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Angled ball

Postby elnino

The entire section that previously dealt with angled ball situations does no longer exist. If you're angled you're forced to hit the ball on indirectly.

a) If you were angled and failed to first make contact with the ball-on can the referee call a foul and a miss? Can the 3 miss rule be applied in such a case?
b) If you were angled as a result of a foul can the referee award you a free ball?

Re: Angled ball

Postby Dan-cat

elnino wrote:The entire section that previously dealt with angled ball situations does no longer exist. If you're angled you're forced to hit the ball on indirectly.

a) If you were angled and failed to first make contact with the ball-on can the referee call a foul and a miss? Can the 3 miss rule be applied in such a case?
b) If you were angled as a result of a foul can the referee award you a free ball?


Great questions. I don't know the answers I'm looking forward to finding out. There's a great Alex Higgins shot where he put the nugget in an angle situation to win a frame here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo0RYMP8F7k

I did the same thing to my snooker buddy a few weeks ago. He was impressed and annoyed in equal measures!

What if you are angled after a foul, and can't see any of the balls?

Re: Angled ball

Postby acesinc

elnino wrote:The entire section that previously dealt with angled ball situations does no longer exist. If you're angled you're forced to hit the ball on indirectly.

a) If you were angled and failed to first make contact with the ball-on can the referee call a foul and a miss? Can the 3 miss rule be applied in such a case?
b) If you were angled as a result of a foul can the referee award you a free ball?



Elnino, either you are a master of the obscure thought experiment, or else you have way too much time spent on a snooker table with obscure, unusual things happening to you. Either way, I like the way you think.

As for "angled", it is a term I think from a bygone era, when I learned to play the game back in the 80's and earlier. To my knowledge, there is no longer any mention of the term "angled" in the Rule book at all. Even though the Rules are so necessarily wordy in other places, I believe that "angled" fell victim to Occam's razor and was eliminated.

And of course, it is rare to see such a situation professionally on telly. Surely, only a small percentage of the professional matches are televised and unfortunately, I can only manage to watch a tiny percentage of those, so I have not personally witnessed a proper referee's call in such a case in the modern era. By the way, Dan-cat, I love that clip of the Hurricane, have watched it innumerable times. Hurricane is always fascinating to watch....he could make shots that no one else would even think of, but then, on the flip side to keep things incredibly interesting, he might arbitrarily miss simple shots that any of us would pot 99 percent of the time. Fascinating.......

Anyway, back on topic, before coming to an answer to the questions, I think it prudent to look at what is actually in the Rules regarding what we know as "angled" and it can be found early on in Section 2., Definitions, 17. Snookered:

"...
(e) The cue-ball cannot be snookered by a cushion. If the curved face of
a cushion obstructs the cue-ball and is closer to the cue-ball than any
obstructing ball not on, the cue-ball is not snookered."

So these two sentences say a lot. Let's reverse your questions and start with "b)". Obviously, the referee will not award a free ball because, by definition, in this case, "the cue-ball is not snookered." Even if the object ball were surrounded by other balls not on so that it is absolutely snookered if the cushion weren't there, this is still not considered to be a snooker situation as the cushion being the nearest obstructing entity nullifies the possibility of a snooker.

This may seem to be very strange to think about. The way I view it is to consider the rule by which it is illegal to snooker your opponent behind a nominated free ball. Say you call Pink for your free ball, strike, and when the balls come to rest, the Pink is nearest ball to the cue ball in a series of balls not on that are blocking the line of sight to the object ball. That is a foul because the incoming player is snookered behind what had been the free ball. But...if the Pink comes to rest close to the object ball and snookering it, but there is another ball, say Black, which is nearer to the cue ball blocking the line to the object ball, there is no foul because Black is the effective snookering entity.

So in the angled situation, the cushion is the nearest "obstructing entity" so none of the other would be "snookering balls" pass muster.


As for question a), that is another definitive answer. Extracted from the specific rule concerning loss of frame following three successive misses, Section 3., Rule 14., (c):

"...when there was a clear path in a straight line from the cue-ball to a ball that was
on or that could have been on, such that central, full-ball, contact was available..."

...very clearly not the case in the event of an angled ball so there is absolutely no possibility of loss of frame with three successive misses. As for the referee calling a Foul and a Miss, he can always call a FAAM if he believes it to be a FAAM unless the frame scoreline prevents it.

dan-cat wrote:What if you are angled after a foul, and can't see any of the balls?


As I see it then, no special rules apply. The usual options: either play it yourself or put your opponent back in. If there was a miss involved, of course you can put him back in the original position. Odd situation but no odd rules required to govern it.

