Snooker Sighting Technique.

Seeing the line of the shot and sighting it correctly are the most vital parts of any cue sport because it's possible to aim for the perfect place and give a flawless delivery and still miss the shot. What you really need to know is exactly where the cue ball is going to end up. So here's how to pop more consistently by seeing where you're aiming. Clearly seeing where you're aiming in snooker is one of the hardest things to do consistently well. It's the main reason why you will miss the simplest shots and everybody struggles with it including the best players in the world. But we no longer need to worry about this problem because it's been bothering me for some time. So I decided to come up with a solution. You see the problem is the direction I strike the cue ball in would normally be a bit of a guess, until now that is, where I can see exactly where it's going. But of course the only problem is I can't. Surprisingly using Blu-Tack to crudely stick a gun sight to the end of your cue isn't going to help you sight the shot any better for a number of reasons. Unfortunately having this on the end of your cue is just going to get in the way. I mean it's not even positioned in the right place. I don't think there's any way I can actually see down it. But even if I could see down the barrel of this it wouldn't be any help because you don't sight the cue ball in the same way as you sight a gun. You look down a gun sight with one eye, sometimes closing the other one to prevent getting distracted. But in order to see which direction the cue ball is about to go in I'm going to need to sight with both of my eyes to pop this red. The game would be so much harder to play if you only use one eye but using two can sometimes be really confusing. You can end up missing shots like this. But why? Now if you're playing a shot at an angle and you miss it there's a good chance you got the angle wrong. And if you narrowly miss a mid-range pop there's a good chance that could have been down to your cue action. But there's no way I could have misjudged an angle on a simple shot like this by so far. And even with hilariously bad cueing from this range I'm still able to pop the ball. So why did I miss? Missing the pop all comes down to what I'm seeing or what I think I'm seeing. What this means is I'm going to deliver the cue perfectly and I'm going to aim for the right place. However I'm still going to miss the shot. Now there's a good reason for this and I'm going to show you after we find Italy from Parana, Brazil which is there. In order to pop this red I need the cue ball to go here but that's not where I'm aiming. Where I'm aiming is about here but I don't realise this and that's why I'm going to miss it. So what exactly is it that's causing the problem? Well that's actually a little bit surprising. The chances are there's nothing you can technically do to improve this like standing in a better place or getting your head in a better position. This is probably caused by your brain but there is a way of sorting it out. The difficulty is your eyesight only sends signals back to your brain which your brain then has to interpret. Despite this being a very accurate process because of optical illusions we know it can be fooled. We can be tricked into thinking that still images are actually moving and into seeing faces inside out. If your brain can be tricked like that it really wouldn't take much for you to start seeing a shot very slightly off line. Sometimes this will just be a small amount of unwanted side spin but as we've seen often you'll miss a shot by too far for it just to be poorly cued. Now of course players do physically sight the ball incorrectly but this is usually because of where they're trying to put their head on the cue. If you force yourself to play shots with the cue in the centre of your chin this can cause problems but if you don't do that most players will often find the right position to sight the ball naturally. For me it's slightly under my left eye. This is something you don't want to mess around with too much though because the key part of sighting a shot straight isn't training your eyes it's training your brain. The good news is there is something really simple you can do about this. You see helpfully snooker balls are pretty reflective even though it's a little bit tricky to see the reflection of the cue ball in this black with a camera with your eyes it's obvious where it is and the reflection is going to be in the middle of the object ball so if we can see this we know we're going to be aiming straight. So all I'm imagining I'm doing is pushing my cue straight through the cue ball and hitting the reflection on the red with the tip of my cue and then when I play the shot I can see exactly how straight it goes. So if I push my tip through to the reflection I know I'm aiming for the right place and if the shot goes in a straight line I know I must have sighted it correctly. This can take a few goes to get exactly right because to start off with it may even look like you're aiming for completely the wrong place and you're probably going to notice now the next time you play snooker it takes a few shots for your brain to line everything up even if things are going well. The next day everything is likely to go out of sync again in fact it probably will and it'll take you a few shots to get back into it. If the first shots I play at the start of a session don't go the way I expect them to there's a chance I could think there's something wrong with my cue action or even the way I'm aiming the shot. This is why it's important to make sure you're sighting the shot correctly before you get too serious about how well you're playing the game. This is the main reason that players struggle to improve because when things go wrong like this they'll think there's something wrong with their technique. Even professionals struggle at the start of sessions but they always play their way into the match. So the last thing you want to be doing is making changes to your technique because if you're sighting the shot incorrectly straight cueing just simply isn't going to help you. We're just going to find Sebastian from Marder Plate Argentina where apparently there are no snooker tables. Snooker however is one sport where you often don't get the chance to warm up before you start playing so how do you start seeing the shots a little more clearly? So if that happens you can do something about it in a game so long as you an easy chance. The trick is just to keep focusing on where you're aiming. Watch where the cue ball goes after you play the shot. Now that more or less went exactly where I wanted it to but what happens in a second if we're going to play a screw shot on this black. So we'll play a screw shot on this black. We're just watching where the cue ball's going and on these basic shots you can really see. See that one I just hit it a fraction thinner than I wanted to. It was only a hair amount but if you just keep watching it you don't need to do anything about it but within a few shots you'll start seeing where you're aiming a lot clearer and you'll start podding the balls a lot more easily. This is why regular practice works. Your brain will start sighting the angles quicker and more reliably but it does rely quite heavily on consistency. The less you move around during a shot and the more you can keep your head still as you play it the quicker you're going to improve. Because the more you keep the same the easier you're going to make it for yourself to sight the shot correctly. So weirdly having a sight on your cue won't help you in any way sight a shot but what will help you is allowing your brain the time it needs to work the angles out. But of course there are ways you can actually practice it. I just want to point out I am aware of laser guides and we probably will look at them in the near future but we were just keeping things natural today. As most people have stopped watching by now I've got some secret bonus tips that are going to help you sight the shot even better and that starts with hitting the cue ball near the centre. If you were to play the cue ball up and down the like this and you find you put an extreme amount of side spin on the cue ball this is going to be a problem that's going to cause you to miss pots. If you're putting a lot of side spin on the cue ball you're definitely going to need to do something about that. But if it's coming back roughly straight through the spots I wouldn't worry about it. In this case you're a lot better off playing the shot with a small amount of unwanted side than you are trying to fix the problem. As I've explained a lot in this video already it's very difficult to see where the shot is going if you're continually changing things. Striking the cue ball with a little bit of unwanted side isn't ideal but it isn't a big problem. It's much better spending your energy each day trying to see the shot straight because this will be far more beneficial in the long term. Our second bonus tip is there's a lot easier to sight the shot after you stand well back and walk in on the line of the shot using your cue as a guide both to where you're aiming and keeping you on line to where you're striking the cue ball. This is probably the best way to sight a shot properly using your cue as a guide as you walk into the table. But what about your stance? Can that help you sight the shot as well? Well not really but where you put your feet can be really beneficial for a number of reasons that help you see the shot better. If I fix my foot on my cue side of the body in the correct place then my cue is going to be automatically resting on my body in exactly the right line so there's less for my brain to get wrong. So if I found the correct place to put my foot it's going to make it a lot easier to pop the ball. But how exactly do you find the right place? Well next week I'm going to show you because we're going to be looking at the technical tricks that most help improve your game and if I've made that video already it'll be on the screen now. 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!