Greg Davis has waited patiently but he is itching to clean up like his snooker father Steve

“It was for the lads’ beer money,” he says. “Every week I was winning enough for us all to have a good night out.”

Until, that is, watching him clean up, someone saw something familiar in the way he leaned over the table, identified the ice cool manner in which he dispatched all-comers, was alert to the speed he downed the balls.

Not to mention the flash of reddy blond hair, the cleft in his chin, the flat Essex vowels. And they asked him the question he had been waiting for all along. “You’re not Steve Davis’s son are you?”

The moment he admitted he was indeed the offspring of the former world champion snooker player he was summarily banned from entry.

“I felt a little guilty,” he says. “But it was all in a good cause. We had some nights out on it.”

Davis has now left university to dedicate himself full time to the sport that made his father one of the most recognisable faces in the country. It is, he says, an itch he has always needed to scratch.

He was as good as born with a cue in his hand – the one he uses today he has had since he was 11. His dad had him crawling across tables when he was a baby. He scored his first hundred break when he was 14, and first beat his father in a frame a year later.

“I mean genuinely beat him,” he says. “When I was a kid he’d give me 100 starts. I’d played him in an exhibition before the World Championships that was televised, when I’d been given a 30-point lead and won. But this was an even start. After I’d done it, he shook me by the hand and said, ‘Well done, that was a proper win’.”

His father, he says, was “always encouraging, never pushy” about his snooker.

“He wanted me to get an education, you know something to fall back on. I’ve done that. Now I’m looking to do what I always wanted: play snooker. People think it’s odd, given that’s what my dad did. But really I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do.” However Davis senior, he says, never coached him.

“You know the mess that happens when a father tries to teach his son to drive? I think dad instinctively recognised that would happen if he tried to teach me the game. But I absorbed so much from him. I really respect what he achieved.”

And what did he absorb most? “My dad wasn’t born the most talented. But he was the most dedicated. That’s what he passed on to me: practice makes perfect. I’m trying to match his dedication now. Though I admit I probably have more social distractions than he had as a youngster.”

Now, aged 20, after concluding his education, Greg intends to make the game his career.

He is entering the Cue School this May, the sport’s annual apprentice hurdle, in which every competitor pays a £1,000 fee and the semi-finalists across four different competitions are given entry to the professional tour for the following two seasons.

“I’m doing it really for the experience,” he says. “I’m not that used to tournaments. I’ve hardly been in any, what with school and uni and everything. So I’m not expecting anything.”

Tournaments, he adds, were something of a problem for him when he was younger. He would turn up and the buzz would already be spinning round the room: Steve Davis’s son is here.

“Psychologically I found it hard because everyone used to gather round to watch me and when I missed I could feel people going: ‘whoah, Steve Davis’ son just missed’. And I began to avoid tournaments just to make sure I didn’t miss. I’ve got over it now, but there’s a big gap in my experience.”

To help him overcome that deficit, his father secured him an invitation to train at the Grove Snooker Centre in Romford, the game’s professional epicentre, where he can spar for up to five hours a day with emerging stars such as Judd Trump and Jack Lisowski, even occasionally share a frame with Ronnie O’Sullivan.

“Actually, at my stage I need to put in a lot of solo practice,” he says. “It’s good occasionally to be thrashed by someone like Judd, just to get some tournament feel, but if I played him every day I’d only get the chance to pot about three balls in a session.”

If the training pays off and he achieves his ambition, however, Davis Jnr is aware of one potential consequence: there is every chance he might be drawn to play his father in competition.

“He’s ranked 40 in the world, so is still very much on the circuit,” says Greg. “We could well end up playing one another. But to be honest, it’s not something I look forward to. I’d find it hard to play him.

"I certainly wouldn’t want to beat him in the way I want to beat other people. I wouldn’t enjoy that. He’s my dad.”