Snooker Ball Values and Order: Points for Every Colour
Snooker ball values and order under the WPBSA rules used across the UK: red 1 up to black 7, when colours are re-spotted and how the points add up.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Snooker Rules24 min read
- Red
- 1 point
- Black
- 7 points
- Six colours in sequence
- 27 points
- On the table at the start
- 147 points
The black is worth seven points and the red is worth one, and every other ball on a snooker table falls between them. The values are fixed by the first rule of Section 3 of the official rules published by the WPBSA, the Bristol-based governing body whose rule book is used in clubs across England and the rest of the UK: red 1, yellow 2, green 3, brown 4, blue 5, pink 6, black 7.
The order follows from the values. A frame starts with fifteen reds and one of each colour. A player pots a red, then any colour, then another red, and each colour comes back onto its spot. Once the reds have gone, the colours are potted from the cheapest to the dearest, yellow first and black last, and this time they stay in the pocket.
Snooker ball values at a glance: seven kinds of ball, seven numbers
| Ball | Points | Number on the table | Where it starts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red | 1 | 15 | In a triangle beyond the pink |
| Yellow | 2 | 1 | Right-hand corner of the D |
| Green | 3 | 1 | Left-hand corner of the D |
| Brown | 4 | 1 | Middle of the baulk line |
| Blue | 5 | 1 | Centre of the table |
| Pink | 6 | 1 | Midway between the blue and the top cushion |
| Black | 7 | 1 | 12¾ inches from the top cushion |
The white is not in the table because it has no value. It is the cue ball, shared by both players, and the only thing it can do to the score is cost points when it goes where it should not.
Notice that the scale has no gaps. Seven kinds of ball take the seven whole numbers from one to seven, in an order that has nothing to do with the rainbow or with how the balls look under the lights. Size and weight do not vary with value either. Every ball in a set is specified at 52.5 mm in diameter, and the rules ask that the heaviest and lightest differ by no more than three grams.
Add up one of everything and the object balls are worth 42: fifteen for the reds and 27 for the colours. A frame holds far more than that, and the reason is the subject of most of this page. The colours are potted again and again.
One practical point belongs here. Red and brown can be hard to tell apart for a colour-blind player, and so can red and green, so the rule book makes an allowance. A player who cannot differentiate between colours is entitled to ask the referee which ball is which, and the referee must answer. The rules give "Red and Green" as their own example. The line attributed to the BBC commentator Ted Lowe, assuring viewers watching in black and white that the pink was next to the green, described a real problem.
The order while reds are on the table: red, colour, red
The commonest misunderstanding among people who have only half-watched the game is that the colours are always taken in sequence. They are not. For most of a frame there is no fixed order among the colours at all.
What is fixed is the alternation. Every turn begins on a red, any red. If one goes in, the striker scores a point and must next play a colour, and the rules describe it as "a colour of the striker's choice". Yellow or black, baulk end or top end, it makes no difference to the legality of the stroke. If the colour is potted its value is scored and the referee puts it back on its spot. Then the striker is on a red again.
So a break written out ball by ball might read red, black, red, blue, red, pink. That is 1 + 7 + 1 + 5 + 1 + 6, a break of 21 from six pots, and the three colours involved are all back on the table at the end of it. The three reds are not.
That asymmetry is the heart of the scoring system. Reds are a finite supply that only runs down. Colours are a renewable one. Each red is therefore a kind of key: potting it earns one point and buys the right to play for up to seven more.
What the alternation rules out
A turn cannot start on a colour while a red remains. The one exception is the free ball, dealt with further down.
A colour cannot be taken twice running. After the black, the striker needs another red before the black is available again.
Nor does a missed colour stay "owed". If a player pots a red and fails with the blue, the opponent starts on a red, and the blue is just another ball on the table.
More than one red may fall in a single stroke, and each counts for a point. Only one colour follows, however many reds went down. Two reds and a black is nine points, with two keys spent on one lock, which is why players do not regard a double pot as unmixed good fortune.
When a red is knocked in during a foul stroke it stays off the table all the same. The frame simply gets shorter, and the maximum either player can still score drops by eight. How the alternation fits into a whole frame, from the break-off to the final black, is set out in our guide to how a frame is played and won.
