Snooker Struggles to Deter Match-Fixing as High-Profile Bans Continue
Snooker’s unique one-on-one, turn-based format, and predictable scoring system make it an ideal target for match-fixing compared to many other sports.
Experienced snooker watchers could tell something was wrong when Mark King stepped up to the table to play Joe Perry in the qualifying round of the 2023 Welsh Open. Several of his shot choices seemed odd. He seemed to rush or hit certain balls way too hard. He ignored easy pots for complicated angles.
King lost 4-0.
After the game, his opponent, Joe Perry, would say: “I just thought he had not such a good day at the office. That’s how I saw it.”
There was more to it than that. Betting patterns on the match raised suspicions and the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA) provisionally suspended King in March 2023. In November 2024, the sentence was upheld, with King banned for five years and fined over 68,000 pounds.
This likely marks an ignominious end to a strong career that saw King ranked among the top 32 snooker players in the world for almost twenty years until 2015.
King had struggled extensively with gambling addiction and had extolled the virtues of Gamblers Anonymous for helping him in the past.
But beyond King, his case adds to a series of scandals that have challenged the integrity of snooker.
In 2023, ten Chinese players were banned for their involvement in the sport’s most extensive match-fixing network to date. Two were banned for life, although one of those involved, Zhao Xintong, made a winning return to snooker in October after being banned for 20 months.
24 matches were found to have been fixed thanks to the ring-leading Liang Wenbo & Li Hang, both of whom received lifetime bans from the game and were ordered to pay £43,000 in costs. 36-year-old Liang was singled out as “particularly disgraceful” by the WPBSA Disciplinary Commission, having been found to have put pressure on several “young and impressionable” players, showing “threatening behaviour” towards them, and then failed to cooperate with the investigation.
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