low scoring frames at the crucible

[kcfm1967]

Hello everyone

This is my first post. During the world championships 2025 I decided to build a little database of matches/scores from all the various years at the Crucible. I did this (99%) by cutting and pasting data from cuetracker.net, tedious but I did a couple of years per day and by the end I'd all years data.

I did this for 2 reasons - a) to help learn a new IT tool, and b) cos I was interested to be able to answer questions like

There's been 2 matches at the crucible where the match loser WON 8+ frames in a row during the match - which were they? (one is obvious, the other less so)
How many best of 25 matches at the crucible have been won from 8-12 ? (3)
How many 10-0 matches at the crucible ? (2)
...

The rest of this I asked already on the snooker breakfast podcast, Angles didn't know/remember, here's the question I asked him:

There was a crazy frame this year which John Higgins won though he potted only 3 reds (frame 3 vs O'Connor). He won the frame 46-45 after getting a snooker. Not many frames (at Crucible standard) are won with 40-odd points. But as I was curious I checked my stats for who had won a frame with LESS than 40 points at the Crucible. There's a few, but most are not proper frames, likely 3-miss rule, Ronnie conceded one to Maguire while 7-36 down in 2004, etc. However in 1997 cuetracker says Alan McManus lost a frame 30-10 to Lee Walker, round 2, frame 17, in a match he went on to lose. 30-10 is a very low frame score. Alan said maybe he needed snookers, well maybe if it was just blue pink and black on the table and maybe he stuck up the blue. Anyone any other source? Maybe someone with the Almanac ?

Thanks for any help, KM

PS: There's quite a few other obvious errors, frame scores which are impossible like say 60(75)-22 - the numbers in brackets are the 50+ breaks. I've got a list but a) the cue tracker guys Twitter account (@CueTracker_Ron) isn't active any more, and b) whats he going to do about it anyways, I dont know the correct frame scores.

[DeanH]

hello kcfm
welcome to TSF

"Crucible" - have you got a copy of the Crucible Almanac? this is the bible for all things Crucible; the 2025 version is being worked on and will be out soon-ish.

CueTracker - Ron no longer has direct dealings with CueTracker, he has moved onto other projects that pay
If you know of any issues please do let me know, I am one of the data peeps for CueTracker and will be happy to hear what you have found and research if necessary.

1997 Walker-McManus F17, Crucible Almanac has the match as 90-10 with a break of 33.
When Ron was doing these years back in the day, it would be direct from Snooker Scene, scanned, OCR'd, and sometimes the data got squiffy.
And/or sometimes the quality of Snooker Scene in the past we not the best.
I do spend my time fixing old issues.
I will check the entry and edit as necessary

It goes for anyone, if you see anything on CueTracker "squiffy", just shout

With 6,674 tournaments, 330,201 matches, 1,737,148, frames - I am not surprised there are a few issues

[kcfm1967]

Hi Dean

Thanks for replying.

No, I'd certainly like an almanac, but I don't have one.

Thanks for clarifying the 30-10 frame was in fact 90-10.

I've moved in opposite direction from Ron - from paying projects to just doing stuff for a hobby!

I only "indexed" the WC matches played at the Crucible - 1456 matches, 29496 frames by my count.

I've quite a lot of errata, how do you want them sent? I dont see how to send a personal message on the forum. Maybe cos my account is new. Stuff like

1995 R1 19 Mark_Davis Ken_Doherty - 2 frame scores are shown as "80" and "78" - I used 0-80 and 78-0 to make score 10-7, CT shows 9-6

Best, KM

[kcfm1967]

And, before I forget, thanks for all your, and the teams, work on maintaining CueTracker. Those efforts, same as the people at snooker.org, are truly appreciated by 000000s, if quietly!!

[DeanH]

Hi Dean

Thanks for replying.

No, I'd certainly like an almanac, but I don't have one.

Thanks for clarifying the 30-10 frame was in fact 90-10.

I've moved in opposite direction from Ron - from paying projects to just doing stuff for a hobby!

I only "indexed" the WC matches played at the Crucible - 1456 matches, 29496 frames by my count.

I've quite a lot of errata, how do you want them sent? I dont see how to send a personal message on the forum. Maybe cos my account is new. Stuff like

1995 R1 19 Mark_Davis Ken_Doherty - 2 frame scores are shown as "80" and "78" - I used 0-80 and 78-0 to make score 10-7, CT shows 9-6

Best, KM

And, before I forget, thanks for all your, and the teams, work on maintaining CueTracker. Those efforts, same as the people at snooker.org, are truly appreciated by 000000s, if quietly!!

