my life of snooker

How I Started

I forgot how I started to play this game. Maybe it was from playing truant. Or maybe I picked it up from a friend. I really have forgotten. I only know that this game has been in my life very long. This game is frustrating yet rewarding, my love-hate relationship with it goes up to years. Snooker is really fascinating.

I think I should have started playing it during the play truant days in JC (Junior College), when I was 17 years old. But my memory of snooker starts in the army after that. The sound of phenolic balls colliding, and balls being potted going into the pockets, the feeling of the wooden cue against the chest, on my bridge hand and my grip hand as I take aim, the sensation of the table cloth on my bridge hand. Everything about snooker intrigues me.

(photo of me down on the shot on a snooker table.)

It's not about the winning or losing (although it feels better to win). It is the process that I love. How you work out the angle, the approach to the line of shot; the things that go through your head when you are not at the table.
Let me try to explain the basics of the game, how it is played:
First, the cue ball or the ball you strike with your cue tip is white in colour. You start anywhere in the 'D' at the baulk line. The first ball to hit will be a red ball. If there's no pot, or if you don't pot a red ball, it becomes your opponent's turn, and your opponent will start where the cue ball stops, and the target ball is red. If you pot a red (1) ball, you get 1 point and you continue where the cue ball stops. The next ball you need to hit is a 'coloured' ball of your choice; yellow (2), green (3), brown (4), blue (5), pink (6), or black (7). After you tell the referee your choice, the first ball to hit is the coloured ball you have chosen. If there is no pot, it's your opponent's turn, and the target ball is red. If you pot the coloured ball, you get the points in brackets, and you continue and the target ball becomes red, and the coloured ball is respotted, or put back onto the table at its specified spot. Only coloured balls are respotted, red balls stay off the table when they're potted. Once you or your opponent have potted the last red and a colour or not, then the person at the table with his or her turn will need to pot the coloured balls in ascending order of the points. This time when the colour is potted, it stays off the table and will not be respotted.
The objective of the game is to earn as many points as possible till your opponent needs a snooker (you'll know what is it later) or more, and gives up and concedes the game on their turn. The maximum number of points you can get is 147 points, the dream of every person that plays this game (there are 15 reds, you pot all of them with blacks, then clear the colours. You do the math.), just like a 300 pin fall for a bowler or a 9 darter in a game of 501 in darts; the perfect game. You only need to pot 36 balls. Hahaha it sounds simple, but it is not.

Even if not a perfect game a century is not that easy to obtain. 13 reds with blacks only comes up to 104. Clearing the colours gives you 27. So you need to average brown with the 15 reds and clear the colours to get 102, or score high value colours with the reds to get a century without clearing the table.
If you can't score anymore or have no other choice but to leave the table, you try to make it as hard as possible for your opponent. You either try to put distance between the cue ball and target (or correct technical term, object) ball or try to snooker your opponent, or both. So what does it mean to lay a snooker? It means to block the cue ball and object ball with another ball in such a way that the cue ball can only contact one side of the object ball if travelling in a straight line. A complete snooker would mean the cue ball can't see the object ball in a straight line at all. Basically you try to limit what your opponent can do, so it becomes difficult for your opponent to take the next shot.