Snooker Rules

First Monday of the New Year, and we're back!  Let's see how long I can keep it up this time.


After watching the Snooker Guys on That Mitchell and Webb Look one more time, I finally got fed up and went and looked up exactly how snooker differs from what we in America simply call "pool."  The 2012 Welsh Snooker Championship on YouTube was helpful.

Snooker is played on the same basic table as pool-- a big felted rectangle with six pockets.  The main difference is the balls.  Instead of 15 sequentially numbered balls, snooker has 15 identical solid red balls and 6 "colored" balls (in yellow, green, brown, blue, pink, and black).  The red balls are set up more or less like the 15 of pool, but the six colored balls are added to the table in a kind of loose T shape, basically spread out to get in the way of the red balls.

Play begins similarly, with one player shooting a cue ball into the mass of reds.  But from then out, on your turn, instead of hitting "your half" of the balls (as in billiards) or the lowest numerical ball on the table (as in 9-ball), you can hit any of the reds.  If you sink a red, you earn one point, but before you can aim for another, you have to hit and sink one of the "colored" balls.  These are assigned values between 2 and 7 depending mostly (as far as I can tell) on how much in the way of the reds they tend to be.  The ones right down in amongst the red end are the 6-7 pointers, and the three back on the other side of the table are 2, 3, and 4.  So anyway, in a perfect game, a player would alternate shooting reds and colors (with the colors being replaced on the table in their original places every time they're sunk) until all of the reds are gone, at which point they would run out the colors in ascending point value order.  Of course, if at any point you hit the wrong type of ball or fail to sink a shot, your opponent takes over and begins shooting at a red.

So instead of being a race to sink the 8- (or 9-)ball, snooker is a points game, with the frame going to whoever has the most points when the last ball is sunk.  Based on my limited viewing, it looks like 80 points is a commonly accepted end point, slightly more than half of the maximum of 147 points (it is possible in some rules sets to get a few more points off of fouls, so the "actual" maximum is slightly higher).