Snooker described as a board game

Boardgames
1

So I’m watching the snooker and it occurred to me that it could be described with conventional terminology in board games.

  1. push your luck - every shot is a risk, to pot is to continue and to fail is to concede the turn to the opponent. A player can always bail out with a conservative “safety shot” but usually ceding control voluntarily is not considered worth it by the top players.

  2. pick up and deliver - sort of - in a break* a players are routing to find a good spot to pick up resource (good positioning) so they can deliver efficiently (potting the ball) and from there find another good spot to play from. Maybe this is a bit loose.

  3. mostly low to no interaction (breaks) but with moments of high interaction (safety play). The safety play is almost like an auction of skill - each player tries to maintain a safe position until their resource (skill) cannot match the current cost (difficulty of shot) and they will bow out ungracefully (usually with a poor shot). Occasionally these moments of high interaction can be punctured with some ridiculous turn of fortune. As I describe this it feels a bit like pseudo.

*a break is a single stretch of potting balls because you have potted one ball that gives you permission to try to pot the next and if you pot the next you may continue in this fashion and carry on forever.

I was also darts is a bit of an efficiency game and the ultimate “multiplayer solitaire”

4 Likes
2

I get the impression that once one has reached a decent competence level in snooker there are many shots that one can reliably make, at which point it becomes a more tactical game (which red do I go for, can I separate the cue ball from what my opponent needs next).

2 Likes
3

Yeah their level of execution is so high that really the consideration of the opponent is the exception rather than the rule. Essentially they want to path a single line from the start to the end with an almost zig zag route structure (red-colour-red-colour etc) which is why it felt pick up and deliver to me.

I think top crokinole is very similar - in that 90 percent of shots will go in the hole and then a single mess up requires the smart play. But largely speaking it’s kind of boring to watch.

2 Likes
4

If you’re talking about snooker, I find it incredibly relaxing to watch (while at the same time incredibly frustrating because I will try and do some of it on a snooker table later and be much MUCH worse…)

2 Likes
5

I meant top crokinole. I find most of a frame of snooker a bit boring to watch I think the players are too good and control the ball too well. I like safety play a lot more but this is a much smaller part of the game.

2 Likes