SNOOKER: Jamie Burnett was a little- known player until he hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons this week. David Hendon reports

Until last week, Jamie Burnett was best known for being the only player to have compiled a break in excess of 147 in a professional event.

With the aid of a free ball after his opponent's foul, which counted as an extra red, Burnett completed a 148 at the qualifiers for the UK Championship four years ago.

However, his 9-3 defeat to Stephen Maguire in the televised stage of the same event last Monday has propelled Burnett into the headlines and his professional future may now be in doubt with a World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA) invest-igation to come.

Two days before the match began, the WPBSA, the game's governing body, received a call from a bookmaker to say unusually large bets were being placed on Maguire to win 9-3.

New accounts with Victor Chandler had been opened from Glasgow addresses specifically to bet on 9-3. The information caused alarm bells to ring through the betting industry.

Burnett, from Hamilton, is a friend of Milton-based Maguire and the pair sometimes practise together.

The WPBSA sent an official into the arena to watch and will now review the match having received the tapes from the BBC.

Maguire, the world No 2 and 2004 UK champion, was always the likely winner and a 9-3 victory was not an unreasonable bet. However, many snooker watchers were alarmed by some passages of play. In the seventh frame, with Maguire leading 4-2, Burnett potted the yellow and was perfect on the green but called a foul on himself when he touched the black with his hand. In what proved to be the last frame, he fluked the pink before missing the black.

It was not a routine pot but he missed it by a long way. "It would have been a poor shot for an amateur," said former world champion John Parrott, analysing the incident for the BBC.

Burnett admitted he had known there were suspicious betting patterns on the match but adamantly denied any part. He said he had been under pressure to win the last frame because he knew people would say it was fixed if he did not.

News of the betting irregularities had already gone round the Telford Inter-national Centre. A huge, ironic cheer went up in the players' room when Burnett fluked the pink. An even bigger one greeted his missed black.

Burnett is ranked 44th in the world and has been a professional for 16 years. He enjoyed a strong junior career, winning the British and Scottish junior titles and the 1992 Scottish amateur championship, after which he turned professional. He achieved a highest ranking of 27th in the 1999/2000 season but has never risen above his journeyman status and his TV appearances tend to be sporadic.

He has appeared in three ranking event quarter-finals, the most recent being 10 years ago, and suffered a nightmare Crucible debut in the 1996 World Championship when, needing only the brown to beat Terry Griffiths 10-6, he inexplicably screwed in-off, meaning Griffiths could win the frame. Burnett went on to lose 10-9.

Last season, he constructed a 147 in the Grand Prix qualifiers and indeed made a fine century during his defeat to Maguire. To qualify for Telford, he defeated the highly-rated Jamie Cope 9-7.

Snooker, like any sport, has had the finger pointed at it before but only one player has been punished for match fixing, although Quinten Hann was banned for eight years in 2006 after being recorded on tape by a tabloid newspaper agreeing to throw a match that was ultimately honestly contested.

In 1995, betting was suspended on Jimmy White's match against Peter Francisco in the first round of the World Championship after large sums of money were placed on White winning 10-2. When he did win by this margin an inquiry was immediately launched, although nobody suspected White of malpractice. A panel of former players watched the match back in its entirety and concluded that Francisco had not been trying. He was banned for five years and still competes as an amateur.

A similar panel is likely to be convened now and, if they reach the same conclusion, Burnett faces a lengthy ban.

In match fixing, the loser obviously needs to be part of any plot but the winner, as with White, seldom comes under suspicion.

Snooker insiders do not believe the sport has a major problem but have been concerned by the integrity of certain matches in three tournaments that used a round-robin format, where some players knew after two or three matches that they could not qualify.

In this season's Northern Ireland Trophy, a heavy volume of bets were placed or requested on Liang Wenbo to beat Peter Ebdon 5-0, which he duly did. The Gambling Commission are investigating this match but, unlike with Maguire v Burnett, the WPBSA have not announced any action. Some believe the situation is complicated by the fact Ebdon sits on the WPBSA board of directors.

The investigation into Maguire and Burnett's match is likely to take months, leaving them free to play in this season's remaining events, including the World Championship.

What happens to them, and in particular Burnett, further down the line will depend on whether there is sufficient evidence to prove what could be one of snooker's biggest scandals.