The order of the colours once the reds have gone
Yellow, green, brown, blue, pink, black. Ascending value, lowest first. This is the only part of a frame in which snooker colours in order means what people assume it means throughout.
The switch from one system to the other is not quite instant, and the rule book takes a clause to say so. When the fifteenth red is potted, the striker has earned a colour like any other, and may choose any of the six. That colour, if potted, is re-spotted. Only after that stroke has been played, successfully or not, do the colours become "on" in ascending order. A player who pots the last red and then the black scores eight, sees the black return to its spot, and then faces the yellow with all six colours still on the table.
Had the striker missed the colour after the last red, the opponent would come to the table with the yellow on. The same is true if the last red left the table on a foul.
From here each colour is potted once and stays down. The ball on is always the lowest-valued colour still on the table, and the cue ball must strike it before anything else. Potting the yellow puts the green on, and so forth up to the black.
Two complications are worth spelling out because club players get them wrong.
A colour only stays down if it was potted lawfully. Suppose the yellow is on, and the striker hits it well enough to pot it but the green drops into another pocket on the same stroke. That is a foul, since the green was not on. No points are scored, and both balls are put back, the yellow included, because a ball that goes in during a foul stroke has been pocketed and not potted in the rule book's terms.
The second concerns a colour that leaves the table out of turn. If the blue is knocked in by accident while the brown is on, the blue is re-spotted and waits for its proper place in the sequence. No colour is ever lost from the final six.
The sequence ends at the black, which has a rule to itself. With the black the only object ball left, the first pot or foul ends the frame, and if that leaves the scores level the black is put back for a decider, a procedure covered in our guide to the re-spotted black.
Where each colour sits and how to remember the baulk three
Every colour has a spot of its own, marked on the cloth, and the six spots lie in a pattern that makes sense once the table's centre line is pictured running from the baulk cushion up to the top.
Four of the six are on that line. The brown is at the middle of the baulk line, 29 inches up the table. The blue is at the exact centre. The pink is halfway between the blue and the top cushion, and the black is 12¾ inches short of the top cushion. Walking up the centre of the table, then, the order is brown, blue, pink, black, which happens to be ascending value.
The other two are either side of the brown, at the points where the D meets the baulk line. The rule book gives their positions "viewed from the baulk end": yellow on the right, green on the left.
That left-to-right order, green then brown then yellow, is the one that trips people up when they set the balls themselves, and British club players have a three-word mnemonic for it. God Bless You. G, B, Y, reading from the left as the player stands at the baulk end.
Three of the spots keep names from English billiards, which is the older game and the reason the table is marked as it is. The blue's home is the centre spot, the pink's is the pyramid spot, so called because the pyramid of reds was built from it, and the black's is often just "the spot". Readers interested in the parent game will find those markings doing different work in our guide to English billiards and its scoring.
The reds have no individual spots. They are packed into a triangle whose apex ball sits on the centre line as near to the pink as possible without touching it.
If the balls are set up wrongly
It happens, especially with the green and yellow reversed. The rules take a pragmatic line. Once a stroke has been played with a ball on the wrong spot, that ball is treated as correctly placed for the strokes that follow. It stays where it is until it is next potted, and then it goes back where it should have been all along. Nobody is penalised, and the frame is not restarted.
Exact measurements for every line and spot, in millimetres as well as inches, are in our guide to the dimensions of a full-size table.
A colour whose spot is covered: where it goes instead
Sooner or later a colour is potted and something else is sitting on its spot. A red has drifted onto the black spot, say, and the black has just gone in. The referee cannot balance one ball on top of another, so the rules lay down an order of alternatives.
First, a definition. A spot is "occupied" if a ball cannot be placed on it without touching another ball. A red lying half an inch from the black spot occupies it just as surely as one sitting dead centre.
- Own spot freeThe colour goes back on its own spot. This is what happens after almost every pot.
- Own spot occupiedIt goes on the highest-value spot that is free, starting with the black spot and working down to the yellow.
- Two colours to placeThe higher-value colour is placed first and takes the better spot.
- Every spot occupiedThe colour goes as near to its own spot as possible, on a line between that spot and the nearest part of the top cushion.
- No room towards the cushionFor the pink or the black only, it goes as near to its own spot as possible on the centre line of the table.