Re: Angled ball

Postby elnino

DAN-CAT says it so poetically _ "Brilliant Acesinc"

Your knowledge of the Rules of Snooker is deep; and, you have a gift of explaining them in an readily understandable way. Keep it up.

The Rules of the game are devised for the governance of the game; and, not as sometimes suggested in club circles for the conduct of the Professional game.

It is surprising how scenarios that never happen in the Professional game regularly crop up in ordinary club friendly games.

Re: Angled ball

Postby acesinc

elnino wrote:DAN-CAT says it so poetically _ "Brilliant Acesinc"

Your knowledge of the Rules of Snooker is deep; and, you have a gift of explaining them in an readily understandable way. Keep it up.

The Rules of the game are devised for the governance of the game; and, not as sometimes suggested in club circles for the conduct of the Professional game.



Thank you both, you are too kind.

I have always had an affinity to being the "rules guy" for whatever endeavour currently interests me. Snooker in particular has been a nearly lifelong passion for me having picked it up in my formative post-adolescent years when I lived briefly in England. Home in the US, it had been nearly impossible to stay connected to the game--sadly, I was completely ignorant of Paul Hunter until well after his passing--so modern technology is wonderful for this purpose (although I do often loudly curse other aspects of technology).

For whatever paranormal reason, I have always seemed to have a natural understanding of the written word of the Rules. It is definitely not simple nighttime reading and I think people often get their mind twisted around the phrasing and references to other sections and rules, and just have a difficult time trying to follow what is actually trying to be said. The Rules try to encompass a nearly infinite possible number of potential situations within a framework of an obviously finite list of categories and sub-categories and it is just not an easy thing to do. That is why proper referees require training and re-training and certification at regular intervals. I did have a short training course and was technically certified Class 3 (which, if I remember correctly, just means I was qualified to referee preliminary amateur matches. In essence, it was a handshake and a pat on the back for seeming to understand the Rules pretty well.).

elnino wrote:...

It is surprising how scenarios that never happen in the Professional game regularly crop up in ordinary club friendly games.


I agree that many more unusual circumstances occur in amateur and social games, but I find it hardly surprising at all. It all has to do with level of skill, knowledge, and understanding. For instance, we just discussed "angled ball" and you will nearly never see these things in a professional match. The reason seems to be obvious to me. Most often, an angled ball situation occurs because the cue ball was headed toward a pocket en route to an in-off because the striker did not have the skill, knowledge, and understanding to know that the white ball would be heading that direction in the first place. And he just got lucky that it didn't happen to fall in the pocket.

The professional of course would have known better than to play that same shot, or at least, he would have played it in a different way so that the in-off would never have been a possibility. And so it goes for many of these unusual situations.

In fact, as a "rules guy", I have even written a lot of my own rules. I have "invented" several variations of Snooker and even a handicap system to make the Game more interesting for players who have a hard time stringing together more than a couple of balls. I put "invented" in quotes because it almost seems as if these things already existed and I just happened to be the medium who plucked them out of the air and wrote them down on paper. If you are interested, and if I don't bore the hell out of you with my laborious writing, you can access my Handicap white paper on my website. It is a compare and contrast of Professional versus Amateur Snooker along the same lines of what Elnino said of these "surprising scenarios". You must approach it with a completely open mind, make no judgments, criticisms, or decisions until the very end when all will be summed up tidily. Warning: it is tedious...thirteen typed pages and it reads in pretty much the same literary style as the Rules of Snooker. You can find it here:

http://www.acesmachinery.com/league/han ... epaper.pdf

If you can bludgeon your way through it, let me know what you think.

Re: Angled ball

Postby Andre147

Just one small correction to your previous post Acesinc, a Class 3 referee is eligible to referee not only amateur competitions but also professional ones. You see a lot of Class 3 refs at PTCs and Qualifiers for instance, and some of them even have reffed in TV matches.

Class 3, 2 and 1 Referees is the systeam used for EBSA, IBSF, etc organizations, World Snooker uses a diferent system with letters from E to A being the highest. The main difference in order to improve your Class you have to pass an Examination consisting of acessing you referee a match and then after the Examiner or Examiners acess you on the Table with various kinds of situations. In World Snooker system it's a lot simpler, and no Exams are involved, they just access you on the actual matches.

So yeah all this to say that once you are a certified referee, you can ref at both amateur and professional tournaments.

Re: Angled ball

Postby acesinc

Andre147 wrote:Just one small correction to your previous post Acesinc, a Class 3 referee is eligible to referee not only amateur competitions but also professional ones. You see a lot of Class 3 refs at PTCs and Qualifiers for instance, and some of them even have reffed in TV matches.

