Snooker Referee Banned From Officiating One Player At UK Championship

A snooker referee is banned from officiating any match involving one player during the 2025 UK Championship.

The tournament gets underway at the York Barbican on Saturday afternoon, with world number one Judd Trump in action.

Ronnie O'Sullivan, meanwhile, makes his return to competitive snooker in the UK on Tuesday when he faces China's Zhou Yuelong.

There are a total of 32 players competing in the tournament, with each round contested over a best of 11 frames until the final, which is a best-of-19 frame encounter.

A number of high-profile players dropped out of the competition in the qualifying phase, with the likes of Jack Lisowski, Stuart Bingham, Joe O'Connor and Hossein Vafaei all failing to qualify.

One player who did make it through is Leicester-born cueist Ben Woollaston, who reached the second round of the World Championship earlier this year by beating Mark Selby.

The 38-year-old takes on John Higgins on Saturday evening on the back of part of a career resurgence over the last 12 months.

Woollaston developed chronic fatigue in 2021, telling BBC Sport that he was 'bed ridden for six months, sleeping 18 or 20 hours a day'.

As recently as January 2024, he said he was 'not perfect', but has shown signs of improvement since and has qualified for every tournament bar one this season.

Woollaston goes into every professional snooker match knowing that he won't be officiated by World Snooker referee Tatiana Woollaston - who he married in 2011.

The pair met a year earlier in 2010 and have two children together.

Tatiana is prohibited from officiating any of her husband's matches on the World Snooker Tour, though the Belarusian has previously said that, even if she was allowed, she wouldn't want to anyway.

"He's on the circuit on as a player, I'm on the circuit as a referee," she told the Daily Mirror in 2024.

Image: Twitter/@tatiana_referee

"We've never really mixed that. I'm obviously not allowed to referee his games and I wouldn't want to, to be fair."

The 39-year-old, who has been on the World Snooker Tour circuit since 2011, has never officiated a World Championship final.

But she did take charge of a semi-final between Kyren Wilson and David Gilbert last year, and refereed the UK Championship final between Judd Trump and Barry Hawkins in December.

O'Sullivan wants her to take charge of the showpiece match at the Crucible, telling Eurosport after the Wilson/Gilbert match: "Best ref in the world. By a mile. All day long for me."