Still open when
nothing else is.

Early afternoon is the quietest the room gets, and by some distance the best time to learn on a full-size table. Nobody is waiting for it, nobody is watching, and you can spend forty minutes failing to pot a long red without feeling like you are holding anybody up.

The busiest stretch. Eight snooker tables means there is usually still one free, but if you are coming with three friends and want two tables together, this is the hour to ring ahead about.

Adelaide’s northern suburbs are not generously supplied with places to be at nine on a Tuesday that do not involve drinking. This room is one of them, and being unlicensed is exactly why it works at this hour rather than in spite of it.

It is also the hour that shift workers actually have. A room that opens at one in the afternoon and runs past midnight is a room built around people whose day does not end at five.

Tables go dark one at a time as their lamps go off, which is the best thing a snooker room does and the reason the film on the homepage is built the way it is. What is left is two or three lit rectangles in a black room and the sound of the balls. The last tables of the night go on now, an hour before close.

Five nights a week end here. The last frame finishes, the last lamp goes off, and the room is black until one the next afternoon.

An extra hour at the weekend, and the last of it is the part nobody who has played in a room like this forgets: one table still lit, three people who should have gone home, and somebody insisting on one more frame.