Class 3, 2 and 1 Referees is the systeam used for EBSA, IBSF, etc organizations, World Snooker uses a diferent system with letters from E to A being the highest. The main difference in order to improve your Class you have to pass an Examination consisting of acessing you referee a match and then after the Examiner or Examiners acess you on the Table with various kinds of situations. In World Snooker system it's a lot simpler, and no Exams are involved, they just access you on the actual matches.

So yeah all this to say that once you are a certified referee, you can ref at both amateur and professional tournaments.


Thanks for the correction Andre. The course I had was impromptu conducted across two days by a former professional referee who would occasionally travel here to the US. At the end, I was tested quite informally and he gave me a certificate stating that I was Class 3 qualified and he explained at the time what that meant.

As for me, I really only took the course for the knowledge and experience and that was years ago. Of course, here in the US, I had no opportunity to actually referee anything remotely approaching a snooker match between competent players so I really paid no attention to what the Certification meant as I knew I would not be using it. It is a moot point now as I have not been re-Certified so I guess I have no Class. :chuckle:

Re: Angled ball

Postby Sidecar Man

Under the old rules of Snooker Control Council the referee would say -Foul, Angled Ball- providing the next player to know the rules would be able to Play from Hand- the -D-.
Here is a scenario using current rules. There is a difference in points to Spot of 17 points and the balls left on the table are Blue, Pink and Black the White has come to rest as an angled ball in the Yellow pocket, Blue is over the centre pocket as is the Pink over the Black pocket on the same side of the table as the Blue and they Black is over the other side from Pink. What should Spot do let his opponent play again who could possibly pot the Blue from across the table on double and pot trembling balls and win the frame. Incidentally the foul was committed on Pink just to make it easier. I would think the balls would be re positioned and Spot play from where the Cue ball was before the foul.

Re: Angled ball

Postby TheSaviour

"What if you are angled after a foul, and can't see any of the balls?"

"Providing the next player to know the rules would be able to Play from Hand- the -D-."

No, no. Can´t be. If you are angled after a foul, surely you can choose a free ball if just fancing it. Many doesn´t wan´t to, even when the clearance or a significant break would be on the cards, cause they wan´t to see their opponent to sweat it out and to make look like a dummy.

Overally, there wouldn´t such thing as a human if there wouldn´t be your own ideas which you just keeps on arguing are spot on. That´s how all the kids grown up. Even when playing chess against a genius, they just keep on arguing their own "moves" and "thinking" is a spot on. And they get rewarded doing so. The society, the parents, all of them. As long as they would go out only punching and kicking.

So everyone will have their own ideas about what is a fact and what is not. I am forced to agree with that behaviour, as vice versa there wouldn´t any humans. It is only your own "facts" which creates you.

A couple of months ago one German girl asked me that "So where is you sailing boat, if I would be with you I could be your sailing boat... And w1nk w1ink. I replied that "That´s right. A very nice sentences indeed. Bye.." I was on for a heavy blender. I then do miss those chances as I tend to think too quickly while have some alcohol and nicotine-blender going on. They say that you could do with a bit of a wine. I always reply that as you can see from the colour of my face, some wine just never is enough to me. That´s usually the end of the conversation. I always say that I could the TENT. There is no such things as poor weathers. I could a TENT. I will be a TENT. For myself. To myself.

There wouldn´t such a thing as human if you wouldn´t able to beat to em all. To change em all. There wouldn´t be such feel as a REAL HUMAN FEEL without a chances and prospects to beat em all. Always do remember that also while dealing with scores of people.

There still can be some good advices, no matter how everyone eyes his or her own facts as a something to defend.

Now.... Finally I could stand a chance (from what I feel and guess...) to bring the best out of Ronnie O´Sullivan and to say that I HAD the same "secrets" (=knowledgeSS SSS) than he HAD. And now everyone does know those knowledges and an informations. He has all the channels and the fans to tell those while obviously I doesn´t have those. There yours difference. The most important of the secrets is not about the tattoos. It is all about that who´s actually who. Not just labelling the people but actually. So far currently I am and have been the only to have seriously been blamed to be a some kind of reincarnation... I always just repliy that yes, he must have been some man then (he was an around the world sailor -1 december 2009). And I will also say that he actually was a dead honest person also... Which ends the conversation. The second big secret with Ronnie O´Sullivan has a lot of do with those lack of any common and general facts. And that we just must accept that there are countless of those "facts" now..

I fear nothing lol. I have the self-confidence. Which has a lot do with a picking a correct streets. Making mistakes while finding something makes you wander the time and the place. What´s those houses? Well, they have been there for a while already...

