Snooker: How a good carpet can improve your game

This curious yet famous variation of regular billiards has grown to be one of the most practiced precision sports around the world. Some might say that having a great game in snooker is just caused by inherited talent or endless hours of practice, but sometimes, just like in football, the pitch conditions might help you improve your performance. The pitch in snooker is the carpet and might affect the game on a noticeable way.

Snooker cloth is similar to any other domestic carpet, which means it has a pile. This pile makes it necessary to iron the carpet in one direction that goes from the baulk end of the table to the top; the direction of the ironing will affect the running of the balls involved in the game.

Of course, the vast majority of snooker tables have thick carpets because they wear longer, and if that’s the case, the friction will infringe a great run-off upon the cue ball that might complicate slow shots. When playing slow shots, this run-off called the nap influences the cue ball even prior to its contact with the objective ball, but if the distance between the cue ball and the object is short, then the nap will affect the later one.

Long shots become even more difficult in thick carpets because the distance might cause a drift and get the cue ball impact other point than the intended one. The thing with the nap is that is almost impossible to predict the path it will follow and it will require a long session of trial and error to get accustomed to it.

Some of the facts you will find helpful are: your shots made with the right hand will drift to the right when they’re made from the baulk end to the top, those made with the left hand with the same direction will drift to the left. Au contraire, the shots made from the top directed to the baulk end will drift to the right if made with the left hand and to the left if made with the right one.

 

Of course, the clothing used on the tables intended for snooker championships is a fine one, it doesn’t have pile and won’t affect the shots allowing a performance based just on skills and not bad luck.

Nevertheless, if you play snooker just for fun instead of making a living out of it in the major leagues, your table or the ones of your favorite club will need some maintenance and cleaning due to its thick clothing. If you’re not aware on how to take care of the carpet, you might want to contact some experts like Franklin Carpet Cleaning, even when they’re not specialist on snooker table cleaning, they’ll give you some advice on how to keep it on the greatest conditions.

As said before, in most sports the game place is taken care of to guarantee the greatest performance of the players, and snooker shouldn’t be the exception.

Snooker, how to improve your game

You could think that, as in any sport, just training a lot is enough to have an excellent performance, nothing further from reality. The truth is that to improve your game you have to follow certain strategic steps that we will show you below:

 

Play alone:

​​Maybe you could think it’s crazy, since playing alone is harder, for novice players, to notice their progress in the game. But the truth is that by playing alone you can take better advantage of the time to analyze yourself, without being interrupted by the other players. So, to begin, spend at least 30 percent of your time playing alone and studying your routines, your strengths and your weaknesses.

 

Keep a record:

Even if you do not think it’s useful, leave all your games, your progress, your strategies and anything you can notice every day is important so you can study and analyze your game, and design strategies based on that, this step is crucial to be able to improve in the short and long term.

 

Establish a structure for your practices:

Based on the above, it is important that you establish a structured practice that allows you to concentrate on your weaknesses while maximizing your strengths. Avoid wasting time by having everything planned in advance, and be sure to follow specific objectives.

 

Mix everything:

It is important that you practice both alone and with colleagues who help you to realize your weaknesses and strengths, when you train with other people you try to perceive your weak points and strengths, and when you are training just try to improve the aspects you saw earlier .

 

Stay focused:

It is very normal for athletes to lose focus of their practice for any reason, to avoid this it is important that you have clear objectives, preferably that there are many short objectives to be few long objectives; This will help you to fulfill your goals step by step and will avoid to a great extent that you are distracted from your goal.

 

Practice seriously:

If you are an amateur player, you will most likely underestimate the importance of the practices, even professional players will tend to put aside the practices and there is nothing more harmful to your game than taking the practices in serious. During the practices you can make mistakes, learn from mistakes and correct them in time, in the game you do not have this opportunity, so you have to give the practices the importance and seriousness they deserve.

 

Practice the basics:

The basics are the mainstay of your game, you have to keep those bases as solid as possible so that your game is not affected over time.

