by acesinc » 05 Jan 2018 Read
Speaking strictly as a player since my ability to watch the Game is very limited, the disparity in shot times at the professional level does not seem very great. And truly, it is not. Even the "slowest" of the players, Rod the Plod, Ebdon, et al, are not generally slow potters at all. When they get in the balls, they generally are prepared and know what is going to happen next, they know which ball they will end on to continue the break, so that the stroke following tends to flow quite fluidly and quickly.
The real disparity is in decision making. It is often those times that a player is responding to a defensive move made by the opponent. This explains why as someone pointed out that the so called faster players also tend to be the better players. These are the aggressive scorers, play the safety as required but not overly bothered by it. The plodders on the other hand tend to not score so well so when faced with a defensive decision, you may need to mark them with a calendar rather than a stopwatch. As their scoring is not their strong point, plodders will overly fret about the perfect safety stroke to get them in with a chance.
Everyone is familiar with the famous Peter Ebdon 5 minute break of 12 against Ronnie. That break illustrates the point perfectly. It is a matter of confidence and the slow players tend to have lower confidence than the faster players. Peter spent most of the time trying to decide what to actually do, not dawdling over the individual stroke (though I suppose it could certainly be argued that twenty feathers on a single stroke ought be considered to be "dawdling").
I do not think this is a "stat for stats sake" as someone suggested. I think it could be very useful if the players would pay attention to learn from it (or more likely their managers or coaches since players tend to have a hard time admitting to flaws). The largest differential of shot time is from 17 seconds to 35 seconds...for all practical purposes, that is double. 35 seconds on its face does not seem an unreasonable length of time, but that is the average of all strokes. If you break it up into an hour instead of just seconds, it means that one player is at the table for 20 minutes while the other is wasting most of 40 minutes. That becomes significant. Most strokes within a break are just as fast for the plodders as fast players but again, the plodders take a horrendously long time to make even a simple decision when necessary bringing their "average" time way up.
I am very disappointed with the nomenclature "Average Shot Time"....far too reminiscent of Pool. At the very least, it should be the Snooker proper "Average Stroke Time", but I think it would be more accurate if it were called "Average Delay between Strokes". By calling it Average Shot Time, it sounds like Lee Walker pots a Red, scratches his head for 35 seconds, then pots the Black, etc. Not true at all. He can pot four Blacks in two minutes, then take another two minutes to decide a safety to play because he ran himself out of position. Big difference. Good stat; bad name.
Lastly, again spoken strictly as a player, in general, slow players have absolutely no idea that they are slow players. It is quite an amazing lesson in psychology. Every moment they take to decide a stroke is vital and necessary, therefore, the stroke could not be played any faster than it was, therefore, they are not a slow player. No amount of evidence to the contrary can be presented to change this way of thinking. I know this from personal experience having witnessed a number of players who would make Ebdon look hasty.
