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Miscueing

Postby crossFader

Hello everyone,

I got a little problem of myself :).

Since I live in a country where Snooker is not a very popular sport,
it is very hard to find an oppurtunity for myself to get some training sessions.
Iam playing alot Snooker lately and I can see my progression over the time.
I have encountered a problem now where I could use the advice of an experienced Snooker player.

Some time ago i got comftable with my cueing action and my stance.
I mostly have a positive feeling when approaching the table now.
Though my cueing got 'relatively' consistent (at least the most consistent it ever was),
I kept missing easy pockets.

I realised my issue by practicing straight shots one day,
blue ball straight into the middle pocket. In order to perform a straight shot,
I had to alter my aim a bit to the right. At this point the shot was not straight anymore from my intuition.
Yet it was a perfectly straight shot every time.

Obviously this had nothing to do with my aiming but with my cueing action - I figured that after some sessions. I tried out various alterations on my grip, stance, head position, shoulder position, etc.
I have this problem for a while now and can see that Iam improving, but this still happens on around 50% of my shots. Especially on long shots i can clearly see that the cue ball is hitting more left than I actually aimed for.

Some time ago I asked a friend to make a video of myself. In slowmotion one can clearly see that I 'had' - and still have - a huge problem.

Now as I said, this improved already but still happens a reasonable amount of times. Does anyone have some tips for me how I can get onto the issue? Or is this something that will fix itself with time and practice?

This is frustrating me and I got a little desperate lately ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTihCNtDGjI

Thanks all

Re: Miscueing

Postby Vojta1

Hi, I think I can share few thoughts on this.
Watching your video in slow motion I realised that you have very similar problem that I am currently experiencing as well: You are aiming right, cue is pointing in correct direction but when you actually play the shot, you don't deliver the cue in the straight line, which causes the cue ball to go off line plus perhaps also applies unintentional side to the cue ball.
I believe the only way to fix this is practise. Luckily there are plenty of exercises that will teach you correct cueing. The one that I am currently practising for 20 minutes before every session is this:
Place the cue ball on the brown spot and play it along the spots - that means to the black spot, black cusion and back. The goal is that cue ball should come back to the same spot you have played it from. See this video of Barry Stark explaining this exercise:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5zFwSQ-ZJs&t=6s
You can also try to play that with different pace as I found that playing this with low pace is much easier than high pace. When I started this exercise the cue ball always bounced from the black cusion to the right side which means there was right-hand side applied but now I am already getting some positive results. You can also watch other video of Barry where he is explaining some other exercises that might help you with straight cueing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxjTAmP-9B4
Good luck