What You Need To Know When Playing Snooker

August 7th, 2009 by Norton Legg

by Norton Legg

Snooker is one of the world’s most popular billiard games in the world because it’s lots of fun to play and easy to learn! Snooker is played much like pool is on a felt-covered snooker table with 6 pockets, a set of billiard balls and a cue stick. If you like billiard games why not learn how to play?! Here’s how you play snooker:

First, gather up all the stuff you’ll need. Snooker is played with blank coloured balls called object balls. Divide the balls into two piles. In the first pile, lay the red balls aside. You can put anywhere between 10-15 red balls in there depending on how long youd like to play. In the other pile put one ball of each of these colours into it: yellow, green, brown, blue, pink, black and white.

Now, set aside the white ball from the others as this is always to be used as the cue ball that you will need to knock the other balls in the snooker table pockets. The other balls have point values as follows: red (1), yellow (2), green (3), brown (4), blue (5), pink (6) and lastly, black with 7 points.

You would then need to place the 2 piles of snooker balls into the middle of the snooker table, just like you would for pool with all the coloured balls on one side, and the reds on the other side.

Toss any coin to decide who will play the opening shot. The opening player must then ensure that the white ball comes into contact with one of the reds. If not, then its the other player’s turn to give it a try.

The first player who is able to hit a red ball can then earn further points by pocketing a coloured ball, and then a red ball in sequence. Should he fail in this task, the opposing player must then attempt to pocket a red ball which should then be followed by a coloured ball in that order. As long as there are red balls still remaining on the snooker tables, all pocketed coloured balls have to be immediately replaced back on the snooker table at its original starting position. The game must continue until all red balls have been pocketed.

Now that the red balls have all been sunk into the snooker table’s various pockets, players can then earn points by pocketing the coloured balls in ascending order. Its not necessary to replace all the sunk coloured balls during this round.

Now that all the coloured balls have been sunk, thats the end of the game. Now to tally up the scores and the player with the highest score wins!

There are only 2 ways that a player can accumulate points. Firstly, by earning points when the opponent fouls on a shot. The most common fouls being either failing to hit the target ball, failing to hit a red ball on the opening shot, and pocketing the wrong coloured ball or the white cue ball. The opposing player is usually awarded between 4 – 7 penalty points when one of these fouls occur. This is usually the higher score between the legal object ball and the score value of the incorrect ball that was hit first or sunk. The second way of accumulating points is obviously by sinking the correct target ball into one of the snooker table pockets.

The opposing player must also give the opposing snooker player the choice of allowing the opponent to play at striker for the opening shot, or to play as the striker himself. The game continues from there.

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