A Cambridge University professor has retained his world tiddlywinks title after seeing off an American challenger nicknamed the Dragon.

Tiddlywinks is a game in which players try to get small plastic discs into a cup by pressing one piece against another to make it fly through the air.

It can be traced back to late Victorian times, but the birth of the modern game stems from a group of Cambridge undergraduates meeting in Christ’s College in 1955, the English Tiddlywinks Association said.

Prof Patrick Barrie, 61, won the World Singles Tiddlywinks Championships on Thursday, with the seven-hour match held at the Castle Inn pub in Cambridge.

Prof Barrie, of Cambridge’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, described the fixture as “like a boxing world title” in its challenger format.

“You have a champion and only a national singles winner can challenge you,” he said.

His opponent was American tiddlywinks veteran Dave Lockwood, who lives just outside Washington DC.

Prof Barrie said of his 26-23 victory: “It’s a curious mixture of elation and relief. I’m very pleased.”

He continued: “It was a long old match, it went on for seven hours. It was close, hard-fought.

“The relief is because I was favourite to win and expected to win, which puts you under a different type of pressure.

“I know Dave, I’ve known him a long time, and he’s a formidable opponent on his day.

“I had to do my best to make sure it wasn’t his day.”

He said that the pair “have a rivalry” and he was “glad to come out on top” and win the trophy.

Prof Barrie said tiddlywinks is “a nice mixture of physical skill, but with some intellectual thinking”.

“You’ve got to think about strategy and tactics, you have to control your nerves,” he said.

“It doesn’t take long to become good at all the shots.

“If you practice the shots a lot you become good at the shots fairly quickly, within six months or so.

“But knowing when to play the shots is what takes quite a lot of years to develop.

“When I was young I took up lots and lots of hobbies and I little thought the only one I would still be doing decades later would be playing tiddlywinks, and competitively.”

Harley Jones, who is chairman of the English Tiddlywinks Association, was the umpire of the championships.

The 34-year-old, of Ely, Cambridgeshire, said tiddlywinks was “like chess if you could miss” and Thursday’s game was “really nail-biting”.

He said there are just two national singles championships, the English and the American, and there are “about 120 people in the world ratings which is the number of people who’ve played in a tournament in the last year”.

Mr Jones said it was a “privilege” to umpire and “observe this high level of play”, adding: “I think I learn a lot myself for my own game by watching these things.”

He continued: “It’s a game that really rewards the time you put in and the thought you put in, the training and practice.”

Titleholder Prof Barrie said he has a challenge booked against Tim Hunt, “the current British champion – I only came second last year”.

He said the pair will meet this weekend to discuss arrangements for the next World Singles Tiddlywinks Championships, possibly to be held in the spring.