How To Play Snooker IN 5 MINUTES and BETTER Snooker IN 10 MINUTES

Learn to play snooker in just 5 minutes, and how to play even better snooker in 10 minutes. When it's your turn, you're required to play a legal shot. This means striking the white cue ball once with the tip of your cue, so that the cue ball first makes contact with a red ball, and this marks the end of your turn, unless you pocket a red. To pot any straight shot like this, we can just aim for the reflection of the cue ball in the object ball, and as long as we strike the cue ball on the central plane, we can just think about aiming our tip towards this reflection, and we'll pot the ball. Potting a ball gives you the biggest tactical advantage in the game, not only do you score points, but it's your shot next, rather than your opponent's. Potting a red scores you a single point, after which you must play a colour, which are replaced in these exact positions after entering a pocket. Once all the reds have been removed from the table, the colours are then played in ascending order of value, all the way down to the black, which I'm playing now. But this time the shot isn't straight. What makes Snooker such a complicated game, is if we line these shots up in exactly the same way as we did with a straight shot, that's aiming for here, not only does the pot miss, it actually misses by quite a long way. This is something that new players to the game often have a lot of trouble understanding, because it even affects shots that are nearly straight. Because what you need to do is play the cue ball into a space that's directly in line with the pocket, and new players often underestimate how much space the cue ball takes up. But if you think about it in terms of where the cue ball needs to be, directly in line with the pocket behind the object ball, then it doesn't matter if the shot's thick or thin, as long as you hit the cue ball where you're aiming, you will pot it. But how do you hit the cue ball in the right direction? For this, we're going to need a good technique. If you just pick a cue up off the table, how you're holding it is likely to be your grip, and that's why every player's grip is slightly different. But the big question is where to hold the cue, and a lot of players will get this wrong because they'll just hold it right at the back, which can be the wrong place. You can also hold it far too close to the tip end. Ideally, you want to find a balanced position where your arm has as much space to go backwards as it does to go forwards. The same with the cue arm from the front, close to being straight in line with the shot. You also want to leave space between your bridge hand and the cue ball, so you can pull the cue back as far as it will go. But how do you make a bridge? To do this, place your hand flat on the table, raise your knuckles up and bring your thumb in. You'll have to keep your thumb quite tight to your hand. It's a little bit difficult to do this, but you will get used to it. If the cue ball finishes really close to the cushion, you could do something similar, just resting your knuckles over the edge of the table this time, and running the cue along by your thumb and forefinger. This does mean striking close to the edge of the ball, which can cause you to miss cue. You can help with this problem by chalking your cue after every shot, allowing you to grip the cue ball a little better. If it's a little bit further away, yet you still have to position your hand on the cushion, you can use what's known as a loop bridge. To do this, pull your thumb into your middle finger. Your cue will then run along it and loop your index finger over the top. From this position, it's easy to move your cue back and forwards in between and play the shot. So let's move quickly on to the stance. Ideally, you want to be stood at the table with your feet slightly wider than your shoulders, in a position that allows you to lean into the shot. But more important than this is where you're standing. We call this the line of the shot, and it's an imaginary line that goes backwards from where you're aiming on the object ball, through the cue ball and across the floor. If you can get your cue into this position, it means you're in exactly the right place, and you'll pot the ball if you just push it through straight. Standing in the right place makes it a lot easier to get your cue on this line and push it through straight. But even if your technique's perfect, you can still miss a shot by striking the cue ball to the side. The right-hand side I'm putting on this cue ball makes it throw to the left, and if I strike the cue ball with left-hand side, it'll make it throw to the right. It's not always obvious if you're getting this wrong, but you can find out by playing the cue ball through the spots. If it's coming back to strike your tip again, then this is good enough, because nobody's going to get this absolutely perfect, so you're going to have to pot the ball with unwanted sides sometimes. So how do you deal with this? Unintentional side spin isn't that much of a problem. If you stand a couple of paces back from the shot, and just work out how hard you're going to play it before you get there, and don't change your mind, your brain will quickly adapt to this, and you'll be winning frames in no time. To win a frame of snooker, you need to get so far in front that your opponent gives up, have more points than your opponent when the final black is potted, or when your opponent fouls on the black, or be more than seven points in