Snooker Angles Escapes And Doubles What Is The Trick

Here's all the little tricks that allow you to use the angles to your advantage. Whether you're trying to safely escape from a snooker or successfully play a wide variety of doubles. Including all the tricks to playing swerve shots so you can avoid using cushions altogether. 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 wrong with a basic way to escape from snooker? Okay so here's a basic way to escape from any snooker. Okay so I've stopped it there because it's possible that something you're having problems with or the way the table reacts means it's nowhere near this simple. But let's just go through the basic explanation first. Because the white and red are level here relative to that cushion you measure the distance between the which according to my phone is a metre and a half which is 48 centimetres. Half it which is 24 centimetres which means in order to hit this red we handily have to hit the bulk line and that means hitting this red should be exactly the same as if we were aiming for the reflection of the red in this mirror that's flat against the cushion. The theory of this all means if you just use a cushion like it's a mirror and aim for the reflection of the ball you're trying to hit you should make contact with it every time. But as I said it's not that simple and on shots like this one you could find that results in you missing by quite a way. So what's happening here? Well when you've got a shot like this one you're quite away from the cushion you're playing it at a square angle. The cue ball's roughly going to come off the cushion at the same angle that it went on but when you're closer to the cushion and you're actually playing it at a narrower angle the cue ball isn't going to bounce off so straight it's actually going to do what we call slide a bit. So if I aim for the pink here in the same way it's just going to slide wide a bit. How much the table actually slides will depend on how hard you strike the ball and the table you're actually playing on. The steel block cushions the professionals play on actually slide quite a bit whereas some club tables won't actually slide at all and unfortunately this is just an extra complication you're going to have to deal with. And adding to this complication can be any unintentional side spin you accidentally put on the ball. So if you want to be able to play snooker escape at a firm pace you have to be able to cue the ball straight and if you want to find out more about doing that then try the video in the card. But I think the most crucial part of escaping from snookers is actually shot selection. Try and look for areas on the table where the cue ball will be safe whether you hit the balls or not rather than just playing the easiest shot. Getting the pace right is also vital especially if it's not guaranteed that the balls will go safe. But what about the shots where you need to use side spin to help you escape from snookers? This is actually a really difficult snooker to escape from until you know how to use side spin and as soon as you know how to escape from a snooker it becomes unbelievably easy. To put it very simply striking the cue ball on the right hand side will make it jump to the right off a cushion and striking it on the left hand side will make it jump to the left off a cushion. Playing into a cushion straight like that greatly affects the direction of the cue ball but when you play into the cushion at more of an angle with side spin it has more of an effect on its speed rather than its direction. But you can take advantage of that as well. Striking the ball on the opposite side to a cushion will make it speed up as it hits the cushion. We call this running side and hitting it on the same side as the cushion will make it slow down. We call this check side. The trick to this is knowing which side to use when. Because we're hitting the first cushion at such an angle here it doesn't actually change its direction only its speed. It's off the second cushion where the direction's changed and that's why we need left hand side on this shot. So basically striking a cushion straight mostly affects the angle and striking the cushion at an angle mostly affects the speed. So if you want to find out more about playing shots with side spin including how to pop balls with side spin have a look in the video in the card right now. But here we're going to be looking at other things you can do with the angles. Like playing doubles. To get these shots you'll again have to play for the mirror image as a pocket but there's more to these shots than potting the ball. But the main trick to playing these shots is getting the cue ball safe if you miss because they're never guaranteed and often they're played in the shots and nothing in this way. When you play them like this you don't really want to be missing and hitting the far jaw because that's likely to leave the ball on and often you'll see players erroring on the near jaw side just to make sure they don't leave a pop. Doubles are actually used in snooker far more to keep a single object ball safe whether that's playing up the table like this or by playing a cross double where you use two cushions to try and get the object ball in the middle of the top or bolt cushion and keep maximum distance between cue ball and object ball. And if the angle's right it's sometimes worth a risk to play a pot like this because you know you're getting the cue ball safe. The last double to talk about is what's usually referred to as the crook tap double and this is where you play a ball around three cushions into the middle pocket. Now the way I usually work this out is if you imagine there's a ball on the side cushion roughly where the black is there dead in line with a black spot and we have the cue ball halfway between the pink spot and the middle pocket and we play this straight you know it's going to be going close to the middle pocket it's not necessarily going to be going in the middle pocket but we know it's going to be going close and you could sort of use that as a pattern to work out other shots but what if you don't want to use the angles you want to play a swerve shot so hitting it with right hand side will make it swerve to the right hitting it with left hand side will make it swerve to the left. Now even just playing it with right hand side here slowly will make it swerve to the right. It's going to the right now but nowhere near enough to pop the blue so what we're going to have to do to increase that effect is strike down on it at a 45 degree angle now what I'm doing here is I'm striking down on the cue ball I'm aiming as far to the edge as I can go so my tip is just the whole tip is just about making contact with the cue ball so when I strike down on it like this I can swerve it but not quite enough to actually pot it so in order to pop this shot what I'm going to do instead of striking down on the cue ball at a higher angle which I could do and will work I'm going to strike the cue ball slightly lower so I'm hitting it about a tip and a half lower still hitting as close to the edge as I can now this will probably have less spin on it than the last one just a bit less but when it gets to here it's also going to have back spin on it so that'll start to drag and slow the cue ball down meaning we should comfortably pop the blue the spin came off it right right as when it got there spin came off it and it swung back to the right the most complicated spin shot is the masse shot now I'm going to use it here to just push the cue ball forward a little bit and spin back and pop the pink so the way I'm going to do this I'm going to hold it in my hand like this off the table hit the very edge of the cue ball half a tip on the edge of the cue ball as I'm going to go like that at it as I play it and that should hopefully just be enough to help me pop the pink there we go it doesn't look that impressive but it's a very difficult shot to play the final shot isn't actually a legal shot in the game of snooker because it involves jumping over balls but it is handy to know for some trick shots now the way to play this shot is to just strike just below center at more than the 45 degree angle getting the gap right between the cue ball and the reds is also vital here because I want to be at the highest point as I'm going over them and I usually find if you've got the white near the cushion it can get more height more easily hands in a more stable position up here and I'm really striking down on it from some height I just need to commit to the power now to make sure I get over the top make sure I hit it hard I hit the red but that's close enough now you can legally play some jump shots and I explain what you can and can't do in this really old video when I barely had a functioning camera it's in the card right now and on the map is Armando from Mauritius island which leads us nicely into trick shots because if you're one of the five people who have ever wanted to know how I play these trick shots at the start of my videos then you're in luck over the past weeks I've been incredibly hard at work writing a book that explains how you can play even the most complex trick shots but this doesn't just explain the tricks themselves in fact this goes into great detail explaining the techniques you need in order to play all of these shots and also to play snooker to a higher standard as well it's even going to link back to the precise parts of these videos that you're going to need to know in order to play each individual shot and that's why I'm going to be playing all 99 trick shots in the next video in this series and I'll post it here as soon as I finally made it 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