2012-2013 Season

Hi

So last year was very busy but I still managed to play snooker with Steve and Monty for the second season in a row. We're planning to come back as we're all enjoying playing and feel that we're improving (even at our age). 

We didn't have as good a season as last year; when the league was drawn we were put back in div 4. I must admit I was pretty upset at this to begin with as we'd tried so hard to finish in second in our first year expecting to earn promotion and it never happened. But meh, a lot of the teams in this division are good fun so it was enjoyable from a social perspective and we came 4th this year. 

I finished second in the division players list and second in the breaks list (Steve came first in the breaks). I was pleased with this; I don't think that I was far behind the winner in the players table - in fact he only won by a black ball in points, and Steve just pipped me in the breaks table in the last match. So I think I played really well relatively speaking of course.

Just after Christmas I scored my personal best break in a friendly game of 53 beating my previous best by a point. More signs of improvement!

OK so just a short update really and I'll post a more coherent blog before next season because I'm working on my game and plan to put some hours in over the summer. 

Until then, best wishes and good luck!

Runners Up, Division 4

Well we ended up finishing runners up which we are all really pleased about. We will play in division 3 next season which will be a great challenge. Personally, I feel that I performed far above my standard. There was a generous portion of luck involved I think, but I played well at times too and ground out results when I needed to. I'm not naturally a very confident person, but in snooker I feel that I play pretty well under match conditions. In terms of the players league for the 4th division, I actually finished second (out of 54 players) with 1729 points for and 1225 points against for a win ratio of 77% of frames. I'm really quite proud of that achievement; I'm not sure I'll ever better it. The winner of the players table was Steve Blackman, a good player. I should mention that my top break was only 20, this is a little disappointing as I've hit quite a few breaks bigger than this in practise, but I think that if I continue to put in the hours (especially when I start working again) then perhaps next season I can try and claim a match break in the 30s. I think Steve (from our team) will be plesed with his performance, he finished 8th. For someone who hadn't played much snooker before (and none competitively) he did exceptionally well. Chris is disappointed, he's mentioned that he would like to have played better at times. But I can think of two or three matches where his results made a big difference. So while I performed above my standard, I think that 'Monty' performed beneath his, and in this respect the team balanced itself out. As I mentioned, I'm out of work at the moment (I quit my last job in a rash moment). If I can get some work going before too long then I will be able to put some hours in over the summer months and perhaps come back in the Autumn as a better player. Right, that's it for a few months. If anyone has read any of this and found it interesting then I'll blog again in September. Simon.

Further Improvement

Made my first 40 break for a few years last evening so I think I've finally returned to the sort of level that I played at before which is a great feeling. It's taken a few months (since September I guess) but I've got there at last.

During the game yesterday I specifically concentrated on doing 3 things better:
1/ I sometimes have a tendency to push my right shoulder forward while getting down on the shot which has the effect of bunching up my cueing arm somewhat. This then shortens my follow through and affects how straight my follow through is too. So I played the entire afternoon making sure I did not do this.
2/ No micro adjustment. When I'm not feeling very confident I can often move the cue tip while down on the shot because I don't trust that I've lined it up correctly. I believe this to be a pretty bad thing to do (although I must confirm this with a coach). I think that all of the aiming should take place while getting into position for the shot and all that we should do once set up is to perform 'quality control' and a last minute check that everything is OK. If the angle is wrong, it's probably better to just get back up off the shot and start over. So yesterday I didn't micro adjust once.
3/ Watching the cue tip through delivery. I've seen it theorised that this is a good way to make sure that the cue is going through straight. After I had performed all my checks once down on the shot I would just watch the cue tip, bring it back and cue right through the shot until the follow through was complete before then looking up at the object ball. The reason I've started doing this is so that the very action of cuing is independent from the results. Sometimes I find my cue tip following the object ball before the end of follow through which is obviously a terrible thing. I also don't think I fully follow through sometimes and watching the cue tip makes sure that I do.

A combination of all of these things (plus a dose of confidence gained from finding that the changes were helping) allowed me to score pretty heavily (by my standard). Poor ol' Chris didn't really know what was happening (although I told him what I was concentrating on).

