Aiming With Sidespin In Snooker What Is The Trick？

Snooker isn't really too difficult to understand until you start striking away from the center of the cue ball, but being able to play shots with sidespin effectively can really help you escape from snookers and play better positional shots. So here's everything you need to know about maximizing and controlling spin, along with all the tricks you need to know to be able to aim any sidespin shot accurately. This is Break From Life. Welcome back and if it's your first time watching one of our videos then it's fantastic to have you here. So what's the best way to generate spin effectively? When you're striking the cue ball in the center things are fairly simple. The further up the cue ball you strike the more top spin you're going to get on it and the further it's going to run through. Striking it further down will encourage the ball to stop and play a stun shot and striking it right at the bottom will encourage the cue ball to come back, what we call a screw shot. To get more backspin on the cue ball or in fact more of any spin you need to do two things. To start off with with a screw shot you need to hit the white lower. The lower you hit the white the more backspin you're going to get on it until the point where you miss cue. The second thing to remember is you need a long follow-through. This will encourage the white to come back. To practice this it's best to play a slightly offset shot rather than a straight one so you don't actually have to get your cue out the way. And you can use the method we explained in the video at the start of this series that's in the card right now to play any type of run through, stun or screw shot accurately. But playing a shot with sidespin isn't that simple and there's a greater number of things to consider before you can line up a shot accurately. When you play any shot with sidespin the cue ball is going to deflect away to the opposite side to which it was struck but that's not all. As the cue ball slows down it starts to spin and change direction on the cloth and when it comes into contact with the object ball it can change the direction of that as well. So how can you possibly control all of this? Well it's got a lot to do with how hard you strike the cue ball. When you play a plain ball shot harder like this the only thing that happens is the cue ball goes further but when you start playing a shot with sidespin a soft shot and a harder shot will go in two completely different directions and end up in two completely different places. Accurately potting a ball with sidespin is only possible if you know exactly where you're going to hit the cue ball, how much pace you're going to play the shot at and you don't change your mind about it at any stage during the shot. So here's all the various things that you'll need to consider to properly aim a shot with sidespin and I'm going to be using this shot that I commonly play with sidespin to help me get on the yellow to explain all of that. So you'll need to adjust your aim to allow for the cue ball deflecting away because you're not striking it in the centre. Failing to do this will simply result in you missing the pot. Left hand side makes the cue ball deflect to the right and right hand side makes the cue ball deflect to the left so because we're playing the shot with left hand side we need to allow for the cue ball to travel away from our tip at an angle. It means on this shot I need to aim to miss the black by this far in order to actually pot it. So am I actually aiming to miss the pot? Well no I'm still aiming to pot the ball I'm just allowing for the cue ball to come off my tip in this direction rather than this direction and the harder and lower you strike the cue ball the more it's going to deflect away from your tip and the more you're going to have to allow for. Everything changes though when you play the shot slow enough for the spin to grip the cloth. It's still going to deflect to the right here but the spin is going to bring it back further and the shot's actually going to miss to the right hand side of the pocket. Watch as the cue ball dramatically moves to the left just before striking the black here and I'm not far away from the black here it will have a much greater effect from further away. So this time I'd only have to allow a tiny bit for the deflection and a lot more for the spin gripping the cloth and to pot the ball I'd have to do the equivalent of missing the shot by this much but of course I'm not trying to miss the shot I'm allowing for all of these things before I get to the table. The last thing we haven't allowed for is a slight change in direction of the object ball when the cue ball strikes it. This is the only thing you have to properly change your aim for and what I mean by that is the position you're aiming for on the object ball. As you can see here I can just about pot this black with the red in this position but if I move it in a bit then I can't pot the black. The best that I can do is just slightly miss the black to the right hand side of the pocket. If I put the balls back again in exactly the same position though and play a shot with right hand side I can do something that's often referred to as squeezing the angle. The right hand side on the cue ball will straighten up the black and I could pot a shot that didn't quite go. So the correct way to line up a shot with side spin isn't to go down on the shot and move your cue over it's to take into account everything we've just considered before you get to the table and to go to play a shot with the exact spin and power that you just decided to use. If you don't change your mind about anything on the shot you're going to be able to pick up these shots a lot quicker and ultimately be able to play them a lot better. And this is the way to play a side spin shot. The first thing you need to work out if you're going to play any shot with side spin is how hard you're going to play it and how much side spin you're going to put on the ball. Next thing is just to be aware of any other balls that might then be in the way because the white's no longer going to move in a straight line. We know what shot we're going to play we know there's nothing in the way of it so we need to work out where we need to strike the object ball and allow for this being slightly different to normal because of the side spin we're putting on it. Now we've worked out where we want to strike the object ball we just need to find a way to get the cue ball there and the first thing to allow for is the deflection. The amount of deflection will differ from player to player and cue to cue but it's something you will get used to over time. Then if we're playing it soft enough like this shot we need to work out how much the cue ball is going to spin back on the cloth. Now this can be very difficult to work out because it differs from table to table so you need to be playing on the table for quite a bit before you actually play a type of shot like this. Once you know that and only when you know that can you walk into the shot with confidence and we're not going to be standing in the same place as normal because we're going to be playing the shot with side spin so our stance is going to need to be in a slightly different place and that's for two reasons. To start off with because we've got to allow for everything we've just worked out so we're not going to be playing the shot in a straight line and secondly we're not going to be lining up the shot to the centre of the cue ball we need to be lining up our cue straight to the side of the cue ball and that also means we need to be standing in a slightly different place and once you're down on the shot you need to make sure you're striking the cue ball exactly where you want it to and you know exactly how hard you've got to play it. There's still only one thing we haven't actually talked about the nap of the cloth and the nap of the cloth runs from the bulk end of the table all the way down the table to the top and that means when you play the cue ball against the nap of the cloth it reacts slightly differently especially when it slows down a lot. By this I mean it spins back completely in the opposite direction allowing me to swerve round the blue a little bit and then back round the yellow but after wandering around all over the place we're finally back at the comments mat with Michael from Mrs Auger in Canada and if you have a really good understanding of the angles and how side spin works you can even swerve round balls to play doubles. Doubles, masse, swerves, snooker escapes the next video in the series talks about all these things and more so you can really use the table to your advantage 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!