Snooker Rules Explained: How a Frame Is Played and Won

The referee at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield says very little during a frame. A number after each pot, the running total of the break, now and then the word "foul". Everything else is assumed to be understood by the two players and by the audience, because the rules in force are the same ones pinned to the wall of snooker clubs from Plymouth to Carlisle: the Official Rules of the Game of Snooker, published by the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association from its office in Bristol.

Those rules reduce to a paragraph. Two players share one white cue ball. On the table are fifteen reds worth one point each and six colours worth two to seven: yellow 2, green 3, brown 4, blue 5, pink 6, black 7. A player pots a red, then a colour, then a red, then a colour, and each colour is put back on its spot for as long as reds remain. When the reds have gone, the colours are potted in ascending order and stay down. A foul gives the opponent at least four points. Whoever has more points when the last black goes in wins the frame, and a match is a race to an agreed number of frames.

Everything below takes that paragraph apart, one piece at a time, and says where the awkward cases fall.

Who writes the rules of snooker and how the book is laid out

There is one rule book. That is less obvious than it sounds, because snooker has a world governing body, a commercial professional tour, a national body for the amateur game in England and thousands of clubs that have never corresponded with any of them. All of them play to the same text. The WPBSA publishes it as the Official Rules of the Games of Snooker and English Billiards, the edition in force when this page was written is marked as revised in September 2024, and its opening pages describe the rules as applied globally across World Snooker Tour, the women's and seniors' tours and disability snooker.

The snooker half of the book has five sections.

Section	Title	What it settles
1	Equipment	Table size, the baulk line and the D, the six spots, the balls, the cue
2	Definitions	Twenty-two terms, from "frame" and "stroke" to "snookered" and "miss"
3	The Game	Twenty-one rules covering play, fouls, penalty values, free balls and the miss
4	The Players	Unsporting conduct, conceding, time wasting, how the non-striker behaves
5	The Officials	The referee, the marker and the stroke recorder

Section 3 is the one people mean when they say "the rules". Its first rule is a summary in eight short paragraphs, and a reader who absorbed only that summary could play a frame. The other twenty exist for the moments the summary does not reach: a ball hanging over a pocket that drops in on its own, a colour whose spot is covered, two players stuck in a position neither will break up.

Two habits of the book are worth knowing before reading on. It says "stroke" where everyone else says "shot", and it distinguishes potting from pocketing. A ball that goes in legally is potted. A ball that goes in on a foul stroke is pocketed. Commentators ignore the difference. Referees do not.

The book also separates a foul from a penalty. A foul is an infringement that ends the offender's turn. A penalty, in the book's narrow sense, is an infringement that leaves the order of play alone, the usual case being a seated player who interferes with a ball when it is not their turn. Both hand points to the other side. In ordinary speech both are called fouls, and outside this paragraph this page follows ordinary speech.

Tournament organisers add conditions of their own, covering dress and the number of frames, and the Snooker Shoot Out is played to a separate set of competition rules printed in the same volume. None of that alters how a ball is potted or what a foul costs in the standard game.

Twenty-two balls and where each one starts

Fifteen reds, six colours, one white. The white is the cue ball and the other twenty-one are object balls, each 52.5 mm across, which is a shade over two inches. The rules allow a tolerance of five hundredths of a millimetre on that figure and ask that the heaviest and lightest ball in a set differ by no more than three grams.

A full-size table has a playing area of 11 ft 8½ in by 5 ft 10 in, measured between the cushion faces. The end the players break from is the baulk end and the cushion there is the bottom cushion; the far end, where the black sits, is the top. The naming confuses nearly everyone at first, since television shows the black at the foot of the screen in half its camera angles.

Twenty-nine inches from the bottom cushion a line runs across the table. This is the baulk line. A semicircle with a radius of 11½ inches is drawn on the baulk side of it, centred on the middle of the line, and this is the D. Three colours sit along the baulk line: yellow on the right-hand corner of the D as seen from the baulk end, green on the left-hand corner, brown in the middle. Blue goes on the centre spot. Pink goes halfway between the blue and the top cushion. Black goes 12¾ inches from the top cushion.