 

Know the table:

It is essential that you know the field in which the game is developed, in this case, the pool table, spinning, practice possible moves around the table.

How to Find A Good Tennis Coach

One of the most important things you need to know is how to find a good tennis coach with whom you have a good affinity, with whom you have full confidence and respect both the player and the coach, basically what they call “chemistry”. Among the points to consider to find a good coach we can highlight the following:

 

It has to be a coach that connects emotionally with the player

It is important that the coach knows how to identify the player’s emotions since tennis is a sport that requires both physically and mentally, the coach must be able to read the player and make decisions correct depending on the case.

Your coach should avoid giving inaccurate messages

The trainer has to use almost always a technical and precise language so that the player understands the instructions in an easy way, and has to be a trainer that does not use expressions like “raise your hand!”, And other instructions that hinder learning.

 

Maximizes learning by doing

The best way to learn tennis is undoubtedly learning by doing, although it is important that the player knows the technical aspects, rules and other things, learning by doing is the only way that the body learns to react in a certain situation

 

The coach must have at least 5 years of experience as a coach

To ensure that he has enough experience to work with inexperienced players and even children. The experience should not only be in the sports field, but also in the psychological, control of emotions and body control, since all these aspects are key at the time of a competition.

 

It is important to understand that a coach usually trains several children at the same time

You only get to have an exclusive teacher when you reach the professional field. If the coach is going to work with children it is essential to have the opinion of other parents to know how the coach communicates with them and to know if the coach is really good. Parents will know if their children are being well trained.

 

You have to feel comfortable with his coach

The best feedback is going to give your son, if the trained is him, it is your son who will tell you if he likes the way he teaches his coach, since it depends on whether you like tennis or not. If your child feels motivated to attend the practices then it is because he has a good coach.
In case you think it is necessary, change the coach until you can find one that you consider appropriate, and that you possess all the qualities mentioned above. It’s no use if you like tennis but you hate your coach, it just does not work.

 

Finally, having a good coach and being consistent with tennis are essential for the person to advance in the sport, but in the case of children it is essential that parents do not meddle in the coach’s teachings, but rather that they have enough freedom to teach in the best possible way. Nor should pressure be exerted on children, since being too demanding with them can result in them hating the sport and ending up leaving it behind.

Rules, the neglected side of sports

The rules are presented to us since we are very small, for example things we should not do, things that we should not say, in general they tell us how to behave. As we grow and begin to relate to other human beings through the game we begin to explore and to know the rules that can be intrinsic or some others that must be explained by their complexity. Little by little and almost without realizing, we adopt and create a lot of rules that give control to our lives, both as individuals and as a society.

 

So, if you care about the rules for a person’s development, why do they get neglected so much in sports?

We almost always witness many rules that are good for athletes, from anti-doping rules to rules of behavior. Athletes prefer in many cases to ignore the rules of sports to obtain a better result in their encounters, although this means competitiveness and sportsmanship in many cases.

 

One of the main causes of this behavior is that the rules and their respective penalties have been left aside, almost without problems since the creation of the first rules for such sports, when the rules have to go at the speed that the sport changes. The rules can evolve to the category that athletes evolve, otherwise it can and usually happens, that people find legal gaps that give them an advantage over their opponents when facing the court.

 

The scenario where the questions are more frequent than the previous ones, with the less frequent recipients in all sports, although there are some rules more difficult to change or modify than others there is always the dilemma about whether changing a rule would give or take advantage of one athlete over another.

 

There are also cases in which the rules do not have to be updated with respect to the athletes, but they have to do it with respect to the sport and the advances that are entitled to the technology.

 

For example, we can take the case of “Monkey kick” in Olympic Taekwondo, where athletes use their techniques for other, stranger ones with which they benefit from the technology of electronic equipment. For this case, the Technical Council of the WTF had a deliberate meeting, since the damage was done in the Olympics, where the use of these kicks was noticeable.

 

The rules in sports, as well as the rules for each sport in particular, such as those in the state in which the athletes are, the sport and the sports community in general.