Refereeing at main tournaments just like the World Snooker Championship is barely a part of one official’s earnings.
Malgorzata Kanieska juggles her profession as a snooker referee with working at an airport (Picture: Getty)
Snooker referee Malgorzata Kanieska combines her work officiating among the greatest matches on the earth along with her profession in aerospace. As if one disturbing occupation wasn’t sufficient for the baize umpire.
Kanieska made her debut on the 2025 World Snooker Championship when she took management of a Crucible fixture for the primary time. Nonetheless, she’s not at the moment assigned to be on name when play will get underway for the 2026 event this weekend. The Warsaw-born official began working within the snooker sphere way back to 2010. Nonetheless, she nonetheless works a daily job in Poland, the place she’s chargeable for structuring operations to make sure issues run as as easily as attainable.
Chatting with Framed: The Snooker Podcast final 12 months, Kanieska mentioned: “Once I did my first skilled occasion I used to be finding out. Now I am simply working full-time and I take days off to go to tournaments, that is the largest change.”
One must be a real fanatic of the game to tackle the stress of refereeing on their time without work. Nonetheless, such is Kanieska’s ardour for snooker that she’s prepared to make that sacrifice.
“I can cancel flights,” she added. “When there’s industrial motion, or airports will be closed, or aircrafts will be broken, I’ve the ability to cancel flights – fortunately I don’t contact passengers in order that makes it simpler.”
Kanieska’s peer, Rob Spencer, has been assigned to referee the 2026 World Snooker Championship closing on Could 4. In the meantime, she is because of watch this 12 months’s competitors from the sidelines as she plots a comeback on the game’s grandest stage.
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