I spoke to Grant Conquest about getting some coaching time so hopefully I'll arrange that for the next month or two. He said we'd look at some technical stuff before getting set up with some practise routines. Then I'll just need to work hard and put individual time in.

As for the league, we're second now below the other Witney side but only by a point. I believe that they will win this league now (their best player is the best in the [correction] division by some distance) but that we have a good chance at coming second for promotion. If we don't get promoted this season I'm sure it will happen next year because we've all improved a great deal.

So I'm really enjoying the game, and who knows I could soon knock in a 50 break!

Technique Analysis

I played a few frames with Chris from the team yesterday and hit two thirty breaks and a mid twenty - more encouraging signs that I'm beginning to score a little heavier.

I took along a mini tripod that I've got for my iPhone so that I could video a few shots and see if I can identify any technical faults. It's the first time that I've seen myself play and I was pretty pleased to be honest. My body remains pretty still throughout the shot and the whole thing looks pretty sound with one exception - I appear to be a little high on the shots. The consequence of this is that I tend to cue down through the shots more than I think that I should.

Now that I've identified a fault it's figuring out how to fix it. Firstly, I can widen my stance. Up to now I have been standing around a shoulders width apart but opening it up a couple more inches shouldn't be too much of a problem I don't think. I could also try bending my left knee a little more. On the internet forums they suggest that the cue should be about 1" above the side rail. I'll use the next few practises and work on this single aspect of my cueing technique and then once I can reliably do this - and it has become second nature - I'll take another video and see what I can spot.

So I'm making progress. It's slow and frustrating but at least I appear to be improving. What is my goal? There are players at the local club who are clearly better than I am but whose ability I feel is within my reach (if I don't stop playing and practising). Players who occasionally make 60-80 breaks and quite regularly 30-60 breaks. In these leagues that's easily enough to kill off a frame. Right now I'm a player who can occasionally make a 30+ break but my common ground is in the teens and to a lesser extent the twenties. So my goal is to move from my current bracket into theirs. It could be that I never get to that standard. Or I could get there in two to three years and then feel that I can push on and aim higher. Only time will tell.

Finally, I'm utilising a snooker sim on my computer to do two things:
1/ Improve my knowledge of positional play (as I feel the ball modelling is pretty accurate)
2/ Drill myself to be thinking more than the next ball ahead. For years I've been playing for the next ball only without trying to give myself further options and this a mental habit that I must begin to get out of.

EDIT: One final thought I just had, a while ago I was talking about improving my aiming. I've read through quite a few forum posts since then and it seems that there is no magic formula for learning the angles; that even the top players don't really know how they aim. The one constant though is that they do pick out the contact point on the object ball before aiming. So in this instance it looks like the brain must work all of these things out for itself as long as it receives the right information. So if I make sure that I'm cueing as straight as possible (and therefore giving my brain the right feedback it needs) and also staying down on the shot and making sure I'm watching the object ball when the collision occurs then over time the potting will sort itself out. So I'm making a leap of faith and all of my work will now focus on just getting my cueing to be as accurate as I can manage.

Anyway a bit of a ramble but this is where I'm at with my game at the moment, and hopefully my improvement will continue.

Lost in the Semi Finals

So we played our semi final last night and ran into a better team. Right up until frame five there were still realistic possibilities that we could have got an unlikely victory but it wasn't to be.

Chris aka 'Monty' had a poor first frame by his standards; I suspect he was probably a little nervous and it affected his cueing. He also suffered from some bad luck which didn't help. Steve played well and narrowly lost and I was so so. I knocked in a 16 break at the start of my crucial frame, and pushed on for a lead of 21. But then I just started missing stuff. I'd knuckle pots and hit safety shots too thick or too thin. I had two decent chances to win the frame (I'd probably pot those balls about half of the time on average) but missed so in some respects I was disappointed. But my opponent was a good player so I'm not too beat up about it.

My overall feeling is that this semi final was too early for us; I think we can all get an awful lot better than our current standard. Another year or two of league play (providing circumstances continue to allow us to enter) and I think we'll be a decent team.