The reds are racked in a tight triangle on the far side of the pink, the apex red on the centre line and as close to the pink as it can be without touching it, the base of the triangle parallel with the top cushion. Our guide to full-size table dimensions and markings gives every measurement in imperial and metric.

• 22Balls in total
• 15Reds worth one point each
• 6Colours worth two to seven
• 27Points for the six colours together

Fixed figures from Sections 1 and 3 of the WPBSA rules for the standard fifteen-red game. Six-red snooker and club variants use fewer reds.

Who breaks, and from where

The players settle the order of play by lot, in practice a coin toss, and the winner chooses who plays first. In later frames the break alternates regardless of who won the last one. Snooker has no "winner breaks".

The opening stroke is played with the cue ball in-hand, meaning it can be placed anywhere on or inside the lines of the D and sent in any direction. Red is the ball on, so the cue ball has to reach a red before it touches any other ball. That is the only demand the rules make of the first stroke. Nothing obliges the breaker to drive balls to a cushion, as American pool does. The standard professional break clips the outside red in the back row and brings the cue ball round off the top and side cushions to finish near the baulk cushion, a convention born of self-preservation and written down nowhere. The detail is in our page on the opening shot and its safety.

A frame officially begins at the moment the tip of the cue touches the cue ball after it has been placed on the bed of the table, even if the touch is an accident during the address.

What counts as a stroke, a pot and a break

A turn at the table has no fixed length. It may last one stroke or the thirty-six pots of a full clearance, and what decides it is whether the last stroke scored.

The rule book builds this from four definitions, each one leaning on the last.

A stroke is made when the striker hits the cue ball with the tip of the cue. The little practice movements beforehand, which players call feathering, are not strokes. The cue ball must be struck once and not pushed. A stroke is not finished until every ball has stopped, any colour that needs to go back on its spot has gone back, and the rest or spider has been lifted off the table.

A pot is an object ball entering a pocket after contact with another ball and without any infringement. Both conditions matter. A ball that drops in during a foul stroke is not a pot and scores nothing. Nor does a ball that goes into the pocket and bounces back out onto the bed, which the rules treat as though it had never gone in, with no redress for the player.

The ball on is any ball the cue ball may lawfully hit first. At the start of every turn, for as long as there is a red on the table, red is on. Not one particular red: all of them are on at once, and nobody has to name which.

A break is a run of pots in successive strokes within one turn, and the word also means the points that run produces. "A break of 60" is a single visit that scored 60.

Put together, a visit goes like this.

1. 1Red is onThe first stroke of any turn must send the cue ball onto a red before it touches another ball.
2. 2A red goes inOne point is scored for each red that drops, and the same player stays at the table.
3. 3A colour is chosenThe striker picks any of the six colours and pots it for its face value. The referee puts it back on its spot.
4. 4Red and colour alternateEach pot adds to the break, which the referee calls aloud as a running total.
5. 5The visit endsA stroke that scores nothing, or any foul, hands the table to the opponent.

The sequence in Section 3 Rule 3 of the WPBSA rules for a turn played with reds still on the table.

When the turn passes, the incoming player plays the cue ball from wherever it stopped, and that holds after most fouls too. Snooker has nothing like the ball in hand anywhere on the table that American pool awards for a foul. The only time a player picks the white up is when it has gone into a pocket or left the table, and then it must be played from the D.

Red, then a colour: the sequence that drives the scoring

Two reds can go in on the same stroke and both count. That surprises people who assume one ball per shot, but the rule is explicit: when red is on, the value of each red potted in the stroke is scored. A cluster split open by a firm pot can yield two or three. The striker then plays at one colour, not one per red.

After a red, the next ball on is "a colour of the striker's choice". Any of the six will do. The striker has to make the choice known, and the rules accept either of two ways: indicating it to the referee's satisfaction, which in practice means cueing obviously at one ball, or stating it aloud. When two colours lie close together, or the shot is an indirect one off a cushion, the referee will ask. A player who is asked and fails to answer is penalised seven points, which is the stiffest penalty the game has for saying nothing.

If the nominated colour is potted, its value is added to the break and it is returned to its own spot before the next stroke. If its spot is covered by another ball, it goes on the highest-value spot that is free. Then red is on again.

