‘You’re absolutely trapped’: welcome to the loneliest seat in sport

Ding Junhui throws back his head and allows his eyes to droop closed for a few seconds. Opens them. Closes them. Finally, with a kind of resignation, opens them again. Ruffles the hair at his temples with both hands, as if trying to shake himself awake. Meanwhile, oblivious to any of this, his opponent Jack Lisowski continues to pot balls and rack up points: just a few feet away and yet in an entirely different world.

Welcome to the loneliest seat in sport. For the next minutes, perhaps even hours, this is your whole world and its horizons are extremely limited. You get a couple of bottles of water and a small table. You can’t leave. You can’t make a sound. No teammates or coach for solace. No way of knowing when you can get up again. Your opponent is busily clearing the table, playing you out of the frame. And – the worst part – it’s usually your own fault that you’re sitting there.

Almost all sports incorporate moments of quiet time: breaks, lulls, pauses in the action. But there is nothing that quite mirrors the elaborate torture, the solitude and powerlessness, of The Chair. It is, according to seven-time world champion Stephen Hendry, “what sets snooker apart from any other sport. You’re absolutely trapped. It’s a horrible feeling.”

The average snooker player will spend, give or take, half their career sitting in The Chair. How do they cope? What does it do to their focus, their patience, their sanity? And – perhaps most mundanely of all – what on earth are they thinking about?

“It can be the most random things,” says Mark Allen, the world No 3. “What I’m having for dinner. What I have left on the shopping list. Random, random things. Really, you should be concentrating on the task at hand. But sometimes matches and sessions can be so long, you need to let your mind wander a little.”

The six-time world champion Steve Davis says: “You’re aware of crisp packets. The granny in the front row with a bag of boiled sweets who decides to open one carefully because she thinks it’s going to make less noise. But it makes more.”

Different players have always handled the monotony of The Chair in different ways. Mark Selby stares bleakly into space. Allen, one of the more kinetic players on the tour, rarely sits still: eyes darting towards the ceiling, towards the scoreboard, towards the other table. Ronnie O’Sullivan lolls and slouches, propping his head up with his hand, scarcely disguising his ennui.

Of all snooker’s greats, it is O’Sullivan who has perhaps the most polarised relationship with The Chair. “The first time I have ever felt absolutely helpless at a snooker table,” was how Ricky Walden described their encounter at the 2014 Masters, in which O’Sullivan dispatched a world record 556 points without reply. But O’Sullivan has often struggled when marooned in The Chair himself. Earlier in his career he tried putting a towel on his head to block out external thoughts. When referees banned him from doing that, he began taking a spoon into the arena and counting the dots in the pattern on the handle.

For players already predisposed that way, the void of the chair can unleash a torrent of negative thoughts. In recent years Selby, the four-time world champion, has begun to speak more candidly about the mental health struggles that have afflicted him throughout his career. “It wasn’t so much the actual playing that was difficult, more the sitting in your seat,” he said in 2022. “When I was at the table I had things to keep the mind active. But sitting in my chair, you’re in your own headspace, thinking about all the rest.”

So what, at a psychological level, is going on here? “Our brain craves certainty and control,” says Jeremy Snape, a former England cricketer and now a sports psychologist who hosts the Inside the Mind of Champions podcast. “In their absence, we try to fill the gaps. As for the self-talk, our brain wants us to keep safe. So we often hear the inner critic, preparing us to lose. The champions are able to reframe the pressure and negativity to the things in their control.”

The problem is that The Chair can easily become a self-prophesying spiral. “When you’re always sitting back in your chair as a result of a mistake, you have to process that mistake,” says the veteran Dominic Dale, who lost his first-round match 10-1 to Kyren Wilson. “It shatters your concentration. It takes you out of the zone.”

Davis learned his game in an earlier era when big breaks were rarer, mistakes not so brutally punished, plentiful booze and cigarettes to balm the tedium. Even so, he still had to learn techniques to maintain his focus. “The longer you sit on your chair stewing, the more you can go off the boil,” he says. “So over the years I used to write myself a note with a swing thought. A coaching aid. ‘Keep your head still’; ‘Finish the shot off’; ‘Get your bridge closer’. Sometimes it worked. Other times I got beat, went back and tore the note into a million shreds.”

Snape argues that the best way to fight the sense of powerlessness is to reclaim some sense of agency. “Is it time for someone to change the game?” he wonders. “Like the goalkeeper walking up to give the ball to the penalty taker. I’m sure there’s an etiquette at the table. But they could stand and stretch. Sitting is such a passive and submissive state, which reinforces the active control of the player at the table.”

For Wilson, who takes on Joe O’Connor in the second round on Saturday evening, body language is key. Herein lies the strange duality of The Chair: you’re being seen without being watched. Both part of the action and utterly extrinsic to it. “You need to be in the present,” he says. “You know people are watching, so you always need to send positive messages. If you’re sat there sulking, you’re only going to inspire your future opponents.”

And in this respect, the competitors at this event have one big advantage: the Crucible itself. The unique intimacy and intensity of the arena, the sport’s biggest tournament taking place in one of its smallest spaces, carries its own inbuilt stimulus. “This place will focus your thoughts,” says Davis. “Maybe at smaller events you might be a little less focused. But this tournament, you’re watching.” A note of caution, perhaps, to Barry Hearn before he decides to move this most treasured of events to some draughty enormo-dome in Saudi Arabia.

So yes, this is a kind of loneliness. But a gilded and privileged kind of loneliness, the sort of loneliness that feels like a reward as well as a curse. Dale is 52 and fought through two rounds of qualifying to reach the world championship for the first time in a decade. “When I last played the Crucible, I was much more competitive,” he says. “I still had ambition and desire. When you get to your 40s and 50s, you understand that you’re doing your best. If it isn’t good enough, don’t worry about it.”

And so as he sat in his chair, watching Wilson clear up the last few balls to win the match, Dale smiled, thinking how far he had come. “Some great players had to qualify,” he says. “Stephen Maguire, Stuart Bingham. Even Neil Robertson didn’t make it. So I’m proud of myself. I understand that I might not ever get the chance to play here again.

“Never,” he says by way of conclusion, “forget the beauty of the game of snooker.”