Correct, you need over 10 posts and a bit of patience to gain functions like Private Messaging.
I don't mind, you can just use posts here; or do you use Twitter? I get a lot of info very Direct Messaging there

The team at CueTracker is a massive 3 - me and one other with Admin rights and another who captures lots of events for us
I was early-days working with Herman on snooker.org but found out he already had a large team and CueTracker did not (only 2 back in 2011) so I came over to help out; and got hooked in

Please bare with when you find stuff; it takes me a while to check and recheck; then make the fix; whilst doing a day job so take your time

[kcfm1967]

whats your twitter handle?

Here's my errata list, please check them as I'm human too, and I did this sync over last few weeks and some pages might already have been fixed/changed.

1995 R1 19 Mark_Davis Ken_Doherty - 2 frame scores are "80" and "78" - I used 0-80 and 78-0 to make score 10-7, CT shows 9-6
1985 R1 19 Steve_Davis Neal_Foulds - Frames add to 11-7 but it was 10-8 - given is frame1 33-18(52), maybe was 33-118(52)?
1979 R2 25 John_Virgo Cliff_Thorburn - Frame score given as "113(65);" - maybe "0-113(65);" was meant?
2000 FI 35 Mark_Williams Matthew_Stevens - Frame 2, shown is 28-34(77), was (according to wikipedia) 28-84(77)

and these are all not correct somehow

1984 R2 25 Ray_Reardon Silvino_Francisco frame6 20-79(83)
1985 R1 19 Tony_Meo John_Virgo frame4 11-65(68)
1994 R1 19 Ronnie_O'Sullivan Dennis_Taylor frame4 9-54(55)
1994 R1 19 Alan_McManus Fergal_O'Brien frame4 34-95(98)
1994 R1 19 Ken_Doherty Alex_Higgins frame12 0-63(83)
1994 R2 25 Nigel_Bond Terry_Griffiths frame15 57(82)-0
1997 R1 19 Alain_Robidoux Brian_Morgan frame15 45-60(72)
1997 R2 25 Lee_Walker Alan_McManus frame22 61(81)-0
1997 R2 25 Stephen_Hendry Mark_Williams frame5 24-61(66)
1997 QF 25 Alain_Robidoux Lee_Walker frame21 60(61)-0
1997 SF 33 Ken_Doherty Alain_Robidoux frame23 51(74)-6
1998 R1 19 John_Higgins Jason_Ferguson frame5 85(86)-0
2006 R1 19 Stephen_Maguire Mark_King frame6 68(69)-1

and

1997 R2 25 John_Parrott Anthony_Hamilton - Frames add to 14-10 but it was 13-11 - one score wrong way round?
2024 R1 19 David_Gilbert Luca_Brecel - Frames add to 9-9 but it was 10-8 - one score wrong way round?
1996 R2 25 Darren_Morgan Ken_Doherty - Frames add to 14-4 but it was 13-5 - one score wrong way round?
1996 R2 25 Darren_Morgan Ken_Doherty - Frames add to 14-4 but it was 13-5 - one score wrong way round?
1985 R2 25 Terry_Griffiths Alex_Higgins - Frames add to 14-6 but it was 13-7 - one score wrong way round?
1980 R2 25 Ray_Reardon Bill_Werbeniuk - Frames add to 12-7 but it was 13-6 - one score wrong way round?
1980 SF 25 Cliff_Thorburn David_Taylor - Frames add to 17-6 but it was 16-7 - one score wrong way round?
1984 R1 19 Ray_Reardon Jim_Wych - Frames add to 9-8 but it was 10-7 - one score wrong way round?

[DeanH]

LOL
exactly what I did not want, a great long list

Don't worry, I doubt any have been fixed as I have not done any of them

seriously though, thanks for pointing these out; I will try to fix them a soon as with work-work and other ongoing tournaments I am capturing allow


Twitter =
@DeanHsnookerfan

not that I post much, use it to communicate with the CueTracker team and a few other sources, but please do make yourself know there

[kcfm1967]

btw, just on technical side, I simply used cut and and paste (no API access to CueTracker?, I didn't want to use a web scraper but probably should have!)