A quick word on the evening, it was very well organised and it was great to have a referee for the game. There were three other semi finals going on at the same time; it felt very professional and everyone was well mannered. I was impressed and it was great to be involved in an event like it. One minor criticism is that I think it would have been a great opportunity for the really good county players to have mixed with us 'noobs' a little more and given some more encouragement. If this game wants to continue to thrive then it needs the better players to sell it.


As far as my game is going, the big picture must be positive as I've hit five mid twenty breaks this week. This is similar to the sort of scoring I was achieving a few years ago when I last played regularly. However, this afternoon I played and I seriously struggled. Everything just felt out of sorts - my alignment, aim and cueing. I really feel that my technique is holding me back and so a session with a coach is becoming a bigger and bigger priority.

Another thing that I'm thinking of doing is purchasing the 'snooker gym' dvd series by Nic Barrow. It's got 700 minutes of snooker coaching. The draw back is the price - £150. But if the content is good it could potentially be worth a lot more in utility for the improvement it offers my game.

Anyway I'm so tired I'm going to have to hit the pillow. Many apologies if this post has been a little hurried but I need to catch up on two late snooker match nights!

Edit:
Thoughts on Improvement

So I spent the day thinking a little more about how I can improve. Aside from the obvious work on cue action (which I need to try and make as consistently straight as I can somehow) I think that learning to pot the colours off the spots would be a good thing to do as soon as I can.

Potting the colours is a good exercise in my opinion because it's relatively simple. More over many of the positional shots have been well documented and can easily be learned. My goal is to get to a standard where I can clear up the colours about half of the time or more. Currently I can rarely do it so I think this would be a really good target for me to aim for.

If I was to achieve this standard then I could then begin to add reds and gradually make the game more complex. Eventually (hopefully) I would be able to pot a few reds and colours and then clear up the colours that by then should be second nature to me. If I was to consistently make 40-60 breaks then I'd be a much more confident match player and I'm certain that my improved confidence and ability would translate (to some degree at least) into regular play.

I'll record my progress in this area and keep it a mini feature of future blog posts. Until next time!

The Cup Run Continues!

Played the quarter final last night and somehow scraped home. The way this competition works (Oxford and District Billiards league Sherlock cup) is similar to the league where each team plays off in up to six frames. The way that the result of a tie is determined is by the higher aggregate score at the end. Anyway, it turns out that I went into the last frame needing to win by 10 clear points to take the match. Of course, it went to the black ball to decide it all and I managed to pot a good long black ball to wrap it up. I was pretty chuffed with that to be fair, most of the frame I'd struggled - especially with safety play. So now it's the semi-finals, and surely this will be seriously tough now. I can't really see us going any further, but to reach a competition semi final so soon after returning to the league is a great result whichever way it goes. I just have to remember to dress smartly and enjoy the experience. Got some days off coming up so I'll make sure to put in plenty of practise to help me as much as possible.

Efforts to Improve
There's an excellent snooker resource on the net called the snooker forum where players can talk about the game - including the technical side. I'm actually learning a lot from reading the various threads and listening to good players give generous advice to new and aspiring players. I'm beginning to believe that the greatest thing that I can do for my game is to learn to cue as straightly and consistently as possible. For now I'm not going to worry so much about my visualisation issues (I can come back to this when the data my brain receives is not muddied by my poor technique). The way I see it, if I spend the next year or so trying to build myself a rock solid cuing action then I can move onto the other stuff thereafter.