The order of alternatives in Section 3 Rule 7 of the WPBSA rules. In every case the colour must be placed so that it touches no other ball.
The second step is the one seen most often. With its own spot blocked, a black goes on the pink spot if that is free; failing that the blue spot; then brown, green and yellow in turn. The same rule applies to every colour, so a pink whose spot is blocked could, if the black happened to be off its own spot elsewhere on the table, be placed on the black spot.
This is not a technicality. A black on the blue spot is a far harder ball to build a break around than a black near the top pockets, and players take account of it when choosing a shot. Players will sometimes decline to pot the black when a red is covering its spot, and take a lower colour instead, because the black coming back in the middle of the table would cost more over the next few shots than the difference in points.
The last two steps are rare outside trick-shot conditions, since they require all six spots to be blocked at once. They exist because a rule book has to say something about every case.
A colour placed on a spot that is not its own does not migrate home when the original spot clears. It stays put until it is potted again, and then the same test is run afresh.
147 on the table: the arithmetic of a full frame
Fifteen reds, each followed by the most valuable colour, is fifteen lots of eight. That is 120. The six colours in sequence add 27. The total, 147, is the most that one player can score in a single visit under normal conditions, and it is the figure players mean when they say there are 147 "on" at the start of a frame.
Take a lower colour with every red and the ceiling falls in steps of fifteen.
The chart makes a point that is easy to miss. A player could pot every ball on the table in one visit, taking the yellow each time, and score 72, less than half the maximum. The choice of colour, fifteen times over, matters as much as the potting.
The first officially recognised 147 was made by Joe Davis in 1955. Steve Davis made the first on television, at the Lada Classic in January 1982, and Cliff Thorburn the first at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield a year later, during the 1983 World Championship. How those breaks were ratified, and what has happened to the frequency of the maximum since, is the subject of our guide to the 147 in detail.
The same arithmetic shows where a century arrives. Twelve reds and twelve blacks make 96. The thirteenth red brings 97, and the black that follows brings the break to 104. A player sticking to the black therefore passes one hundred on the twenty-sixth pot of the visit, and cannot do it sooner. With a few pinks and blues mixed in, as nearly every real break has, the hundredth point comes later still. Our page on what counts as a century break takes the milestone further.
Counting the points remaining at any moment
Players at every level keep two numbers in their heads: the difference between the scores, and what is left on the table. The second is easier to work out than it looks.
Count the reds. Multiply by eight. Add 27.
Each red still on the table is worth one for itself and up to seven for the black that can follow, hence eight, and the colours at the end are always worth 27 until the yellow has gone. If the striker has just potted a red and is about to play a colour, add up to seven more for that colour.
| Reds left on the table | Points remaining |
|---|---|
| 15 | 147 |
| 12 | 123 |
| 10 | 107 |
| 8 | 91 |
| 6 | 75 |
| 4 | 59 |
| 2 | 43 |
| 1 | 35 |
| 0 | 27 |
Eight points for each red still on the table plus 27 for the colours. A maximum figure, assuming a black with every remaining red.
Show the numbers
| Item | Points remaining |
|---|---|
| 15 reds | 147 |
| 12 reds | 123 |
| 9 reds | 99 |
| 6 reds | 75 |
| 3 reds | 51 |
| No reds | 27 |
Once the reds have gone the sum is smaller still: add up the colours that are left. With the brown on, 22. With the blue on, 18. With the pink on, 13.
Finding frame ball
The purpose of the count is to know when a lead is safe. If the player in front leads by more than the points remaining, the opponent cannot win by potting alone and needs penalty points from fouls.
Every red-and-black the leader pots moves both numbers at once. The lead grows by eight and the points remaining shrink by eight, so the gap between them closes by sixteen. Take a player 28 in front with three reds left. There are 51 on the table, so the frame is alive. The leader pots a red and a black: 36 ahead with 43 remaining. Then one more red: 37 ahead, and only 35 left for the opponent. That second red was frame ball, the pot that leaves the other player needing a snooker.
Commentators do this sum aloud several times a frame. What a trailing player can do about it is covered in our guide to snookers required and when to concede.
Why the black is played far more than the pink or the blue
It would be natural to assume the black gets potted most because it is worth most. That is half the reason, and the smaller half.
