I've been playing snooker for quite a long time, not seriously, maybe like once a fortnight or so...

My friend and I are certainly improving in all areas from potting to cue ball control. The biggest area which we are improving is the safety game. The safety game seems to be so much more important at our level than actual potting ability. So as we've been improving our scores actually go down on average.

I think this is because we are giving away less foul shots and also forcing each other to attempt tougher shots rather than going for pots every time.

I played a guy that plays pool sometimes but never snooker...I really destroyed him and I was surprised at how many easy shots he was putting me on.

So I'm wondering whether there will be a point where our potting abilities will exceed the safety meta-game we are currently going through and that will be where we start racking up high breaks often. Will there be an exponential improvement after this phase?

Outside of the top levels of play, snooker is primarily a defensive game when played seriously. Until you can consistently break build to the point of being able to move problem balls, split open packs of balls etc, you are generally always better off playing conservative, tight defensive play than attacking.

You simply give up so much equity when you miss medium/hard shots that you are better off grinding well and just picking off what is easy whenever the opportunity arises. This quickly becomes obvious if you take on overly aggro players (which sounds like the pool player you mention), who just go for far too much and leave you in and easy too often. It's generally a no brainer of snooker gambling to basically always back a sound grinder who can knock in 20 breaks and never leaves much vs a wild kid who can knock in the odd 50 but misses a lot and takes on way too many hard shots - the grinder will always win over time.

Most snooker gambling is done around these 'hot shot' kids coming up who idolise huge break players but have missed defense during their snooker education and don't have the ability to break build consistently - similar to all the bad laggro poker players who idolise Ivey and Dwan etc but miss how technically good you have to actually be to play that style. 99% of them they go broke vs experienced defensive players in both cases, 1% go on to become brilliant players who can rip good defensive players to pieces.

Get to the skill level where you can build breaks from most ball layouts, and this safety importance drops dramatically. You become good enough that you beat very high grade defensive players - even if your safety is pretty bad - simply because when you get in you score far more heavily and consistently than any defensive player can. Not only do you massively outscore them, but the equity loss you used to have when missing shrinks to nothing as you:

a) don't miss much, your mid to long potting becomes sound

and

b) you don't lose position much, which makes a) even easier

Get to this level, and you will most likely be the best player in your club or even city, and well on the way to making decent money playing. With you and your friend, it may never happen, but if one of you does reach that level, games will simply become very one sided - the weaker partner in this scenario simply has such tiny equity vs a good break builder that they will very rarely even win a game, so in that sense, yes, it will be a exponential improvement, as the average scoreline will go from something like 27-35 to 93-2 as soon as one of you can break build well.

get in here wamy!! oh yeah.