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.