Sure. But what will that leave you?”

[Blank look on my face]

“You’ll next try for the 12 or the 2, and you’ll miss, and leave the cue ball set up for me with a slam dunk on the 9, then the 13, then the 11, then the 3, 7, uh, 5, 1, and the 8 ball. As soon as you chose to sink the 4, it was Game Over.”

“Oh. I … didn’t realize that.”

I imagine there are women who can hold a similarly complex chain of social reasoning in their heads — “But if Sally tells Jane what Joe told her about Mike’s opinion of what Melissa said about Mary’s cousin Al …” But ever since the days of Newtonian physics, billiard balls have exemplified a non-human universe of cause and effect, so there must not be many women interested in honing their brains to be able to think like a pool shark.