The screw shot is one of the most valuable shots to be able to play in snooker. Knowing how to play a screw shot can be the difference between winning and losing a frame.
Being able to screw the cue ball back gives the player a lot of options around the snooker table, and when applied correctly makes positional play far easier.
The objective of the screw shot is to make the white ball come backwards after making contact with the object ball.
So lets learn how to play a screw shot properly.
In order to play the screw shot, we need to know where to strike the white ball. For the screw shot, we need to strike the cue ball below centre to get the white to spin backwards.
But its not quite as simple as that!! Now if you hit the ball below centre and hit the ball without any follow through, the ball will stop dead on contact with the object ball and no back spin will be seen. So we need to apply follow through to the cue ball for back spin to take effect. When we want to know how to play a screw shot, we also need to know how to use follow through.
Basically what this means is, we hit the white ball below centre but we also follow the tip of the cue a couple of inches further on through the white ball instead of stopping dead. Then we should see the white ball making contact with the object ball and spinning backwards off it.
How hard you need to hit the cue ball depends on how close you are to the object ball, the amount of follow through you can achieve and how good your timing is.
Begin by practicing with the white ball and object ball close together and slowly start increasing the distances between the balls.
If you practice hitting the cue ball below centre and remembering to go right though the white with your tip, then it shouldn’t take you too long to begin mastering this art. Keep the cue smooth and accelerate instead of decelerating when striking the cue ball.
With these simple tips, you should soon know how to play screw shots.
