There are the obvious parallels – the hush when a swimmer is about to dive off the starting blocks, or when a player serves during a tennis match – but none quite the same as snooker.
“You almost daren’t breathe heavily because you think you are going to put them [players] off”, said BBC Sport’s Jamie Broughton, who is at the Crucible Theatre.
The Crucible, the venue of the World Snooker Championship, has a capacity of just 980.
“The strength is its atmosphere, we call it ‘claustrophobic intimacy’. You could lean over and touch a player, it really is intense,” Broughton adds.