front when the pink is potted. So that's how you play snooker in five minutes. And here's how you play it better, starting with pace control. You need to know how hard you're playing the shot to control the cue ball, the second biggest tactical advantage in the game. Take this red for example. If it's in this position, then having the cue ball here makes it almost unmissable. But if the cue ball's in this position, it makes the same shot almost impossible. Honestly, this is just a cheap way of getting a trick shot into this packed video. But this would be a foul shot, because you can't jump out of a snooker. And as I somehow managed to miss fouls out of the first five minutes of this video, here's a quick montage. This is a list of things that would be considered a foul shot, but is by no means every foul. Fouls generally give away four points to your opponent unless a higher value colour is involved, in which case the points given away is the value of the highest ball. Sometimes avoiding a foul can be a lot easier if you can make the cue ball spin. On a straight shot, striking the cue ball above centre with topspin will make it roll through. If you strike the cue ball in the centre, or just below, this is known as a stun shot and will make it stop. And striking the cue ball towards the bottom will make it screw back towards you. However, this is quite difficult to do. It's very easy to miss cue if you're putting backspin on the ball, so you need a lot of chalk on your cue again with this type of shot. And if you're playing a straight shot, it's very difficult to play it right, because you want to get your cue out of the way, and this makes you jump up and not push the cue through. It's a lot easier to practice these shots at an angle, because they need to be struck in a firm, crisp way, which involves a lot of follow-through. And this means you don't have to worry about the white coming back towards your tip. But what about playing positional shots at an angle? To start off with, if the shot is less than half ball, so you have to hit less than half of the ball in order to pot it, the cue ball will almost always roll through at about a 90 degree angle to the potting angle of the object ball. Knowing this allows you to have more of an understanding of where the cue ball's going to end up. You can also use spin to affect the angle. By using topspin on this shot, I end up on the red on one side, but if I want to pot the red onto the other pocket, I can use backspin and finish there. So here's how it could work in a simple break. I start off by stunning the red and leaving myself a straight shot on the pink, and I play the pink with topspin to make it run through a little bit for the red, which means I can then screw the cue ball back a short way onto the black, and then stun the cue ball down the table for the yellow. But what happens if I can't pot a ball? If you know you're not going to be playing the next shot, then you want to make that shot as difficult as possible for your opponent. This is the third biggest tactical advantage in the game. You can do this by leaving the cue ball further away from the object ball. The further it's got to travel, the more likely there is something to go wrong. Before we do any more, let's just find Abdullah from Faisalabad, Pakistan, which is there. But let's get back to the different ways in which you can make the game harder for your opponent. By leaving the cue ball closest to cushions where it's harder to get a clean strike. Although this can make the shot a lot harder, if there's a ball really close to the pocket, it's not going to be that tough a shot. The pockets are a lot bigger from the middle of the table than they are towards the cushions, and this makes it a lot harder to pot the balls down the cushion. So often the best way to stop your opponent from potting a ball is to get the object ball safe by leaving it close to a cushion. And of course, if you get your opponent snookered, that's going to make things a lot harder for them. So here's how you escape. Generally speaking, the cue ball comes away from a cushion at the same angle it goes on. But a lot of cushions these days slide a lot more than they used to, which means the cue ball breaks a little bit wider. And generally speaking, you have to allow for this. Some snooker escapes will even require you to use more than one cushion. But if you apply the same principles, this really isn't a problem. And in some cases can be easier. Well, what if you can't reach the shot? We're going to be looking how to play with the rest after we find Dylan, who's from Auckland, New Zealand, which is there. Playing a shot with the rest requires a completely different technique and wrist action. You have to keep your arm at an angle to the shot. And it's really helpful with these not to pull your cue back too far or push it through too far. So it's a short, sharp, stabby action. And that makes it a lot easier to play. So I think we've done quite well there to get all the basics of snooker into just 10 minutes. Apart from playing shots with side spin and the break-off. Playing with side makes the shot a lot more complicated. And an effective break-off requires side spin. I explain how to do both of those things in these two videos. And our channel makes a lot of videos that shows how to do all of the things we've looked at in a lot more detail. So remember, don't just watch, play. And make the commitment to becoming a better player by subscribing to the channel and visit the website. See you later.