The Four Musketeers and the Spaceman

They share no less than 12 national snooker titles between them. Robert Burda, Robert Bütof, Bernhard Müllner, and Hans Nirnberger know how to win tournaments. Now they want to show others how to play the game. The quartet have teamed up to form the Künstlerbüro Snooker-Team, named after Künstlerbüro, an artist and entertainment agency in Vienna owned by Burda. In association with KÖÖ - the organisation that runs a dozen Billardcafés in Vienna - the team will travel along all snooker clubs in Austria's capital to play exhibition matches and promote the game of snooker.

...The Künstlerbüro Snooker-Team: Hans Nirnberger, Robert Burda, Robert Bütof, Bernhard Müllner...

Who can do a better promotion than four of the most successful players in Austrian snooker history? Watch their amazing list of national titles:
> Robert Burda [3]: 1992, 1994, 1996.
> Robert Bütof [2]: 1997, 2001.
> Bernhard Müllner [2]: 1998, 2006.
> Hans Nirnberger [5]: 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005.

The Four Musketeers kick off their tour on Tuesday, September 25 at the Revue Bar, near the famous St. Stephan's Cathedral in the heart of Vienna. And what a night it promises to be, as they will get some real good company... by Dominic Dale! The Welshman, nicknamed The Spaceman, won the first Main Tour event of the new season at the Roewe Shanghai Masters last month, ten years after his first ranking title back in 1997. The victory saw Dale jumping into the top 16 of the provisional world rankings. Starting at 18.00 CET, Dale will play a couple of frames, show some trick shots, and will be available for pictures and autographs - all for free, thanks to kind cooperation between KÖÖ and the 15Reds snooker club.

...Vienna awaits Dominic "The Spaceman" Dale for an extraordinary exhibition night...

The Künstlerbüro Snooker-Team will next visit KÖÖ 1190 at the Q19 shopping mall in Vienna-Döbling on October 10, starting their exhibition at 21.00 CET. The tour should give the popularity of snooker in Austria another boost as it possibly attracts new players to pick up a snooker cue and helps other players to perform better.

But it's not all about showing off. The team also has a serious competitive ambition as it will train and prepare together for the big snooker events, inside and out of Austria. Talking about big events: the first Austrian Snooker League Grand Prix is staged upcoming weekend at the CSC club in Innsbruck, hometown to No. 1 ranked Richard McHugh. But... the Irishman himself does not enter the event! More on that in the next report here on Maximumbreak.