Snooker can be a difficult sport to understand if you don’t know where to start. There are many different rules and pieces of terminology that you may not understand, so here is a beginner’s guide on the 142-year-old sport.

Terminology can be difficult to remember for anyone, so here are some of the main terms you will need to remember:

  • Cue ball – the white ball, the only ball that you are allowed to directly hit with your cue.
  • Red – the red ball, there are 15 at the start of the game, and all of these need to be potted before you can move on to the other colours.
  • Colour – the other six balls that are on the table at the start of the game. These colours are yellow, green, brown, blue, pink and black.
  • Pot – when the ball goes directly into a pocket and stays in there.
  • Foul – when you or your opponent does something that is against the rules.
  • Snookered – when you or your opponent are unable to directly hit either a red or coloured ball due to the position of the cue ball.
  • Ball ON – the ball that you intend to hit with the cue ball.

If you’re going to be a professional snooker player, you need to know how to win the game. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins, simple right? You get points by potting balls in the correct order. You have to pot all of the red balls on the table before you can directly hit the coloured balls with the cueball.

When all of the snooker balls (red and coloured) are still on the table, you have to pot a red ball before you can attempt to pot a coloured ball. This process continues until the striker fails to pot the desired ball, at which point the opponent comes to the table to play the next shot.

When the coloured balls are the only object balls left on the table (e.g. all of the red balls have been potted), they must be potted in the correct order via numerical value (from least valuable to most valuable). The points system for the coloured balls is as follows:

The game commonly is ended when all red and coloured balls have been pocketed and there is a clear winner out of the two players. However, the game can also end if a player resigns because there are not enough balls on the table to make up for the opponent’s score.

Snooker takes years to master, so don’t get too disheartened if you’re not potting like a rocket straight away. Have fun and persevere, and in the end, you will be able to compete. To further train your snooker skills, we have available snooker training balls to learn how to control the cue ball, as well as high quality snooker tables to help you play like a professional.