The luxury place needs a luxury empty bottles and cans - picker lol.

And there actually could be even more. What was good enough yesterday might be a bit too less and little now. They just don´t accept your moneys anymore. Somehow... They do accept those, but it just isn´t much enough. Anymore. As you were angled. And they called the "rule".

Re: Angled ball

Postby acesinc

Hi Sidecar Man. I am not quite certain if you are asking a question here....I've a feeling that some of your grammar has fallen victim to a "speech-to-text" program. So I will take liberty to re-punctuate a part of your post for the question that I think you are asking....

(original):

Sidecar Man wrote:Under the old rules of Snooker Control Council the referee would say -Foul, Angled Ball- providing the next player to know the rules would be able to Play from Hand- the -D-.
Here is a scenario using current rules. There is a difference in points to Spot of 17 points and the balls left on the table are Blue, Pink and Black the White has come to rest as an angled ball in the Yellow pocket, Blue is over the centre pocket as is the Pink over the Black pocket on the same side of the table as the Blue and they Black is over the other side from Pink. What should Spot do let his opponent play again who could possibly pot the Blue from across the table on double and pot trembling balls and win the frame. Incidentally the foul was committed on Pink just to make it easier. I would think the balls would be re positioned and Spot play from where the Cue ball was before the foul.


(my interpretation):

"....What should Spot do? Let his opponent play again [from the current position] who could possibly pot the Blue from across the table on double? ...and [that then would leave him in to] pot [the remaining] balls and win the frame? Incidentally, the foul was committed on Pink just to make it easier (and that Foul and a Miss on Pink resulted in this unusual table position). I would think the balls would be re positioned [back to original] and Spot['s opponent made to] play from where the Cue ball was before the foul?"


Okay, that is the best I can do to figure the events that transpired. (This does sound like a real event that occurred in a frame you were playing, not just a hypothetical situation.) One contradiction I have in my interpretation is that you said "...Spot play from where the Cue ball was..." but I believe you meant Spot's opponent as the opponent is the one who committed the Foul and a Miss. Certainly, as the NON-fouling player, Spot does not have the option to play from the original position that his fouling opponent faced.

So let's take a look at this....

Firstly, yes, the Angled Ball Rule is a thing of the past. It no longer exists. I am not sure when it went the way of the dodo as I spent quite a long time away from the game but I believe the rule for it changed during the Stephen Hendry era sometime in the 90's. So in the modern game, anytime a player is "angled" (according to the old definition), no special rules apply.

So starting with Spot's opponent committing a foul, it sounds like his table situation had been Blue perched over the middle pocket but he was snookered and so had to strike indirectly off a cushion to attempt to pot Blue. This resulted in the Foul and a Miss striking the Pink first and this odd table position. So Spot now comes to the table to analyze and make a decision. To be clear, this is NOT a Free Ball situation. Spot is not "snookered" on Blue; this is made clear in the Rules. Therefore, Spot has the usual options: he can play the stroke as the table lies and he must contact Blue, or he can pass the stroke back to the fouling player with the same conditions. Since the foul was indeed a Foul and a Miss, Spot also has the additional option of resetting the ball position back to original and having his opponent play the stroke again from there.

This is quite a difficult decision for Spot then and he must simply go with his own gut feeling in his confidence in either his own success or in his opponent's failure. He can play cushion first, pot Blue and be 22 up with 13 remaining (effectively winning the frame), or, if he passes current position back to the fouling player, he may well do the same thing, then go on to pot the easy Pink and easy Black, thereby winning the frame by one point.

So very probably the best option is indeed the Foul and a Miss option, reset balls to original position. By the sound of things, at least in this case, the Pink and/or Black were not in such easily pottable positions so that if Spot's opponent DOES manage to pot Blue from his snookered position, at least he must work a little bit to pot Pink and Black to win the frame.

P.S.- In using Spot as your hypothetical player, you reveal yourself as an old time Billiards player. I wish I had someone near me interested in the Billiards. I am not good at it but would enjoy a frame now and again. I don't know the Rules of English Billiards nearly so well as I know the Snooker so I am not certain if "angled" is currently defined in the Billiards rules or if there are any special circumstances for it.

If any of my assumptions above were incorrect, let me know.

Re: Angled ball

Postby Sidecar Man

I am an old timer, 86 in two weeks time and as a young Billiard player often played a local chap who became Welsh Billiards champion at professional level. His name was Howard Griffiths.
I no longer play because of eye sight problems but in my time I have organised exhibitions with players Terry Griffiths, Steve Davis, Jimmy White and Cliff Wilson. I have played Steve twice. He made a 135 break against me in 1983.