Snooker Tutorials Do They Improve Your Snooker

Can YouTube really improve your snooker? To find out we're looking at seven of the best so-called online coaches to see if what they have to offer actually helps improve your game in any way. Honestly only I would have the audacity to make this video. To find out we're going to be putting their coaching techniques to the test and we're starting with something that should be an open goal for these guys, practice routines. And who better to start with than seven-time champion of the world Stephen Hendry. If his snooker tips won't help improve your game then I'm not sure whose will. And he suggests warming up like this, throwing all the balls down the middle of the table and potting them in any order you want. I'm not quite as good as throwing the balls down the table as he is so I had to separate out the ones that got grouped together. The best thing about this practice routine is it's incredibly simple to set up and you don't have to worry about taking any of the balls out of the pockets. This is a great way to warm up, the only issue is you don't play the same shot more than once which is a great way to build confidence. And that's why Stephen recommends the line-up. Again this is relatively simple and every single YouTuber I'm going to mention is going to suggest you try some form of this but because the balls are in set positions it means you play repetitive shots. So you get to play blacks off the spot like this as well as a lot of other shots common to break building and all you really need to do is line the reds down the middle of the table. The only issue I can find with the practice routines he recommends is they are the obvious ones but he knows most of his audience haven't played a lot of snooker before so won't really be aware of this and this being what Stephen would have practiced on the way to becoming a seven-time world champion means simple is probably better. Stephen's channel is relatively new and I sometimes jokingly accuse him of stealing my job. Honestly I think his channel's great and I think it's fantastic he's putting so much time and effort into something that after he's paid the production costs and got people on to do interviews he's probably making nothing from. Our next practice routine comes from coach to the pros Barry Stark whose presence and coaching knowledge brings a lot of legitimacy to this platform. I used to dream about the sort of success that Barry's achieved and in most ways still do. Here Barry's showing an advanced practice routine where the reds are positioned in such a way you can only pop one of them at a time and you have to take each red in sequence to clear a path for the next one to go into the opposite corner pocket. Practice is enough and I have absolutely no doubt it'll improve your cue ball control around the black spot and that's just going to result in bigger breaks. The only issue with this as I've already explained is it's an advanced routine that will be too challenging for a number of players. I only just got past halfway before missing. But a challenge faced by coaches is to understand the needs of players of different abilities. If Kyron comes to Barry thinking there's something wrong with his technique then most of the time Barry will probably have to reassure him that there isn't. And that's going to be massively different to somebody who's just started playing the game who's bridging across the palm of their hand and cueing like a darts player. And in that case you have to explain to them they'd probably be better off with a technique that looks a little bit more like this. And it's allowing for this gap in standard that I think Barry does excellently. As you'd expect if you go to Barry's channel you'll also find a lot of beginner practice routines as well. However our next practice routine comes from Yasmin Ocean whose channel is really more to do with pool. But she shares a lot of the practice routines she uses and although a lot of them won't be doable on a snooker table I found one that definitely is. You have to pot the balls in order without using a cushion meaning you have to stun between each shot to leave yourself the correct angle. This is a good challenge for beginners and I couldn't work out why I'd never seen it before. Actually I might have figured it out because this is actually a little bit of a stretch on the snooker table but it's not too bad if you put the cue ball a little bit further away. And don't think this is easy. I even messed up on my first attempt. It's not about the balls being close to the pockets it's about stunning for the right angle and holding for position which I know because I read the comments is something a lot of people who watch my videos struggle with. This is great practice for that type of cue ball control especially if you do the routine from left to right and right to left. But if you're looking for something a little bit more challenging I also tried this one where you've got to put all the balls in order around this angle. Presumably this makes things a little bit harder on a pool table but it definitely makes things a lot harder on a snooker table. I found this incredibly challenging but good because it's all the shots I really struggle with like powering stun shots in off the cushion. The idea is to pop all the balls in order around this L shape into the same pocket without canoning into any of the other balls while you're doing it. Again this is beneficial because playing repetitive shots helps you learn the angles a lot faster than you would if you were just playing a game. In a lot of ways this is just a tougher version of the previous routine but it ticked the right boxes for me in being both just about doable but really challenging at the same time. For that reason I'm going to be practicing this a lot and I think it's great that Yasmin's using a channel to explain all this helpful stuff instead of just showing you how good she is at the game. How good was that? Oh now I'm doing it. Our next routine comes from Barton Snooker. You can be assured there'll be no crazed rant at the beginning of Steve's videos as he dives straight in here to show us how this practice routine works. I probably wouldn't have even tried this if Steve Anderson said it's one of his favorite things to practice and I can see why because every time you break open the three reds you get something different to do and clear up. It helps you to find the right angle on the black to split the reds and at the same time take advantage of a chance you've developed. This is great practice for simulating the end of frames where there's often a lot of points on offer but you're often under a lot of pressure to get the job done. Barton Snooker has a lot of helpful information, not just practice routines so be sure to have a look at the channel because Steve puts a lot of effort into making his videos helpful and if that's not good enough