Chan Ming-tung is still too small to play on a full-size snooker table, but the expanse of its baize doesn't faze him one bit. With a gently chalked cue, steady eye - and 8cm platforms on his shoes - the nine-year-old reaches for the white ball and slams a red into the top right-hand corner pocket. Then he pots another, and then another, and before you can say 'pot black', the youngster's cleared the table at the Prat Billiard Club in Tsim Sha Tsui.
Dong-dong, as Ming-tung is fondly called, lines up such shots every Sunday at the Hong Kong Billiard Sports Control Council's coaching sessions for young talent. He earned his slot in the programme in September, when he was runner-up to 11-year-old Kelvin Leong Man-hoi in the first Hong Kong Under-14 Snooker Championship.
Yet Dong-dong only caught the snooker bug in January when his enthusiast dad, Calvin Chan Fung, brought him along to watch a few frames at the South China Athletic Association's billiards club in So
Kon Po. Now, their Causeway Bay home is virtually a shrine to local ace Marco Fu Ka-chun, and Dong-dong regularly studies his idol's match videos after school.
At the training session, coach Neville Jeung Siu-hin summons Dong-dong, Kelvin and three other boys around his table and assigns them their latest drill. The boys arrange the balls into the shape of a cross, and tap them into the pockets, one by one.
Such coaching was almost impossible a few years back, says Jeung, a council committee member. The game was popular in Hong Kong in the 1980s but declined with the karaoke craze, and council members worried about its survival. But the sport revived with the televised success of Chinese players on the international circuit.