Cue Sports — Where to Watch
Snooker, pool and billiards are three different sports with three different rights pictures, and the one most people mean when they ask is snooker. Snooker is a touring professional sport with an established pay-television home in Britain, a long-standing free-to-air presence in China, and almost nothing in between. Pool is more fragmented again, and the American game in particular has no single dominant broadcaster in our research at all.
What the two have in common is this: cue sports are cheap to produce and cheap to carry, which is why they turn up in the free sections of general sports services and in the portfolios of pay channels that needed something to fill the schedule. That is a good thing for a viewer, and it is also why rights move.
| Country | Who shows it | Free option |
|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom and Ireland | TNT Sports carries snooker. It is one of the rights named in its portfolio alongside the Champions League, the Premier League, MotoGP, UFC and the Premiership rugby. Note that TNT Sports moved to HBO Max, which launched in the UK and Ireland on 26 March 2026, and is available standalone at about £30.99 a month or on a 12-month saver. | None confirmed for snooker. |
| Germany | DAZN lists snooker among its rights in the German market. | None confirmed specifically for snooker, though DAZN’s free tier is real — a free account, no subscription, and it includes the PDC darts among its free channels. Whether the same free tier carries the snooker we could not verify. |
| Belgium | Proximus Pickx lists snooker in its sports line-up, on the TV Sports tier at about €24.99 a month. | None confirmed. |
| Denmark | Max, formerly HBO Max, carries snooker as part of its sport add-on at about 40 kr a month. The discovery+ service closed in Denmark on 28 July 2025 and its sport moved to Max. | None confirmed. |
| Hong Kong | Now TV carries snooker inside its sports packages. Third-party resellers advertise it in the combined sports bundles, not as a package of its own. | None confirmed. |
| China | CCTV-5 publishes a dedicated billiards channel in its own channel list, alongside its general sports channels. | CCTV is free-to-air with no login or paywall shown, and streams free on its own site and app. It blocks viewers outside mainland China. |
| Singapore | Singtel carries the World Pool Championships on its business “Sports Pack Plus”, alongside the Champions League and the FA Cup. | None confirmed. |
| Pakistan | Pakistan Television lists snooker among the sports it covers, alongside cricket, football and hockey. | Not confirmed. Our source does not state whether PTV’s coverage is free-to-air, so we are not claiming that it is. |
| United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, Africa | Not confirmed in our research. We found no verified rights holder for snooker, pool or billiards in any of these markets. | None confirmed. |
Can you watch it free?
In one place clearly, in several places possibly, and in most places not at all.
- China. CCTV is the strongest free route we could confirm anywhere. It is a free-to-air state broadcaster, it publishes a dedicated billiards channel in its own line-up, and its streams are free on its site and app with no login and no paywall. It is geo-locked to mainland China.
- Germany. DAZN’s free tier is permanent and needs only an account, and it includes nine free channels whose names we verified include PDC Darts. We could not confirm snooker on it, so treat this as a maybe rather than a route.
- Everywhere else. Nothing we could confirm. Snooker’s British home is a pay channel, and the European services that carry it carry it inside a general sports tier rather than free.
This is the thinnest page on the site, and that is the honest result. Cue sports are widely watched and thinly documented: the rights are bundled into general sports tiers, they move without announcement, and the governing bodies do not publish the kind of per-territory broadcaster lists that football and cricket do. We would rather say so than fill the gaps with plausible-sounding names.
The cheapest legal route
- China. Nothing. CCTV with no login, geo-locked to mainland China.
- UK and Ireland. TNT Sports at about £30.99 a month, or the 12-month saver which works out cheaper per month. There is no free trial, and it is the same subscription that carries the Champions League and the Premier League, so it only makes sense as a snooker purchase if you want the rest of it too.
- Germany. Check DAZN’s free tier first. It costs nothing but an account, and if the snooker is not in it you have lost nothing by looking.
- Denmark and Belgium. Snooker arrives as a line inside a general sports add-on rather than as a package of its own, so the question is what else you would watch on that tier.
- Elsewhere. We could not confirm a legal route in any other market, so there is nothing to recommend.
Where can I watch snooker?
In the UK and Ireland it is on TNT Sports, which now streams through HBO Max. In Germany DAZN lists it. In Belgium it is on Proximus Pickx and in Denmark on Max. In China CCTV runs a dedicated billiards channel free-to-air. For the United States and most of the rest of the world our research found no confirmed rights holder.
Is snooker on free-to-air television?
In China, yes — CCTV is free-to-air with a free stream and a dedicated billiards channel. In Europe the strongest confirmed route is DAZN’s free tier in Germany, but our research verifies PDC darts on that tier, not snooker, so we are not claiming the snooker is there.
Does DAZN carry snooker?
DAZN lists snooker among its rights in Germany, and DAZN runs a permanent free tier with a free account that is explicitly not a trial. Whether the snooker sits inside that free tier is not something our research settles, so check on DAZN itself before assuming it is free.
Where can I watch pool and the World Pool Championships?
The only confirmed broadcaster we found is Singtel in Singapore, which carries the World Pool Championships on its Sports Pack Plus business tier. The American pool scene in particular has no verified rights holder in our research, so this page does not name one.
Where to go next
Darts Watching sport in the UK in Germany Free-to-air sport Free live TV channels Table tennis