Bad kick?

[felipecocco]

I've been watching several matches online and in any given match there will inevitably be a few easy pots that a player should have made - and right afterwards the comment will always be how he got a "bad kick," thus causing him to have missed the pot.

I tried over and over again to look at those videos but for the life of me all I can see is that the player genuinely just missed the pot. So, could anyone to me what this "bad kick" is all about? Also, given that these kicks happen, can you really tell whether or not a player has missed the shot because of an error or because of a kick?

[Darth_Spud]

You can usually tell if a player has a suffered a kick by the CB/OB jumping slightly off the table cloth for a fraction or by the sound the contact between the two balls makes. This can cause a player to miss seemingly easy shots. Most of the time a player’s expression will give away if he has had a kick.

[gus]

Whenever it happens to me I usually assume that I have made some foul abomination of an attempt at a pot, but if you get paid hundreds of thousands a year, then you can put it down to static charge or gravitational waves from Andromeda and climb back up into your ivory tower safe in the knowledge that it could not possibly have been your fault.

[bongo]

You can also get unreliable 'bounces' off the cushion, for example if the cue ball suddenly gains speed or loses spped when coming off the cushion.

When the cue ball gains speed is usually due to chalk on the cushion.

The reason for kicks and bounces is the Snooker equivalent of the Maths problem of finding the value of Pi. We just don't know!