Our second weekly problem sees us in very deep trouble at the tail end of a game of nine ball. We are one frame away from losing the match, completely snookered behind the nine, and facing an opponent who is close to a professional standard.

When considering situations like this, the first and most important thing to consider is your opponent's skill level. This problem has a very different answer against a bad amateur, and in this case you are in extremely desperate territory against a very skilled player. There are very few shots that will reliably leave the seven safe, and even if you do against a player this good, you will pretty much always be in trouble again the next shot considering their available options.

The only two safety shots that leave you any hope of even getting back to the table in this situation are a very hard deliberate foul, or an also very hard two/three cushion nudge up to the seven. Not only are both of these shots very hard, neither carries a very high percentage success rate in terms of leaving your opponent in trouble, and you would be lucky just to get back to the table facing a hard snooker – with both the nine and/or eight in very good positions to set snookers behind for a skilled player.

This desperate situation leaves us only one option – all out attack. Against this player type, our key concern here has to be the shot with the best chance of potting the seven. There are only two realistic possibilities here:

a) the two cushion swing around like this (sorry the lines are so bad but you get the idea):



or,

b) the one cushion with lower right hand side like this:



Of these two choices, b) is vastly superior. Although judging side/English off cushions is always tricky, this is mitigated somewhat by the fact that the alternative shot both requires two cushion hits which always makes your shot harder; as well as the two cushion escape making the potting angle of the seven much smaller.

With shot b), we only have to hit one rail, but much more importantly, we leave a very large margin of error to pot the seven. Coming at it from such an angle leaves us by far the highest percentage chance of potting the seven – as any straighter shot has a much larger margin of error than a thin cut. If we hit it even roughly in line (or even if we hit the cushion first in many angles) we should pot the seven – something not the case from the two cushion escape where we have to be extremely accurate to have any hope of cutting it in.

Often pool is about weighing up risk/reward carefully, and just like in poker, taking a harder move on is frequently correct as long as the possible reward far outranks the extra risk. This is a classic example of this in action, and an area where skilled players will really shine as the opponent's rarely spots/takes on these shots, and therefore go on to lose a much higher percentage of these frames than someone able to think through these shots carefully.


Solution: You should take on the one cushion shot with lower right hand side/English, which despite being slightly harder than the two cushion escape, sinks the seven and keeps you alive a much higher percentage of the time.