Why Snooker Really Needs Billiards Gloves

I want to start off by asking you a simple question. Why don't snooker players wear gloves? 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. Earlier this week I decided to answer some of your comments so I headed down to the Break From Life high-tech media centre. A mouldy old desk with some second-hand computers and a whiteboard that's located in the corner of the snooker room to see who to pin on the map next which reminds me, Thomas is from Anghus, Denmark. I then found a comment from Arthur Vinn who said his game improved after wearing a cotton glove on his bridgehand and asking why these gloves aren't common in snooker and I didn't really know because it seems like every other pool player wears a glove. But I can probably count on one hand the amount of snooker players I've seen doing the same and the only professional snooker player who regularly wears a glove is Ross Muir. This is possibly because it feels out of place in snooker whereas in pool potentially unnecessary accessories are more common. But I think this is mostly to do with your bridge. You see in snooker the standard bridge is you place your hand flat on the table bring your knuckles up and your thumb in. Your cue can then move backwards and forwards easily between your thumb and your hand. You probably won't be able to find a professional snooker player who doesn't use this technique. However in pool you will find that an awful lot of players will use a looped bridge. Now a looped bridge is where you wrap your fingers around the cue like this keeping your cue next to your thumb in a straight line and wrapping your forefinger around the cue. And the difference between this bridge and holding like that is you've got a lot more of your hand wrapped around the cue. So if this gets sticky it's very difficult to cue the ball smoothly. For a lot of snooker players though this is still quite a big problem and you'll often see them cleaning their cue with a dry or wet towel sometimes even using talcum powder to help with the problem. And sometimes on damp unpleasant days I've noticed my cue gets sticky when I take it out of the case especially if the snooker club you're playing in is quite humid. So I thought I might as well give it a go but where would I buy one from? So I asked around the snooker community and they all suggested I get in touch with Jeff Bezos. So after being lured onto Amazon I made possibly the foolish decision of buying the cheapest glove I could find. It arrived in the post a few days later where I proceeded to put it through some tests. My first impressions of it were actually surprisingly good. It didn't feel uncomfortable to wear and although it did feel quite different to start off with there was nothing dramatic that prevented me playing any shot in particular. I did however find it a little difficult to hold my chalk which I kept dropping and this made it a little difficult to chalk my cue. This however would have been less of an issue if I chalked my cue with my right hand in the same way that Ross Muir does or if I'd bought more of an open finger glove. After about an hour of using it though I did sort of get used to it but it's still not perfect. Other than this though the glove seemed to be working well allowing the cue to glide incredibly smoothly across my hand which is when I came up with an idea. Okay here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to get 10 reds and position the white and the red like this so I can play a screw shot down the table. I'm going to mark the white and the red with chalk and I'm going to play the 10 shots with the glove and without the glove. For the shots when I play them with the glove I'll mark the furthest one with a black ball and when I play it without the glove I'll mark the furthest one with a yellow ball and I'll just see how far I can screw back. It's probably a stupid test but I'm going to give it a go anyway. As soon as I started this test I realised I created a shot in an unnecessarily difficult position to play a screw shot from. I wasn't really worried about this though because it was going to be exactly the same for both shots and doing it like this gave me an awful lot of table to draw the ball back into. Without the glove I was able to screw back about 12 feet and I'm only really doing this test because it felt like you could cue the ball better with the glove though I really can't see why having a slightly smoother bridge hand will have any effect over the speed I'm able to deliver the cue at or the amount of spin I'm able to get on the white. Certainly nothing big enough to be measurable. Weirdly it does feel a little bit better and I've just got one that's gone a little tiny bit further than I did with just my hand so I'm going to see if I can actually catch one nice how far it'll go. If you told me before I tried this glove that the friction of my bridge hand was actually reducing my cue power I simply wouldn't have believed you or have told you that any potential benefits would be so small that they'd be totally unmeasurable. So I was able to screw back about 12 feet and I managed to screw back a little tiny bit further which is how it felt. I was still surprised because I thought it wouldn't make any difference whatsoever but it did go a little bit further. So if you look at that as an advantage you're very very slightly able to screw back further with these things. It's a disadvantage, it's like with awkward bridging. So I started off by trying a variety of different hand positions off the cushion and not only did the glove cause no problems whatsoever here for a number of these shots it felt exactly the same as if I wasn't wearing it because being able to do all of these bridges well can be absolutely crucial in a game of snooker. Snooker Cushion Bridge the Controlled Way shows you exactly how to do every single one of them. It's in the card right now and on the BreakFromLife channel page along with a load of other videos to help you dominate at the game and make the commitment to becoming a better player by subscribing to the channel which is hopefully what Ryan H has done from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the United States. I'd made the assumption that bridging over a ball was going to be difficult especially if you were stretching to reach it because your fingers might slip. Not only wasn't this a problem but for reasons I still don't have an explanation for the glove made it so much easier to bridge over and pot a ball. So what do I think of the glove in general and would I consider using one long term? So let's start off with the negatives. I think this thing makes it a little tiny bit harder to chalk your cue especially now somebody's created round snooker chalk and it just meant especially at the beginning I kept dropping my chalk and I think this is definitely something you would get used to and it's probably not an ongoing negative but it was definitely annoying. The second thing is I really miss being able to just pull the balls out of the pocket in particular three balls out of the pocket at once. This actually got a lot more annoying than you'd think. Never really saw that as much of a skill before but I think again the same as the chalk it's something you will get used to over time. Something I don't think you can do anything about over time is the ridiculous handprint you get on the table with this thing. Now again this is the cheapest glove I could possibly buy I think so maybe more expensive ones will create less of a hand mark but I was surprised because I thought it would create less of a hand mark not more. On to the positives then. It definitely glides back and forwards across your bridge hand easier. There's no little bumps or stops and starts or possibly the extra resistance you get across your hand and that means you can just with less effort get through the ball a lot quicker and I definitely think that helped me screw back more earlier. Another massive positive and I don't understand really why with this is it just feels so much better when you're cueing over the top of the ball. When you've got a shot like this normally it feels quite difficult. It feels just as difficult now but it just yeah this smoothness especially when your thumb's in an awkward position like this means the pop is just so much more straightforward and I think on that shot in particular it's definitely a benefit but none of these reasons is why I'm not going to be wearing the glove. Even though the glove was really tight-fitting it just felt like there was something between my cue and my hand that made the shot feel a little tiny bit unstable. If the cue is actually wobbling around on the glove it's by such a small amount that not only can't you see it on the camera I couldn't actually see it for myself when I was down on the shot and it's on screw shots like this where it's not unusual for the cue to jump off my hand but with the glove it seemed to do this more dramatically. Again a lot of this has to do with the fact that I bought the cheapest glove I could find so if you think there's a glove out there that doesn't have the problems that I've described then post a comment down below and I'm sure that I'll eventually give it a try because there's quite a few things about wearing a glove I like. So for me then it's a no but it is really close. Someone who's relatively close is shrink 1061 from Edinburgh in the UK. I don't actually suffer from clammy hands and my cue never really gets that sticky however if I did have that problem and the cue I was using easily retained moisture I could see me very easily moving this from a no to a yes and using it in almost every circumstance because it will simply improve my cueing and if you want to improve your cueing even more try our video snooker straight cueing exercises to improve or if you want to know how to play under pressure then try our video how to pot under pressure in snooker 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.