Somebody explain snooker to me

The Game Room
21

Scoring a 147 in a competitive professional match is still a big deal, though they’re much more common than they used to be. Plenty of players have had a reasonably successful few years on the professional tour without ever recording one. The greatest player ever (in most people’s opinion, I think), the aforementioned Ronnie O’Sullivan, has about 15 to his name I believe.

As to your second question, this is far more common - in a high-quality match, probably about half the frames will be decided in this manner. So very much routine. A break of around 70 is typically enough to achieve this. However, it’s not quite correct to say the other player never gets a shot at all - I would phrase it as the other player never pots a ball (or in some cases, never even gets to attempt to pot a ball). This is because to win a frame without the other player taking a shot, you would have to pot a ball off the break. This is much, much harder to achieve than in any form of pool, due to the large table and small pockets. As a result, it is rarely even attempted, since it’s far more likely to not only fail, but also concede an immediate opportunity for the opponent to make a frame-winning break.

It is however not uncommon for the first player to break off, and the second player to then pot a red and make a frame-winning break. For this reason, a couple of players (notably Welsh triple World Champion Mark Williams) have taken to playing the break-off shot very gently, hardly moving the pack of reds at all, in order to avoid this possibility.

22

Well… Not really. The large table cuts both ways. I agree that a straight-in shot to a pocket 8’ away will be easier than the same shot into a tight pocket 12’ away. But on a small table, with the rules pool is generally played under, the object ball is often obscured, or a runout pattern will require lots of English to move the cueball around. Banking is used a lot more for the same reason, and banking is hard.

Also, note that most snooker shots are played across the short side of the table. Snooker players avoid those 12’ shots at all costs. Most of the time they are shooting at a poket that’s 4-5 feet away at most.

The use of English (side spin) is rarely done in snooker because it makes aiming much more difficult, and because it’s not as necessary on the giant table. Therefore, almost all snooker shots are center-ball hits with maybe draw or follow (bottom or top) spin.

Pool players don’t have that luxury. Spinning the cueball sideways (“English”) is a big part of the game to move the cueball around the table. When professional pool players miss a shot, it’s usually because of english. When you hit the ball towards the side of it, multiple things happen:

  1. The ball ‘squirts’ a bit in the opposite direction from the impact point,
  2. If you are using draw or follow as well, or are hitting the ball with an elevated cue, the Masse’ effect will curve the ball on the table before it hits the object ball.
  3. When the spinning ball hits the object ball, it will ‘throw’ the object ball to the side a bit due to friction. This is a common way to miss a shot - hit the object ball with a spinning cueball, and get unlucky and have the chalk spot from your cue be the contact point. You can throw the object ball completely off angle.
  4. The spin will drastically change the angle of rebound off a rail.
  5. After contact, some small amount of spin will be imparted to the object ball, changing the way it comes off a rail.

All of these effects can vary based on factors like how dirty the balls and cloth are, how ‘live’ the rails are, how much humidity is in the room, type of taper on the cue stick, etc. Most pros will put in many practice hours in the same room and same tables they will be playing on in a tournament to learn the environment.

If you look at a snooker cue, it has a small 10mm tip. Pool cues usually have 12-13 mm tips, giving the tip more contact area on the cue ball so English can be applied.

There are lots of players who compete in both snooker and various pool games. Steve Davis, for example. I don’t think he’d tell you that pool was easier than snooker. The size of the tables just brings different challenges.

The closest game to snooker on a pool table would be straight pool, where after the break you can keep potting any ball you choose until you miss. When the last ball and the cueball are left on the table, they stay in place and the rest are racked, and the player has to make that last ball in such a way as to break open the rack and keep the run going. Matches are to 150 points, and a 150-and-out performance is the sign of a good pro player and fairly rare, just like the 147 break in snooker.

23

I disagree. I’ve played a lot of pool and a lot of snooker. Potting balls and moving the ball around in snooker to get in optimum positions is far, far harder than in pool.

Potting multiple balls in a row in pool is not as hard as in snooker.

24

It really depends on the kind of pool you are playing. And ‘potting balls’ is not the issue. Potting balls while using side english is. I don’t know what level of player you are, but pro players often have *extreme english on the cue ball. If these players were always playing center ball hits, they’d never miss on a small table. But you can’t play that way and hope to keep position for a runout.

In snooker you just don’t see much side spin applied to balls, as a rule. Side is used, but it’s generally a small amount.

If you are a non-pro and can’t set up the kinds of runs the pros use, then sure, if you’ve spread the snooker balls all over the table and are shooting long distances, it will be much harder than if you play pool and don’t try to play dificult cueball position. If you are a bar player who just shoots at balls trying to sink them, without thought for the overall strategy and positioning in the game, then snooker will be WAY harder.

