I don’t think any sport expects it’s participants to perform at their best ‘no matter what’ - there are always rules, regulations and systems in place to ensure sport is fair and without compromise. If it helps think of this as being like a performance enhancing drug.
That said it’s a novel problem and not one I think is necessarily best solved by banning amateurs from professional competitions - I don’t really know what the solution to the problem is but I do recognise the problem and how it would put a professional player at a disadvantage.
Any competition where a professional is at a disadvantage because of the presence of amateurs isn’t a competition between professionals to begin with. It’s a club with members and non-members.
Professional sports players are always expected to perform at their best, any failure to perform is scrutinised as closely as excessive/unexpected achievement. Partly this is to protect the betting industry. Obviously their best is subject to all kinds of pressures and conditions.
I think perhaps we’re talking about different things.
What I was attempting to say is that it’s like telling a clean weightlifter that they shouldn’t complain about dopers because they should be performing at their best no matter what. The point is they are but the other competitor has a potential (and very real) advantage.
Perhaps if you choose to see it purely as ‘amateurs vs professionals’ whilst ignoring the factors that make that distinction relevant - but I agree that’s the problematic aspect.
It’s also a simplification as in this case the competitor wasn’t ‘amateur’ in the traditional sense - he was a professional that had retired.
What @the_borderer said, plus snooker is one of those games where someone can have only a very slightly off day, or even only a very slightly off couple of shots at key stages of the game and it can result in disaster if the otherwise not quite as good opponent has one or two strokes of brilliance at key points.
No I guess I was awkwardly addressing the room/author haha I appreciated when I read it that it might sound more strange that it really is and being a snooker nerd I felt it was my time to shine.
The sport hasn’t changed all that much - there might have been more alcoholics but I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the reason for that is how it mitigates what we’re discussing
Well he’s lumping a group of people together because he’s talking about that group of people. China has its own snooker scene, that’s what he’s talking about.
Like if an American hockey player were talking about the Canadian boys.
He’s also not dumping on them, he’s saying that the amateur seen has a lot of skill in it. Which is true, a lot of great snooker players are coming out of China.