Look at where it sits. The black spot is just over a foot from the top cushion, on the centre line, which puts it between the two top corner pockets and the same distance from each. A cue ball almost anywhere in the top third of the table has an angle on the black into one corner or the other.
Now look at where the reds are. The triangle is racked immediately on the baulk side of the black, between the black spot and the pink. When the pack is opened, reds spread into exactly the area from which the black is pottable. A player can pot a red into a top corner, hold the cue ball within a few inches for the black, pot the black into a top corner, and hold it again for the next red. The cue ball in a well-made break around the black spot travels astonishingly little.
The pink is the black's understudy. It is worth one point less and its spot is the apex of the pack, which is both its advantage and its problem: early in a frame the pink is frequently hemmed in by reds and cannot be potted into either a corner or a middle pocket. As the reds thin out it becomes freely available, and the middle stages of many big breaks alternate between the two.
The blue's role is different. From the centre spot it can be potted into any of the six pockets, so it is the ball players turn to when position on the black or pink has gone slightly wrong. Taking it costs two points against the black. It usually saves the break.
The three baulk colours are last resorts while reds remain. Going down the table for the yellow gives up five points compared with the black, and the cue ball then has to come the length of the table to find the next red.
A fair judgement is that the layout of the spots, more than the values, makes heavy scoring possible. If the seven-point ball lived on the brown spot and the four-point ball near the top cushion, the game would have the same rules and a very different look. The techniques that exploit the real layout are described in our guide to building bigger breaks.
Ball values as penalties: what a foul on each colour costs
The seven values do a second job. When a player fouls, the opponent is awarded points, and how many depends on which balls were involved.
The rule sets a floor of four. Above the floor, the penalty is the value of the ball that was on, or, for many kinds of foul, the value of the ball wrongly hit or pocketed if that is higher.
| Ball that sets the penalty | Its potting value | Penalty for a foul |
|---|---|---|
| Red | 1 | 4 |
| Yellow | 2 | 4 |
| Green | 3 | 4 |
| Brown | 4 | 4 |
| Blue | 5 | 5 |
| Pink | 6 | 6 |
| Black | 7 | 7 |
The bottom four rows are identical, and that is deliberate. A foul on a red that cost one point would be cheaper than a decent safety shot is worth, and players would foul on purpose to get out of trouble. Four is high enough to hurt. In a game where a red-and-black is worth eight, giving away four for nothing is half a scoring visit handed over.
Some worked cases. A player on a red who strikes the blue first gives away five. A player on the green in the colours sequence, who misses it and hits the black, gives away seven. A player on the black who misses everything gives away seven as well, because the ball on sets the penalty when no other ball is concerned. And a player on a red whose cue ball drops into a pocket gives away four.
One effect is seldom remarked on. Because the ball on sets a minimum for the penalty, fouls get dearer as a frame goes on. Throughout the red phase, a simple miss costs four. On the last three colours it costs five, then six, then seven, at precisely the stage where a handful of points is most likely to decide the frame.
There are also six offences by the striker that cost seven whatever balls are involved. They and every other foul are listed in our guide to fouls and the points each one gives away.
Nominating a colour, and the seven points for staying silent
When a red has been potted and six colours are available, the referee needs to know which one the striker is playing. The rule book calls this the nominated ball and allows two ways of nominating. The striker may declare it, meaning say it out loud, or may indicate it "to the satisfaction of the referee".
In practice the second is the norm. A player who gets down on a straight black with the cue pointing at it has made the choice plain, and no professional announces "black" forty times a session. Words are needed when the cue ball's path could be meant for more than one colour: two baulk colours close together, a shot off a cushion, a thin edge on one ball with another just beyond it.
In those cases the referee asks, and the player must answer. Failing to declare when requested is one of the fixed seven-point offences, as large a penalty as the game has, and it is given for an act that touches no ball. The referee will also ask as a matter of course when the cue ball has come to rest touching one or more colours after a red.
What follows from a nomination is strict.
The cue ball has to hit the nominated colour first. Striking a different colour first is a foul, valued at the higher of the two balls with the usual minimum, so a player who nominates the green and catches the pink gives away six.