As I already mentioned, my technique must be pretty poor (or I'd be better, surely?). I've identified a few things where I think that I can do it better.
1/ Grip - I've always held the cue butt pretty tightly, and I think that this has led to inconsistencies in follow through due to tension and unnecessary wrist movement. I have now changed my grip to a looser style, as described on the forum. I used the new grip in the match last night and suffered no negative issues (although it felt a little alien). In fact I believe my long potting improved a little, but of course this could just be an illusion of standard deviation.
2/ Moving into position - While I've stood behind the shot and walked in for a number of years, the places I've put my feet and the process of bringing the cue down has not been a mechanical thing; I've kind of just moved into the shot and let those things sort themselves out. This cannot be good, my body/arm/shoulder/head probably only changes small fractions in alignment but the effect must surely compound. From now on the process is going to involve placing my right foot down the line of the shot and then the left foot directly to the side (about 2 feet) before bringing everything else down into line. I'm also going to try and get my arm vertical (it tends to 'tuck - in' towards the body just a little.
3/ Developing a longer follow through - One thing that I read multiple times is that the great players have a good long follow through (5 inches or more). This improves accuracy and cue power. I'm pretty sure my follow through is only 3-4 inches at the moment (probably why I struggle to get a large amount of top/back spin on the cue ball). The consequence of this is probably that I tend to hit the ball harder in an effort to compensate which obviously brings problems.

Hopefully I can incorporate these ideas into my game and they will become second nature; I'm convinced that I'll improve much more quickly if they do. I'm not sure I'll find it that easy at first, but once it's all settled in my cuing action should be a lot more consistently straight. I'll keep this blog updated with my progress. One thing I may do if I'm still struggling in this regard a year down the line is sign up for some coaching. Whether with Grant Conquest from the club or from Nic Barrow (a respected coach based in Milton Keynes).

Right, enough mindless tekker's talk. Will blog again after the semi-final.

Cup Matches

Hi, so we finished the first half of the season top of our division which is really pleasing. Monty is returning to some sort of form while Stephen just seems to improve every week and is now probably the best player in the team. The unfortunate thing is that I feel that I've taken a giant step backwards.

What hasn't helped is that I'm attempting to adjust the way that I line up shots. My problem is this: I have always sighted the angle using the method known as the 'ghost ball'. This has brought me moderate success but there are always angles on the table where I actually struggle to visualise this 'ghost ball' and so I feel that sometimes (especially on cut backs) I'm shooting blind. Furthermore, I can't see how this method can possibly be accurate enough. Sure, I think it's probably enough for pool but I'd like a more accurate method of lining up the shots.

For these reasons I have been focussing on two things (which are related) which is the point of contact that the cue ball needs to hit the object ball, and the line of aim that gets the cue ball to hit the object ball at the point of contact. There's a web application that allows this to be demonstrated and practised (www.onekaraoke.com) and so I'm spending a little time with this in my spare time as well. The theory behind doing this is that if I can pick out the point of contact reliably every time (an easier process than visualising a ghost ball in my opinion) then it will eventually become easy to just pick out the line of aim {because each respective point of contact is 'tied' to it's own line of aim}. This strikes me as a much more accurate way of aiming at the object ball.

So far though, I'm playing a lot worse than I was using my previous sighting method. Of course, while I learn the angles (again) one would expect this to happen and if I eventually become a better potter than I was then this frustration will be worth it. It will be a situation where I've taken a step backwards to take two steps forwards. I'm just beginning to get a little worried that I've made my game irreparably worse by undergoing this sighting change. Time will tell of course.

One more thing about my development as a player, I'm really trying to get my technique better. The more I talk to good players, the more they mention the small things that I didn't really think that much about like the bridge, grip etc.

We played a cup game just before Xmas where we were (un)fortunately drawn against a very good team from our own club. Despite getting 24 points each head start, I went down fairly easily and so did Monty. The difference between divisions was quite stark; while there were no huge breaks all of the shots were much more sensible and safety conscious. I don't think I got an easy shot all game - unlike our division where players just take everything on. I didn't mention Steph-o, because he played an absolute blinder and beat a very good player called Paul Chester. That's a win to brag about (assuming he doesn't go on to become a top division player himself of course, and who knows on his current trajectory?).

Tonight we play Thame C in another cup game. This cup is different in that the teams are capped at division 3 and so we probably stand a better chance in this one. Thame are in our division so we should feel fairly confident.

I'll blog again in the spring I expect. I'm going to have a real go at this adjustment in sighting and if it eventually begins to pay off (and there are angles that I've begun to recognise now) then hopefully I can begin to become the sort of player that I've always wanted to be.

Simon