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!
Saturday, 25 February 2012
Thursday, 16 February 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, 8 February 2012
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!
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!
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