Hi all. Last night I played snooker again and it was okay. One frame was absolutely superb. With two nineteen breaks and one of sixteen it was no catching up for my worthy opponent Jaap who just about won every other frame. I guess he had it coming after butchering both Bas and myself ;-) The major down side of yesterday snooker was soccer. True fans of this so immense popular game should now switch channels, or click somewhere to go elsewhere, or back, or whatever because this ain't gonna be pretty ... A couple of words to describe the situation: a snooker center. Huge screen with beamer. About fifteen people sitting there. All making a enormous amount of noise together, cheering and laughing etc. Soccer commentary on every loudspeaker with a volume to fill an entire stadium, should their sound system quit. No vacant seats. When not snookering you'd have to 'hang around' until you can play again. Right. When I go to a snooker center I go there for two reasons: to rest and enjoy the calmness and to play snooker. One of them wasn't going to happen and you're not even going to get a chance to guess which one. The other thing that killed me was the lack of even one single chair at the table. Standing all evening tore my back apart and even though the owner of the center asked if I needed a chair, I never got one. Then the noise ... Man it was loud. The ones sitting farthest from each other were no more than fifteen feet apart but they were making so much noise that some of 'em would not have had to leave home to hear the other. On top of that there also were a couple of dogs barking up one anothers end so all together it was hell. The headache didn't help there also, I'll be the first to acknowledge that, but still ... geez. By the way I'm not stupid. I do know there is this European Championship going on and that these are, for the fans at least, good games to watch. But still I believe that in a snooker center there should always be at least some degree of calmness. Last night unfortunately that wasn't the case. Usually I can take this kind of racket until a certain degree. A couple of the regulars are quite noisy sometimes but I can live with that. It happens, nothing you can do. I'll have to open my own snooker center and do it better to rule that out so they won't here me about that. Last night it all was just a little too much and I wasn't my usual happy chappy self. I did enjoy myself but the balance between fun and irritation wasn't that great. When I dropped Bas off at his home and drove home I was thinking to myself that as long as this European Championship soccer continues I wasn't going back there to prevent me from getting nuts. Now that I've had not much but still some sleep it may not be as bad as it seems. We'll see. I guess I like the game to d*mn much too skip a evening of snooker, but I do need to be able to stay focused to play it well. There is something I need to work on, just shutting out all the noise and have fun in what I'm doing. Maybe I'll give it just one more try, who knows ... Thanks for hearing me out, I just needed to get this off my chest for now, when I'm relaxed again I'll tell you guys the fun part of the deal.