And for each match took a line like

China Zhao_Xintong 18 (35) 12 Wales Mark_Williams

and its corresponding frame scores:

141(51,77)-0; 100(100)-38; 47-44; 28-66; 77(57)-49; 71-61(61); 119(104)-0; 95(83)-0; 0-86(86); 8-65; 85(71)-9; 74(56)-0; 14-62; 0-72(72); 96(96)-23; 71(71)-63(63); 43-71; 76-5; 18-66; 65(58)-7; 85-45; 104(52)-1; 14-84(66); 79(67)-26; 63-36; 30-101(101); 1-62; 6-96(96); 0-73(73); 110(87)-8

and used a script to covert that into 30 (total frame count) lines in a CSV file, with a bunch of other columns munged from the data. Do that for every match and create a big csv file with around 30 columns, one line per frame per match, and then imported that into elasticsearch so I can view that data in kibana and run different queries. e.g. who has won most frames when. both players have made a 50+ break, in same frame, at the crucible? Who has started a match with a century most often? How many players have finished a match with a century? And so on.

By the way, my original post had 3 questions:

Q: How many best of 25 matches at the crucible have been won from 8-12?
A: Only these 3, which I found a little surprising. Higgins was a blue away from being the 4th.

1978 QF 25 Eddie_Charlton Cliff_Thorburn 13 12
2000 R2 25 Joe_Swail John_Parrott 13 12
2007 QF 25 Shaun_Murphy Matthew_Stevens 13 12

Q: How many 10-0 matches at the crucible ?
A: Only 2.

2019 R1 19 Shaun_Murphy Luo_Honghao 10 0
1992 R1 19 John_Parrott Eddie_Charlton 10 0

Q: There's been 2 matches at the crucible where the match loser WON 8+ frames in a row during the match - which were they?
A: The obvious won was the 1985 final, Taylor lost first 8 frames.
Less obvious one I leave as an exercise for the reader.

If I've got any of that wrong, let me know :-)

[DeanH]

Just seen you following

first question, do you mean how many matches were won at 13-12, 13-11 down to 13-8?

CueTracker has a Statistics page; I have filtered to World Championship, then you can sort the score and page down
https://cuetracker.net/statistics/ma...alifier,6-reds

Question 2 - same page gives 77 matches with that score, but the page does not filter for Crucible years and the Crucible stats do not work

[DeanH]

when I need to extract a tournament from Cue Tracker - I copy the whole from Final to the bottom; paste into Word, use Find/Replace sequence I have created over the years, remove unwanted bits, convert to plain text; manoeuvrer each match into a single paragraph; then copy paste into my excel file. This takes a matter of seconds/minutes depending on how many matches. Then I can do my checks and balances, add new data, and manage the upload to the site

I have no idea what those other software are or do, no need for me to; but good on ya

[kcfm1967]

"Q: How many best of 25 matches at the crucible have been won from 8-12?"

The only way to win a best of 25 from 8-12 is 13-12, i.e. win all of the final 5 frames, frames 21,22,23,24,25 :-)

Only done 3 times at the crucible.

But, from matches that stood at 8-12 (or 12-8, just depends on how you look at it), in a best of 25, at the crucible, of which there have been 125, there are 6 possible results:

8-13 65 times at the crucible
9-13 34 times at the crucible
10-13 12 times at the crucible
11-13 7 times at the crucible
12-13 4 times at the crucible
13-12 3 times at the crucible

That includes this year. So when Williams and Higgins were playing frame 25 of their 2025 QF match, Higgins having come from 8-12 to 12-12, he was the seventh player to have done so, i.e. "recovered" from 8-12 to take it to the final frame. and that final frame had been won by the guy with at-least-4-frames-in-a-row "momentum" 3 times, and the other guy 3 times. So it was sort of a toss up. The momentum thing they often talk about is not supported by the stats in that case.

On tech side, I did everything with effectively 3 tools - a browser, little bits of awk, and a (bash) shell. I only put it into elasticsearch cos thats a tool I was looking to gain more experience with, it's not really ideal for this use case, but comes with kibana which is a decent UI.

What I do think is the broadcasters make pretty poor use of the data they have access to, compared to some other sports, and what they do use is not usually that interesting.

One semi-related idea I've had is that AI tools should be able to look at a table and make a kind of "par" estimate for the break with balls in given position. "He should make at least 50 from here", "even 30 would be a decent break from here", etc. e.g. in chess, if you watch GM games online, you can see who is "winning" with a status bar, even without knowing much about chess itself. Not a perfect analogy, but not that far away either. That was why Higgins winning that frame 46-45, after getting the snooker, was such an achievement. Selby went in-off a repotted black in a similar frame, where he had really no chance to win it.