Only the nominated colour may be potted. If it is struck correctly and some other colour goes into a pocket, that is a foul too.
The pocket, on the other hand, is nobody's business. Snooker has no call-pocket rule of the kind used in some forms of pool. A nominated black that misses the corner, runs round the table and drops into a middle pocket scores seven like any other.
And a player who pots a red and then commits a foul before choosing a colour at all, by touching a ball with a sleeve while walking round the table for example, is penalised seven. With no colour named, the rules assume the most expensive.
During the final sequence of colours none of this arises, since only one ball is on at a time and there is nothing to choose.
The free ball: when one ball borrows another's value
There is one situation in which a ball is worth something other than its own number.
After a foul, if the incoming player cannot see the ball on cleanly because another ball is in the way, the referee awards a free ball. The player may nominate any object ball on the table and play it as though it were the ball on. For that stroke the nominated ball, in the words of the rule, "shall be regarded as, and acquire the value of, the ball on".
So with reds on the table, a free ball is a temporary red. Nominate the brown, pot it, and the score is one, not four. The brown is re-spotted and the striker goes on to a colour in the ordinary way. In the colours sequence the same logic holds: with the yellow on and the pink taken as a free ball, the pink scores two and returns to its spot, and the yellow is still on.
The borrowed value has one further quirk when two balls drop together. If the free ball and a real red both go in, each scores a point. In the colours sequence, if the free ball and the ball on are both potted, only the ball on is scored, and the free ball is put back.
This creates an arithmetical curiosity. If a free ball is awarded before any red has been potted, there are in effect sixteen reds on the table. The free ball scores one, a black after it scores seven, and all fifteen real reds are still there with 147 to follow. Eight plus 147 is 155, the highest break the rules allow.
A 155 has been reported in practice. None had been recorded in professional competition when this page was written. The first break above 147 in a professional match was a 148 by Jamie Burnett in qualifying for the 2004 UK Championship: a free-ball brown for one, the brown again for four, then fifteen reds with twelve blacks, two pinks and a blue, and the colours. The sum is 5 + 116 + 27. It stood as the highest break in professional play for more than twenty-one years. In March 2026 Ronnie O'Sullivan made 153 against Ryan Day in a World Open quarter-final: the green as a free ball for one, a black, then fifteen reds with thirteen more blacks and two pinks, and the colours, which is 8 + 118 + 27. That was the record when this page was last revised in October 2026, two points short of the limit.
The conditions for a free ball, and the restriction on snookering behind one, are in our guide to the free ball rule.
How coloured balls came into the game
Snooker's two kinds of ball come from two different games.
The reds are from pyramids, a gambling game played in Victorian billiard rooms with fifteen red balls racked in a triangle and a stake paid on each one potted. The colours are from life pool, in which every player had a ball of a different colour, each player's ball was the next player's target, and the order of the colours fixed the order of play. The usual explanation for snooker's ascending sequence is that it simply inherits the life pool order: yellow, then green, then brown, blue, pink and black. No surviving document sets out the reasoning, and it is safer to treat that as the likely origin than as a proven one.
The WPBSA's rule book dates the game to 1875 and places its creation at Jubbulpore in India, crediting Lieutenant Neville Chamberlain; the usual account sets the scene in the officers' mess there. Coloured pool balls were put on the table with the pyramid reds, and each was given a value higher than a red.
By most accounts the first version did not have all six colours. Yellow, green, pink and black are generally said to have come first, with the blue and the brown added some years afterwards, which would mean the early game had gaps in its scale where four and five now sit. The evidence for the exact sequence is thin, resting mainly on recollections written down decades later, and this page does not put a year on it.
The governing bodies came later still. The Billiards Association was established in 1885, merged with the Billiards Control Club in 1919, and the rights to the rules it had maintained passed to the WPBSA in 1992. Through all of that, and through every amendment since, the seven values have been left alone.
Shorter formats leave them alone too. Six-red snooker has a rule of its own in the same book, covering misses and snookers behind a nominated colour, and it changes nothing about what a ball is worth. A simplified game with ten reds on a small club table scores exactly as the full one does, with a lower ceiling.
For the rest of the story, from Jubbulpore to Sheffield, see our history of snooker. More rule-by-rule explainers across other sports are collected on our England guides hub.