I was watching a YouTube video of a guy clearing the table and it was obvious he was playing really well. But I have no idea what the rules of snooker are so I couldn’t really follow what he was doing.
Wikipedia didn’t really make the game clear. Here’s what I understand. (Although Wikipedia informed me that snooker was invented by Neville Chamberlain but not the famous one.)
You play it on a large pool table. The object is to put the balls into the pockets, which is called potting a ball.
Half the balls are red. The other half have different colors. The colored balls have different point values. I believe you’re supposed to alternate between potting a red ball and potting one of the colored balls.
And that’s pretty much the limits of my knowledge.
Is there an order you’re supposed to pot the balls in beyond going back and forth between red balls and colored balls? Or can you pot any of the red balls, for example, if it’s their turn?
I saw there was a person who was putting some of the balls back on the table after they had been potted. What was the significance of this?
The video I watched showed only one player making shots and clearing the table. Is there normally a second player you’re competing against?
How do you score points. Do all the balls score you some points or just the colored balls? And there’s something about a ball being “on” which I don’t understand.
Feel free to explain other things that I don’t even know I don’t know. But keep it simple because let’s face it, I’m never going to play a round of snooker.
Or pool is played on a small snooker table perhaps?
The table is 12 foot by 6 foot with small pockets.
15 reds (each worth 1 point) and six colours, Yellow, Green, Brown, Blue, Pink and Black worth from 2 points to 7 (in the above order)
You try to score as many points as possible. To do that obviously you’d want to pot the high value balls. To be able to do that you must first pot a red.
And that is simply the way the game progresses. Each a player gets chance to pot a red and then they can try for any colour. If they can do that then they carry on to try for another red and colour and so on.
If you can continue that sequence of pots (or “break”) then you stay at the table accumulating points and your opponent remains in the chair. Miss a red or colour and your opponent gets a turn.
When a red is potted it stays potted. When a colour is potted the ref puts it back on the table on its designated spot
When all fifteen reds are gone the colours must be potted in the order above.
That’s just about it, there are various fouls, rules and nuances but that other thread will cover those I’m sure.
That’s a classic snooker commentator term that simply means a ball is available to be potted and that the shot is do-able. It isn’t anything to do with an official rule.
Snooker commentators are a meme all of their own. Mitchell and Webb cover it nicely
Saying snooker is played on a large pool table gives people who know what a pool table looks like an idea what a snooker table looks like. Saying snooker is played on a table the size of a snooker table is technically more accurate but generally not as helpful.
Don’t overthink it, I wasn’t being serious and your description was fine. Snooker purists (I’m not one) would hate to think of it as a “large pool table”
I suppose the other fun bit is “snookering” the opponent, which is when you put the ball in a position from which the other player can’t hit a red ball without great difficulty. Done when you don’t have a good shot yourself and will have to relinquish your turn, so you try to force your opponent to commit an error on their turn.
It can’t be emphasised enough that a 12’ by 6’ table is enormous. You can get lost on it. Potting balls is vastly, vastly more difficult than in pool (not even counting the fact that snooker pockets are more unforgiving). If the ball you’re aiming for is at the far end, even hitting it, let alone hitting it so that it goes in approximately the direction you intend, is a bigger challenge than you would think it ought to be.
This is why snookering is a big part of the game - getting the cue ball to come off two cushions and hit the object ball 10’ away and do so without giving up an easy scoring chance is a serious challenge that only the pros can do consistently.
Pool is of course the little brother of snooker, which is itself a development of billiards. Sometime in the 16th century, someone (possibly in Spain) thought of bringing croquet indoors. A green cloth to simulate grass on a table, some boards around the sides to stop the balls from rolling off, and some small mallets to push the balls around. The name, billiards, probably came from the French “bille” - ball. The cue came about because the original mallet didn’t work that well on a table, so players used the handle. Again in French, it was originally a “queue” - tail.
It took off in England and was well known enough for Shakespeare to mention it in Antony and Cleopatra, written in 1600. Bored army officers in India developed the game of billiards with more coloured balls and this became known as snooker.
Well, sure, I’m a billiard player, certainly, mighty proud - I say, I’m always mighty proud to say it. I consider that the hours I spend with a cue in my hand are golden - help you cultivate horse sense and a cool head and a keen eye. Did you ever take and try to find an iron-clad leave for yourself from a three-rail billiard shot?
But just as I say it takes judgement, brains and maturity to score in a balkline game, I say that any boob can take and shove a ball in a pocket. Now friends, let me tell you what I mean: you got one, two, three, four, five, six pockets in a table - pockets that mark the difference between a gentleman and a bum with a capital “B” and that rhymes with “P” and that stands for “pool”.
It’s ginormous compared to a normal sized pool table. In college, a bar I hung out at had a snooker table, but we played ordinary 8-ball on it. I was a halfway decent player, but on that table planning a shot was like calculating a trip to the moon.
Sorry if I missed this but do you score the points for the colored balls every time you pot them or only when you pot them in numerical order after the red balls are gone?
If it’s every time and the colored balls are placed back on the table while any red balls are still there, then an obvious part of high-end playing is to make sure you’re sinking the black ball every time instead of one of the lower valued balls. Which would greatly restrict your choices. The optimal sequence is red - black - red - black - red - black - red - black - red - black - red - black - red - black - red - black - red - black - red - black - red - black - red - black - red - black - red - black - red - yellow - green - brown - blue - pink - black. But if my math’s right, that’s only 140 points and I think somebody said a perfect score is 147.
And my understanding is that when a colored ball is put back on the table it goes on a specific spot unless that spot is occupied by another ball. So if repeatedly potting the black ball is part of the strategy, one of the tactics is using your alternating red ball shots to set yourself in a good position to the back ball’s location.
Yep, score all coloured balls too, and if you watch a professional match, they routinely attempt to stay close to the black as that is the most efficient way of racking up the points, but will switch to other colours (usually pink or blue) if positioning is unfavourable.
You missed the black after the 15th red, you can pot a colour after the final red before going for the yellow (you could pot 2 yellows consecutively if you so desired).
What level of play is normal at professional levels? Is scoring 147 points routine for professionals? Or is it something even a professional only achieves a few times in their career?
And how often is a complete run achieved by the first player with the second player never even getting to take a shot? Again, is this something seen as routine or extraordinary at professional levels?
