Virtual Snooker

[dr_st]

#11835

On account of the World Snooker Championship that just finished, I’ve decided to play a bit of Virtual Snooker in the past few days.

I played it off and on over the years. It is naturally much more complicated than pool, and my positional play is not good, so I find it hard to make meaningful breaks.

However, on the computer with zoom, precise mouse control and perfect cueing, it is much easier to pot far balls than in real-life snooker. So for mediocre players like myself, it is easier to beat the AI by playing pool-style – break hard to scatter the balls (very different from how a real professional snooker game will go). The AI seems to benefit less than you from a messy table.

Anyhow, I’ve played against ‘Able Shooter’ (AI player ranked 4th from the top), and was almost surprised that I’ve been able to trade blows with it and keep parity, for a while. Eventually I lost 12-18, but I feel I can improve.

It also felt the AI, even on the same level, plays better when the PC/emulator is faster. This may be just my subjective feeling. It is possible I was just playing worse towards the end, because I was tired.

I’ll see if by the end of this month I can actually beat this “Able Shooter”. 😆

[butterburp]

#11838

I didn’t read the descriptions in the other thread first, so I was stunned to see the same interface as Virtual Pool! As with VP, I had to skip the videos, also hit the vertical axis bug once so did the save/restart thing.

I’ve never actually played snooker before, had to read up on it on Wikipedia first. It’s pretty fun! I’m not used to the table being so big, and of course it’s effectively even bigger because the balls are smaller. The alternation between red and non-red is interesting. The “colours” (I’m always tempted to rhyme that with “velours,” because we spell it “colors” in the US) and the increasing point values remind me of the belt progression in karate or judo.

It’ll be a while before I’m ready to challenge the AI, but this is a superb intro to snooker. Thanx for posting!