But playing pro level, where you can set yourself up for runouts or control the table well enough to keep all the reds close, it’s not clear to me that snooker is any harder than say 9-ball, where potting the balls isn’t the issue - getting the cueball into position for the next ball is, given that you have to bend and bank it around all kinds of obstacles.

When I got good enough at pool to start thinking three shots ahead, my ball sinking ability went down - because I was shooting with English to move the cueball. Shooting a ball 8’ into a pocket with a center ball hit is easy - shooting it 8’ into a pocket with a cueball loaded up to go three rails after contact - not so much.

Again, consider players like Steve Davis. If pool were so much easier than snooker, a snooker champion would crush the competition. Davis is competitive and has won some tournaments, but no one would consider him the best 9-ball player around, or even in the top ten or twenty. It’s a different game with its own difficulties.

25

I was good enough to play pool at county level and had no problem regularly clearing the table, thinking multiple shots ahead (as you have to) and using extreme varieties of spin to maintain position.

I’ve also played plenty of snooker with the exact same intent of maintaining the run through potting and position (I was not merely playing hit and hope in either game)
I found potting on a pool table was much easier due to the size of the pockets and the size of the table.

Even just running five or six balls was straightforward on a pool table but a vastly different proposition on a snooker table. Especially when the reds have not been developed.

I could win a frame of 9 ball, or any sort of pool, against the very best in the world. Simply because the basic potting difficulty is low and my modest skills are good enough. I’d have no chance of winning a match of course because having the skill to deal with the inventive nature of the shot-making in the long run would defeat me.

In comparison I’d have absolutely zero chance of winning a frame against the best snooker players because the potting is that much harder.

Well, he’s a past snooker champion who moved to pool and was competitive long past the point where he could be competitive at snooker. I’m not so sure a pool champion decades past their best could so readily switch to snooker and be competitive.

Absolutely, and the very best players in pool are incredibly skilled but the point being made was never that either game was easier overall but that the actual act of potting the balls is easier on a pool table than a snooker table. Which in my experience of both sports, it is.

26

Spin (not heard the ‘English’ expression before, ironically given I am English) is constantly employed by the pros in snooker for positioning for the next shot, and I used to (try to!) use it as a casual player when I got to a reasonable standard (top break 40 odd, feel free to laugh!). I don’t think it’s fair to say it isn’t used much in snooker.

Speaking as someone who has played on 6 foot pool tables in pubs, the larger (8 foot?) ones in pool clubs and 12 foot snooker tables, snooker is by far the hardest. The larger pool table pockets are far more forgiving than the snooker equivalents, for example potting along the cushion (rail) is much easier in pool.

27

Agree with this. It’s not to knock pool, it’s just a fact that snooker requires higher ability and if, say Trump, Robertson or O’ Sullivan went full time and fully dedicated themselves to pool I would be confident they’d soon become virtually unbeatable over longer matches.

28

OK. You totally, totally win the Dope today. And it’s my birthday, so I get to decide.

Shame on anyone that got whooshed.

29

Absolutely, when playing pool (especially on a big 9-ball table) if you are faced with a long shot down the cushion your first thought is not really about whether you can make the pot, because it is fairly easy, it is more about what you need to do to manouver around the packed table afte that.
In snooker, an 8 foot shot down the cushion is something you’d only try in exceptional cicumstances.

I think it is fair to to say that snooker is a game of precision potting and exact positioning whilst pool is a game of inventive shot making, positioning and collision management (i.e. far less about the potting) Both take extreme skills of a slightly different type.

30

This is correct. Mark Selby (The Torturer) played some pool and was world champ - IDK if there is one pool world champ to crown them all, or if there’s many federations, but suffice to say he is world class at pool as a hobbyist.

The best pool player in the world would do well to take a frame off Selby at the Crucible. First miss, baulk-end safety exchange, over.

31

I think this song sums it :slight_smile:

32

The pockets are smaller than pool table pockets, as well, aren’t they?

33

yes, snooker balls are about 3/16 of an inch smaller than a pool ball but the pockets are relatively much smaller still. i.e. over an inch smaller than on a pool table. That is a huge amount where even a few mm can make a table feel extremely “tight”

34

You left out one ball in this. The maximum is to pot the black after each potting of a red, then potting the colors in order. That is assuming you pot them all in one frame. So, after the 15th red is potted, you have your choice of colors for that shot (black being the most valuable, of course), then that potted color is returned to the table, and you then pot the colors in increasing value order, finishing with potting the black.

35

Yeah, as someone who played a good bit of barroom billiards encountering a snooker table for the first time, the difference in relative size of ball v pocket and just how much green you have to traverse is insane. Sure, there’s some skills that are more emphasized in pool than snooker, and they’re different games, but snooker – to me – feels an order of magnitude more difficult. I can’t imagine someone who has played both making a good faith argument that pool is anywhere as difficult, much less more difficult.