he even does his own one-on-one coaching sessions. Before the next one let's just find Hiraj in Nairobi, Kenya which is there. Weirdly now we're looking at long potting advice from a pool player but I think this routine that Gareth Potts is showing us is really good practice for shot to nothing safeties. Gareth's practicing this because it's an awkward shot when it comes up on a pool table but I want to repurpose it for helping with shot to nothing safety shots because this shot's incredibly common especially at the start of frames when you're trying to pot a long ball and also return the cue ball back safe. This is a vital part of the game that I think we neglect practicing so I'd recommend having a go at about five or so from either side of the table. I managed to get six out of ten which I was pretty happy with but I'm sure I can do better and I think it's good that we've stumbled upon something helpful that wasn't really intended as coaching advice. Gareth's channel's more focused on entertainment and that's fine because we need things encouraging people to play these games. Similarly our next practice routine comes from somebody doing something slightly different than coaching. Cuebald seems to use YouTube to track his own progress and ability and this is a practice routine he says he's used a lot that's very similar to the lineup that we looked at earlier just a lot more difficult. It's harder to get on the outside of the reds now especially because the pink is blocked into all pockets which is good because compared with the lineup this is similar to the positions you'd find the balls in in an actual game. Again I found this challenging but doable which I believe is exactly what you should be looking for in a practice routine and I can see if you practice this routine a lot you're definitely going to improve. It doesn't matter that like me he wouldn't stand a chance against anybody on the pro circuit or even those who can't make it through Q-school because he's looking to play as well as he can and that's the point of his channel and he's probably one of the only people who's actually going to watch this video out of all the YouTubers I've already looked at so be sure to check out his channel. Or alternatively if you want coaching from Ronnie then go to www.snooker.online and get it at a discount price by using the promo code BREAK. Now for more long potting practice obviously from a pool player this one's particularly good and it's from Shivari who I've stolen most of my ideas from over the years. With this one you set up a long straight pot the length of the table and attempt to stun it in and when you get it you place an object ball where the cue ball was and attempt to do the same thing the other way which is an incredibly difficult thing to do on a snooker table. So it might be better doing exactly the same thing across the middle pockets unless that makes things a little bit too straightforward for you in which case try the same thing across the pink spot which I found for me made it a little bit too easy but it was still pretty good. And of course the point of this routine is to place the object ball exactly where the cue ball was each time and try to keep the shots as straight as possible and not stun the cue ball further and further over to one side. This is good practice because it's quicker to set up than regularly playing straight shots and in general this is just really good practice for potting straight stun shots. Improving at snooker always takes a lot of hard work so do I think suggesting these practice routines help with that? I'd say definitely. I discovered ways to practice that even I didn't know about and even what I had seen would help you improve faster than just playing a game of snooker. These guys have found a way to create shot repetition in the areas that really matter. Although as I said this is a bit of an open goal they just had to find ways to practice they certainly managed it through a lot of different abilities and that's good because as well as finding someone of a similar standard to play against you also want to find a practice routine that's just challenging enough for you. But if this video goes well and people want to see it I'll make another one about technical advice which might be a little bit more controversial because I still stick to what I said five years ago in pretty much the first video I ever made. You talk to many players after they miss a simple shot and they will almost always blame it on bad cueing but in fact most shots are missed because they're not lined up correctly. Comically I had to take that video down partly because I struggled to speak on... well not just on camera at all at the time also because for some reason I thought this would be a good intro but mostly because this was the start. There could be a thousand reasons why I f***ing missed the shot or just one simple one. Because five years later on it turns out I was right there was a simple one we just didn't know how many zeros it was followed by at the time. I'm hoping bleeping the name keeps us safe from the lawyers. Where was I? Oh yeah advice on YouTube confusingly you have to allow for a mix of abilities people have beautiful cue actions who just stroke the ball in and other players who don't know one end of the cue from the other and it's mostly those people that you have to give advice to. And the way the YouTube algorithm works you have to talk to the people who want to be able to cue like Ronnie in order to help them with what matters. And that's what these videos do begin with what the viewer thinks they know before explaining to them what really matters. I always use this to explain how bad cueing makes very little difference for example if you line up straight to this red and you try to cue across the ball as badly as you possibly can without miscuing then it's almost impossible to miss the ball at the other end of the table and that's why I encourage people to focus more on how they line the shots up. Can you actually get good technical advice from YouTube? I'm not sure yet it's something I'm going to have to make a video on eventually. But you might be surprised if you think you can't because I've always been impressed with the quality of advice on this platform and by how seriously people take snooker. Maybe we do ridiculous things at times to get attention I know I do but it's all done to at least try to get more people playing snooker and I know at least on a small scale it's actually working. What would be even more ridiculous if someone was to give out mostly the same advice I've been giving out for the last five years and to try to pretend I was saying the complete opposite but luckily nothing like that would ever happen would it? If you're looking for more practice routines to improve your snooker have a look at these two videos that are stuffed full of them and 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