Whether you’re a complete beginner or even an intermediate snooker player (however in this instance, more likely a beginner) you may find your typical practice routine to become quite stagnant and repetitive. Whilst consistent practice is the key to improving your fundamentals and break-building, perhaps you can add or try some of these methods to mix up your practice sessions.
If you’re completely new to the game and are looking for ways of practicing and improving, then some of the routines below may be quite useful to you. The methods below exclude the line-up or ‘T’ drill which are probably the most common routines for practice.
Black off the spot
A very simple exercise – place the black on the spot, pot it. Rinse and repeat. Wherever the cue ball ends up, continue attempting to pot the black from there. This is a useful routine to practice soft screw and stun shots in order tighten up your cue ball control. Once you become more advanced, you can attempt using one cushion only to continue playing for the black.
Pot Quiz
If you watch the segments during the intervals of the World Championship, you’ll see John Parrott playing a mini-game with the professionals where they aim to pot all 15 reds and the black in the fastest time possible. Whilst it’s all fun and games, it’s actually a useful way of keeping close control of the cue ball and efficiently navigate your way through an open table.
Put the reds in a 3x5 layout from the blue spot to the black spot, and the black on the brown spot. The aim is to pot all the reds then the black in as fast a time as possible. What’s your fastest time?
Long straight blue
Place the blue on the spot and the cue ball a fair distance behind it in order to leave yourself a long, straight blue into one of the corner pockets. Practicing this shot will improve your straight cueing and give you the confidence to play the long blues to corner pockets in order to keep a break going. How many can you pot in a row?
Cueing on the baulk line/colour spots
Something that is useful right before you go into your main practice and drills is to place the cue ball on the baulk line and spend some time cueing up and down the line, ensuring the cue ball returns to you along the baulk line. This will make sure that you’re cueing well and straight without placing unintentional side on the shot, which of course you would notice if the cue ball returns off-line.
This is a routine that Steve Davis would do before his sessions and to add an extra challenge if you feel you’ve mastered this is to go the full length of the table, this time using the colour spots as reference. You could set yourself a target of 5 or 10 in a row (or a pre-determined time limit) before you continue practice.
Shot-to-Nothing
If you can improve your consistency at shot-to-nothings, you will find yourself creating more opportunities for yourself rather than waiting for your opponent to leave you amongst the balls. While practicing close cue ball control is paramount, if you can practice getting yourself in those positions, it should pay dividends in the long run. Practice shot-to-nothings from a variety of positions until you can confidently pot (similar to the long blue) and change up the angles so there won’t be too many surprises to you in a real game scenario.
Of course, there are a countless number of routines and drills that you could practice and this just shines a light on a handful of them, so expect a follow-up showing a selection of different routines in the future. It also goes without saying how important the safety game is to snooker, so don’t neglect practicing this. There will be a Short post in the future on various exercises you can perform to improve on this aspect of the game so stay tuned for those!
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