I am going to write about the elements of luck which I have been witnessing whilst watching this years world snooker championship.

I am not a snooker player myself – I am actually involved with stuttering therapy and offering a cost reduction service whereby people are able to obtain cheap calls.

A kick

I am sure that most snooker players are aware of what a kick is, in snooker. Basically the ball lifts from the bed of the table and can cause the shot to go offline which can easily cause a missed attempted pot, the positional side to go astray or the safety shot to go wrong.

Many experts have being trying to work out why these kicks happen, to attempt to remove them from the game. As you may well be aware they have not managed to come up with the answers or solutions as yet.

A ball drifting offline

I watched a match last night where the player attempted a pot into a middle pocket. He played the shot quite slowly and it was heading into the heart of the pocket. At the last moment is seemed to roll offline and it hit the jaw of the pocket, his opponent then cleared up the rest of the balls to win the frame.

The player looked in disgust as the table for whatever reason had not played true, the commentators were also at a loss to explain it and even said that it had been a problem all week. We were told that once the snooker table and cloth had been set up it had been through rigorous checks to ensure that everything was in order. The commentator commented that with the large crowd in the arena and the atmosphere, that this could affect the roll of the table.

A dodgy bounce off a cushion

A number of the players had been badly affected by a bad bounce off one of the cushions where it seems to spring off too quickly. This again can affect their safety or positional play, which again can result in them losing a frame.

It can be very soul destroying to have a series of these bits of “bad luck”. Snooker can be one of the most frustrating games at times in any case as a player battles with the demons in his head and these unfortunate kicks and bad bounces off the cushion do little to improve the situation.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 25th, 2009 at 6:41 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.