Continuing our New Year Snooker Resolutions, here is number three:
New Year’s Resolution number 3:
Focus on cueing more than aiming.
Your problem is CUEING, not AIMING!
90% of players who tell me they have trouble aiming or sighting the ball actually have trouble because of their cueing errors. Aiming becomes EASY when your cueing is perfect, but almost all club players want to bypass that step and ‘get on with the business of potting’. Snooker is NOT a game of potting or positional play – it is a game of CUEING… the balls just act as feedback for what your cue has done on every shot. There is more over-emphasis on aiming in snooker than any other topic… where the target should instead be to deliver the cue straight, and consistently. What you can try is to focus NOT ON POTTING the ball, but on HITTING IT WHERE YOU ARE AIMING (whether you pot it or not). So, you are downgrading your expectation from POTTING THE BALL, to HITTING THE BALL WHERE YOU ARE AIMING.In other words:
- Make your best GUESS at the potting angle:The biggest hurdle to aiming is thinking you can unfailingly work out / remember / calculate the exact potting angle on every shot. Most club players do not believe that even pros cannot do this – where as in fact pros have just gotten better over time at guessing the potting angle than the rest of us… by repeated practice, grooving a consistent cue delivery, and properly watching the ball to the pocket on every shot. Most club players get down to the shot with no plan, fish around for the line of aim while down, and then thwack the shot and jump away from the table as soon as possible to avoid seeing their errors – this is the recipe for failure!
- Commit to your guess
- Deliver the cue as straight as possible
Please reply if you have any questions or feedback…
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