Why Snooker Makes You So Angry?

Sometimes I wonder... Just what exactly is it about snooker that makes people so angry? When you consider professional snooker players are playing for a lot of money and sometimes their careers, they don't really get that angry. It can seem tame compared to what you might see in the club with people playing for virtually nothing. I know this is Chinese eight ball, but this is what a lot of us are imagining right now. When things aren't going well, snooker is genuinely the world's most frustrating game and there are a number of legitimate reasons why it drives people completely crazy. The first of these is how much control you have, not in terms of how well you can play the game, but the small amount of time you're striking the cue ball for, between point one and point two of a second. So if we pretend that you're in contact with the cue ball for point two of a second every shot and it's not even that... This means the time you can actually make a difference and win or lose a frame could be as little as four seconds. The rest of it is just waiting for results or preparing for that small space of time where you actually make a difference to the game. What that means is it doesn't matter how well you prepare for that moment. If that moment goes wrong, you end up missing a shot and possibly losing the game. And the harsh reality of snooker is you can lose an entire game by just getting one of those shots, one of those moments wrong. You can genuinely make a huge error without realising it in just a fraction of a second. And often when that fraction of a second's gone wrong there's nothing you can do to make up for it. In fact, you can only make things worse. And that's where we come across our next problem, psychological warfare. If your opponent's thinking about something else rather than concentrating on playing the game, this can really cause their form to dip. Or even very occasionally, almost give up. A player being suspicious of this can still be put off even if their opponent knows nothing about it. Either way, this often heightens the level of tension for everybody involved. When he sat there suffering, he's taken over five minutes for this break of twelve by Peter. Maybe unsurprisingly, the best way to deal with this and inflict some psychological damage of your own is to just keep potting the balls and keep your opponent away from the table for as long as possible. Usually these mind games don't actually work but when somebody tries it, it makes the game so much more frustrating to play. Now everything we've said so far could be true of another game, like golf for example. But with golf, everybody plays the same number of holes starting from the same place, and then plays their own shots. With snooker however, you can often get yourself forced into playing a shot that's a lot harder than something you'd want to play. And if you miss that shot, you can end up leaving your opponent a very straightforward chance. Often we call this the run of the ball and it can sometimes mean that you're playing a game that's twice as difficult as your opponent. But frustratingly, it gets worse than that. Because they get more table time, their game starts to improve. And because you're away from the table, this can cause your game to dip a little bit. And there seems to be more and more pressure on your chances which never seem to get any easier. If you end up taking one of these chances however, it can completely change the game. Although it still seems really frustrating that you have a lot harder shots than your opponent. This isn't luck as we usually think about it and it can be caused simply by your opponent playing better than you in some area of the game. But on other days it might be your turn to be fortunate and it's not really about the chances you get and how hard they are, it's about what you do with them. But right now what I'm going to do is find Dan who's in Lviv, Ukraine. Sometimes if the cue ball doesn't end up where you want it to it can be just as annoying or even more annoying than missing a pot. Snoopa is in fact a very difficult game. It's played on a very big table with relatively small pockets and if you find yourself in a difficult position like this it will be very hard to see me clearing up from here. In fact it will be very difficult to even pot a red. No. But if I assemble the same amount of balls like this, it suddenly becomes a lot easier. Partly because the balls are in easier positions but mostly because these are shots I know. And as a snooker player I'm used to manoeuvring the cue ball around the table and leaving myself the simplest shots possible which worked until I got slightly out of position on the green. Sometimes however the position of the balls makes the game a lot lot harder and getting a kick, big bounce or simply not being used to the pace of the table can result in you leaving the cue ball far from where you wanted it. For top players getting a positional shot wrong can sometimes be just as costly as missing a pot which is why it often makes them even more angry. The fifth and probably most frustrating thing about Snooka is when it's played well it looks so easy to the point where as a spectator it feels almost impossible to miss a straightforward shot which makes you think the game's all about potting the difficult balls. No one expected me to pot that red, least of all me and now I've got the very straightforward chance to clear the colours. This can't go wrong, no one thinks I'm going to mess this up because I've won the game already. But then as a player you realise that everybody's expecting you to do something that's still quite difficult which makes it even easier to run out of position or miss pots. This makes a lot of people angry because they feel judged and don't know how else to deal with a situation. This is the biggest problem with Snooka. Even when you're in the room it looks so much easier to play than it actually is and it's not until you get the chance sometimes you realise how difficult the game actually is and all of a sudden you miss something stupid and everybody looks at you like, how did you do that? And that is probably the most frustrating part of the game. This can make you so angry you feel like you don't want to play Snooka properly anymore. In fact you could even feel like you don't want to even play Snooka anymore. But before you pack your bags and go to live near Jacques in Cape Town, South Africa what can you actually do about it? Well you could always try playing well all the time but as we know that isn't really possible and trying to be less angry isn't going to help. In fact telling somebody to stop being Mr Angry was basically one of the mind games from earlier. You have to be realistic about things even though it's frustrating at times to see how easy others make it look Snooka is still an incredibly hard game to play where even the most straightforward shots can be missed and no matter what you do from time to time this is still going to drive you crazy. But if you don't care how angry it's going to make you why not have a look at one of these two videos designed to help you through another frustrating part of the game trying to improve. 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.