Snooker Advanced Tips Aiming

When lining up a shot, this is the easy part. Imagine pushing the tip of your cue straight through the centre of the cue ball to the centre of the object ball. If you strike the object ball here, you should hit it perfectly straight. And that means if we put the cue ball back in the same position, and I push my cue through the centre of the cue ball on exactly the same line to the centre of the blue, it will automatically pop the blue for me. But aiming for this point straight in line with the pocket doesn't work even if the shot is a fraction away from straight. This is because you need to allow for the space the cue ball will take up when it strikes the pink, so you need to strike the centre of where the cue ball is to the centre of where the cue ball's going. Which means if I push my cue through the centre of both cue balls, I'm going to be aiming for this position, allowing for the space the cue ball takes up, and allowing me to pot the ball. And this process allows you to pot any ball on the table. One, work out where the cue ball needs to go. Two, imagine pushing the tip of your cue through the centre of where the cue ball is on a line to the centre of where the cue ball's going. And three, aim for the tip of your cue to hit the object ball in exactly this position. This is the easy part of lining up a shot. The difficult part is to trust yourself and to fully believe that you have the shot lined up correctly. Aiming is in fact a real mental challenge that requires you to believe you're going to pot the ball, even if you've just missed the previous 10 shots in a row. This is advanced aiming advice that rarely, if ever, gets talked about. It helps you understand your own limitations so you can improve at the game. Start here, a couple of steps back from the shot, where it's easier to visualise both the pot and the position. Decide where to aim and how much power to play the shot with. Once you've selected where you're aiming on the object ball, draw a straight line back from this point through the centre of the cue ball to where you're standing. You can then get your cue above this line as you walk into the table. And then you want to give yourself a few seconds just to get in position and make sure the tip of your cue is going straight through to where you're aiming on the object ball. Once you've done this, don't change your mind about the shot and play it at the power you initially selected back from the shot. From the moment you choose the angle from back here, you need to focus on this angle and stick with it all the way through the shot to the moment you strike the cue ball. It's vital once you get yourself settled on the shot that you don't change your mind and start moving around. If you think you're in the wrong position, you have to get back up from the shot and start again. Work out the line of the shot, get down in position, get yourself settled and stick to that line. Even if you make a mistake and line the shot up incorrectly, the next time you get a similar shot, you will have learned from that mistake. If you move around on the shot, you simply won't learn anything and there's no chance of you improving. I'm going to play this blue with quite a bit of power and I am definitely going to pot it. But I clearly didn't hit it perfectly straight. What looks straight to you isn't necessarily straight as this looks like we're going to pot the green but straight is actually going to take the cue ball over here and cause us to miss. It's not your cue action or unwanted side spin. It's that you think you're pushing your cue straight through to here when in fact it's going straight through to here and will cause you to miss. You can't fix this by changing your technique but you can by sticking to the same line on the shot as we talked about earlier and not moving. Then the more practice you do, the better you will get at seeing where straight is and how the cue ball leaves your tip. But I mentioned side spin there or more specifically unwanted side spin. Generally speaking, unwanted left-hand side throws the cue ball offline to the right and unwanted right-hand side throws the cue ball offline to the left. Therefore, striking the cue ball in the centre with a perfectly straight cue action will make you a better player. Well, not necessarily. To start off with, it's almost impossible to strike the cue ball directly in the centre. And the same can be said about delivering the cue in a perfect straight line. Plus on some shots, players use a trace of side spin to help them cut the ball more and to control the cue ball better. Generally speaking, if you hit the cue ball through the spots and it comes back and strikes your tip then you're definitely hitting it straight enough. Extreme amounts of side like this will be a problem. A shot like that would throw offline and cause you to miss. But if you're striking the cue ball within a tip width of the centre this is highly unlikely to make any form of difference whatsoever. You remember back in step two when I said decide where to aim and how much power to play the shot with. The reason I talked about the power is because if you put a trace of unwanted side spin on the cue ball like this I mean this is an exaggeration, this would be too much but let's say we're going a little bit too much left hand slide like there if you'd been doing this all the way through the shot and you know how hard you're going to hit it then your brain's probably already worked out where the shot's going to go. So as long as you deliver your cue at the correct speed then you're going to pot the ball even with a trace of technically unwanted side spin. So as long as you know how hard you're going to strike the cue ball all the way through the shot and you're within a tip width of the centre of the cue ball side spin is unlikely to cause you any problems. Sometimes you'll miss a shot purely because of pressure. Now I can't prevent you feeling pressure on a shot but I can help you pot the ball when this happens and really that's the key to it. The mistake players make is they try to stay as relaxed as possible and this simply doesn't help. Trying to stay relaxed can make you completely forget about what you're doing and that can even include lining the shot up in the first place. What you need to do is take even more care in making sure you've lined up the shot correctly because the pressure doesn't make you miss it's the fact that you're trying to avoid the pressure and not think about the shot too much that causes you to forget things like lining it up in the first place. Got away with it. Before we do the next one let's just find Gary who's in Carmarthen, Wales which is there. Something that will make you feel better on harder shots like this one is to play it like it was a more straightforward shot like this one. When faced with a shot that has less margin for error players try to be more accurate and unfortunately this doesn't necessarily work. It's to start off with you can end up tightening up your grip tensing up your cue arm and pulling your cue tighter into your body which doesn't result in you being more accurate it just results in you throwing your cue offline. Or to put it another way with a shot down the cushion like this if I play the shot as close as possible to this jaw that gives it the highest chance of going in. The problem is if I want to hit the shot harder then I'm going to think to myself I need to be more accurate and that must mean getting even closer to the jaw but I'm already aiming as close to the jaw as I can so that just means I'm going to miss. Put simply trying harder on difficult shots doesn't make you cue the ball any better in fact it probably makes things worse. But that's mostly to do with your technique and we're going to be looking at the cue action in the next video in this series but if you want to look at how to improve your game further have a look at these two videos 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.