Practice Routines

[dpdubai]

Hi all I’m new to the forum and glad I found it to be honest, seems like a good resource for advice and ideas.

Anyways I’ve always been fairly reasonable standard club player, floating in and out when I fancied a game and depending on how often I played could put together regular 20-40 breaks.
Recently something has clicked in my mind and I want to really raise my standard of snooker, I’m learning as much as I can and basically trying to be my own coach by correcting old faults and establishing practice routines to improve my game. Right now I usually find the time to practice twice a week for around 2 hours followed by 3-4 hours matchplay with my Uncle over the weekend.

My current goals:

Develop a solid straight cue action.
Improve sighting/potting skills.
Improve positional play.
Increase my standard of break building.

Practice routines to establish this:

Cue action - Run the white ball up and down the centre spots & pot 10 long blues from baulk line before moving on to next exercise.
Sighting potting – I have an practice ball with the five basic angles marked on which i use to rep up on potting angles and also sometimes use if i miss.
Postional play – For this I’ve been potting straight blues with the rest of the colours lined up above the pot and i use them as a guide to screw back or run through to.
Break building – Various exercises with the line-up potting round the black, pink or blue.

I’d just like to get some input from experienced players out there if you think I’m on the right track to improving my playing?
Is this kind of routine too much for one practice session?
Is the amount of time I’m devoting to this enough to achieve my goals?

Thanks

[joe.l]

drills

I have some improvement drills that will show results fairly quickly , I don't know how to post them , but if you give me your e-mail address , you can look them over , post them ( I'm not a computer guy ) if you think they will help , then help yourself ....later Joe

[bongo]

Hi there, welcome to the forum!

You seem to be on the right track. You've made the first step that you want to improve your game and that is a really difficult first step to actually have goals to achieve and have an idea on how to improve.

As I can't actually see you play, I can't suggest too many ideas to help your actual game because of that. But make sure that you don't try to cram too much into your practice session at once. A lot of people try to learn so much into one session and cram it all in, that is actually not good as you aren't able to practice each new thing individually. It can also be very confusing to learn so many things in one session. Try to have an aim of things you want to learn in one session, it may only be one thing. Just make sure you can practice it without having so many things to do so you can't actually practice it for a while.

I hope this helps you!

bongo

[bongo]

I have some improvement drills that will show results fairly quickly , I don't know how to post them , but if you give me your e-mail address , you can look them over , post them ( I'm not a computer guy ) if you think they will help , then help yourself ....later Joe

I'd be interested to see your practice routines Joe.

Please send them to 'snookeranorak at googlemail dot com'

I'm writing my email here as I did to avoid any spam robots or whatever. Of course, 'at' means '@' and 'dot' means '.'

bongo

[dpdubai]

Hi there, welcome to the forum!

You seem to be on the right track. You've made the first step that you want to improve your game and that is a really difficult first step to actually have goals to achieve and have an idea on how to improve.

As I can't actually see you play, I can't suggest too many ideas to help your actual game because of that. But make sure that you don't try to cram too much into your practice session at once. A lot of people try to learn so much into one session and cram it all in, that is actually not good as you aren't able to practice each new thing individually. It can also be very confusing to learn so many things in one session. Try to have an aim of things you want to learn in one session, it may only be one thing. Just make sure you can practice it without having so many things to do so you can't actually practice it for a while.

I hope this helps you!

bongo

Thanks Bongo,

I hear what your saying, quality over quantity. Again I know everyones different and no-one here has seen me play so it can be difficult to assess someones strengths weaknesses online but where would you start off?

And for how long would you spend doing a set routine?
I've read the long straight potting exercise is one of the most valuable?

Like many club players i know my cue action breaks down on me which is frustrating when your sighting a fairly simple potting angle 1/4-1/2 ball. i guess this would be something to centre my practice routines round until i feel ive achieved a reasonable improvement?

Thanks guys i appreciate the insight from experienced players

[bongo]

Well you may do a routine, for say 5 attempts or however long you feel like at the time, the danger of doing the latter is that it may just turn into a session where you don't have any real routine which isn't always ideal. A routine can help your concentration. I'd would work on parts of the game which you struggle on, also playing some parts of the game which you find strong.

bongo

[quintahunter]

I'd be interested to see your practice routines Joe.

Please send them to 'snookeranorak at googlemail dot com'

I'm writing my email here as I did to avoid any spam robots or whatever. Of course, 'at' means '@' and 'dot' means '.'

bongo

I'd be interested too. Mine is " magodevoz at hotmail dot com "

[Mike P]

I see that Joe’s drills haven’t appeared in this thread yet. Joe I also would be interested in seeing them. Please send me a PM with them.

Mike

[dpdubai]

Had a bit of a breakthrough at the weekend!!

Taking inspiration from Bongo's advice I limited my practice sessions to concentrate on cue action. The drill I like right now to improve center ball striking is the 15 reds across the blue spot and taking on straight pots from the baulk line. I had two 2 hour practice sessions over the weekend.

Session 1 went like this:

1st hour on long pots best score 5 out of 15 reds
2nd hour break building from line up, consistently hitting high 30's and several breaks into the 40's then came my 1st EVER half century a 58 which included 8 reds, 3 blacks, 3 pinks and 2 blues it felt as though I couldn't miss and I think the isolation of cue action has alot to answer for.

Session 2 yesterday:

Best score on long pots 8 of 15 (getting there)

Line-up- no half century this time but I lost count the amount of times I was in the high 40's.

I know this is relatively modest compared to some other players on the forum but this represents a bit of a breakthough for me and I must now be doing something right.

So thanks for the advice, especially Bongo

[RocketRoy1983]

Congrats on ur first half-ton im sure the floodgates have opened but dont expect anything from this beautiful game. Enjoy it.

[Mike P]

For those interested here are Joe’s drills, they do seem to be geared towards cue ball control.

Mike

[Jacko]

Just in case you missed this on the Del Hill thread - here's some useful practice routines...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpB1N93tVgM

[dpdubai]

I missed that, was that footage from the crucible this year?

I like these routines:

Like the idea of making a game out of the safety routine between you and your opponent.

Also the middle pocket one looks tough and the christmas tree a nice variation on the line up. As Del says forces you to think more about what your doing rather than knowing you'll have something on somewhere if you put the ball in the middle of the table