On Tuesday morning, Apr 21st 2026, Ronnie O'Sullivan decided his cue was wrong. He had played through the first session at the World Snooker Championships with it, taken a 7-2 lead, and described it afterwards as hopeless. So he went back to Ireland, reached under a bed, and retrieved an old cue unused for most of the year. He returned to Sheffield, made two centuries, and won 10-2 in thirty-five minutes.

There was no specification review. No consultation with a cue technician. No measurable basis for the switch. He picked it up because it felt right.

Twenty-nine years ago at the same Crucible, Ronnie made the fastest maximum break in professional snooker history. The 147 against Mick Price in the first round on 21 April 1997 took 5 minutes and 8 seconds (originally reported as 5 minutes 20 seconds before the official correction): an average of 8.5 seconds per shot across thirty-six consecutive pots. Not enough time, in most of them, to evaluate the angle, select the pace, and execute. The shots were not being chosen. They were being executed from somewhere below deliberation.

For twenty years the record was reported as 5 minutes 20 seconds, because the BBC timer operator had started it fractionally too early. The break was moving faster than he could track.

TThe philosopher Michael Polanyi called it tacit knowledge: the expertise that cannot be fully articulated. We know more than we can tell. The master craftsman, the experienced surgeon, the snooker player averaging 8.5 seconds per shot: all working from knowledge that lives below conscious explanation. Ask them how they do it and the answer is always partial, always slightly beside the point.

Sport has spent the past two decades trying to solve this. GPS trackers, shot-selection models, biometric load data, performance dashboards: the ambition is to make what the best performers do legible enough to understand, transmit, and replicate. The assumption running beneath all of it is that elite performance can, in principle, be broken down. Documented. Scaled.

What Ronnie represents is the limit of that assumption. At 8.5 seconds per shot, there is no decision trail to reconstruct. The data captures what happened. It cannot recover the knowledge that produced it. And the harder an organisation pushes to extract that knowledge, the more likely it is to introduce the one thing that costs them most. Deliberation.

Organisations that try to codify their best people rarely destroy the output overnight. What they do is compress the ceiling. The frameworks raise the floor, and that feels like progress, because the average improves. But the exceptional performer, the one whose value lived precisely in what they could not fully explain, quietly becomes something a little more ordinary.

Ronnie O'Sullivan is fifty and pursuing a record eighth World Championship title at the Crucible, one beyond the seven he shares with Stephen Hendry. In March at the World Open in China, he made a break of 153, the highest in professional snooker history. He was given a free ball, and from that point cleared the table in the way he always clears tables: without visible deliberation, at a pace that resists measurement.

The cue under the bed is not a quirk. It is the whole point.

📚 “Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions” by Gary Klein
Experts in high-stakes environments do not analyse options and select the best one, they recognise patterns and act. Intuition is not the opposite of expertise; it is what expertise becomes. Klein's research is the empirical foundation beneath Polanyi's philosophy.

🗣️ “Ronnie O'Sullivan in Studio: Natural Talent, Greatest 147, Snooker Psychology” by Newstalk / Off the Ball, YouTube, May 2023
Listening to the world's most instinctive performer attempt to articulate his instinct is the most direct illustration available of Polanyi's argument. The gaps in what he can say are exactly what this piece is about..

🧑‍💻 "Angles of Approach" by Sally Rooney, The New York Review of Books, 2025
A novelist grappling with exactly the problem this piece describes. Rooney writes that she wants to write books the way Ronnie plays snooker, then admits she never will. That admission is the tacit knowledge argument in a single sentence.

Until next time

Business lessons from the world of sport