can measure, precisely, when and how fast he got properly famous. Just over three weeks ago, on 14 April, he opened a Twitter account with the cheery "Hello twitter!!", swiftly followed by "In nandos tucking into half a chicken!!" (he is fond of exclamation marks. And food.) Initially @judd147t, "part time snooker player, full time international playboi!!" [sic] had some 200 followers – respectable, for a normal citizen. Then he went to Sheffield and played his first game in his second World Championship, which, after a wobbly – and duly tweeted – beginning ("Nervy start but gotta take 5-4 powwow!!"), he won, dispatching the title holder, Neil Robertson. The follower count jumped to 3,000. "I was shocked. And then I started publicising it a little bit, and said I'd love to get up to 10,000, or 20,000, and then one day, after, I think, my semi-final" – a game which, by fearlessly going for shots others might avoid ("If in doubt hit it as hard as you can?!!"), he both thrilled his audience and won – "it jumped from like 10,000 to 25,000, and I was really shocked. I overtook all of the rest of the snooker players." By the end of last week, over 51,000 followers were being informed that it was "time to put a dent in the bank balance in london today!!