The 2026 World Snooker Championship is under way at the Crucible in Sheffield — a natural point to rerun the forecast from last April, when we put Elo on five decades of results and ran ten million tournament simulations. John Higgins led our list at 13.14%; Zhao Xintong was fourth at 10.58% but took the 2025 title and has stayed at or near the top of the ratings since.
[Read More]Whether a game counts as “skill” or “chance” isn’t just a pub argument — in many countries it’s a legal distinction. Roulette and blackjack live on the “chance” side; tennis and chess are filed under “skill”. Different rules, different taxes, different ways for people to lose money.
The trouble is that this line is usually drawn by tradition and gut feeling. Is poker really “more skill” than backgammon? Is snooker closer to roulette or closer to chess? A group of economists tried to answer that question more systematically: instead of arguing, measure how “skill-heavy” a game is in practice by looking at the Elo ratings of all its players. We’ll meet their work properly in a bit.
[Read More]This blog is usually all about board games, but let’s stretch the definition just a little: snooker is, after all, one of the most widely followed tabletop games in the world. And with the World Championship kicking off at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, I couldn’t resist the excuse to dive into something a bit different.
In the last article, we looked at how Elo ratings can be used to measure player strength over time. This time, we’ll take it a step further: using historical match data, a bit of Python, and a lot of simulated tournaments, we’ll try to predict who’s most likely to lift the trophy this year. We’ll also compare our predictions to what the betting markets say – and see whether the wisdom of the crowd agrees with the cold logic of the model.
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