Reds work the other way. A red that leaves the table stays off it, whether it was potted cleanly or knocked in during a foul. The book allows a handful of narrow exceptions, all of them situations in which the referee is restoring a position rather than continuing play.

Which colour to choose is the first real decision in the game. The black is worth most and its spot lies close to the pack of reds, so breaks are built around it when the position allows. The blue, in the middle of the table, is the usual route back to position when it does not. Our companion guide to what each ball is worth and the order they are taken in goes through the six colours one by one.

Three things the sequence forbids

Playing at a red when a colour is due. Taking reds in successive strokes carries an automatic seven-point penalty.

Potting a red and a colour together. If a red is on and the black is knocked in on the same stroke, the stroke is a foul worth seven, the red stays down and the black comes back.

Carrying a colour over. A player who pots a red and then misses the colour does not leave that colour "on" for the opponent. Every turn starts again on a red.

Clearing the six colours for the last 27 points

2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7. The six colours, taken once each in order, add up to 27, and those 27 points are where most close frames are decided.

The changeover has one wrinkle. When the last red is potted, the striker still plays a colour of choice in the normal way, and that colour is re-spotted like any other. Only then do the colours come "on" in sequence. If the striker misses the colour after the final red, the opponent arrives at the table with the yellow as the ball on.

From this point the game is narrower. One ball is on at a time. The cue ball must reach the yellow first, then the green, then the brown, then blue, pink and black. A colour potted in its turn stays in the pocket. A colour that goes in out of turn, or on a foul stroke, is put back on its spot and remains to be potted properly.

Next colour on	Its value	Points still on the table
Yellow	2	27
Green	3	25
Brown	4	22
Blue	5	18
Pink	6	13
Black	7	7

The right-hand column is the one players carry in their heads. A player 20 behind with the yellow on can still win without help: yellow to pink is exactly 20, which draws level, and the black would win it. A player 20 behind with the brown on has 22 to play for and no margin for error. With the blue on, the same deficit cannot be closed by potting alone, because only 18 points remain.

The most watched frame in the sport's British history ended in this phase. The deciding frame of the 1985 World Championship final between Dennis Taylor and Steve Davis came down to the last black, with the match level at 17 frames each, and the story of those final colours is told in our piece on Taylor against Davis on the black.

How snooker scoring works across one imagined frame

Rules read more easily with numbers attached. The frame below is invented, and it is built to show an ordinary sequence of visits, a foul and a finish on the colours.

Visit	Player	What was potted	Break	Score after
1	First	Break-off, nothing potted	0	0-0
2	Second	Red, black, red; missed the blue	9	0-9
3	First	Red, pink, red, black, red, black, red, blue	29	29-9
4	Second	Safety shot, nothing potted	0	29-9
5	First	Missed every red escaping a snooker: foul, four away	0	29-13
6	Second	Red-black, red-black, red-pink, red-black, red-black	39	29-52
7	First	Red-black, red-blue, red-black, red-pink, yellow, green, brown	38	67-52
8	Second	Blue, pink, black	18	67-70

Follow the fourth and fifth visits. The second player, with no pot available, rolls the cue ball behind the green so that no red can be hit directly. The first player tries to escape off a cushion and misses. No points come off the first player's 29. Four go onto the second player's score instead, which is why the scoreboard reads 29-13.

Visit seven shows the changeover. The first player pots the last red and then the pink, and the pink goes back on its spot. Yellow, green and brown follow for nine more, and the break ends on a missed blue with the score 67-52.

Now count what is left. Blue, pink and black are worth 18, and the second player is 15 behind. All three are needed, since blue and pink alone would bring the score only to 63. They go in, and the frame finishes 70-67.

Nobody in that frame made a large break by professional standards. The ceiling for one visit under normal conditions is 147, reached by taking the black after every one of the fifteen reds and then clearing the colours. Our guide to the 147 and how it can be exceeded covers the one rule that pushes the theoretical limit higher.

10%71%18%

• Fifteen reds15
• Fifteen blacks105
• Six colours in sequence27

Fifteen reds each followed by the black, then the six colours in sequence. Arithmetic from the ball values in Section 3 Rule 1.

Show the numbers

Where the 147 points of a maximum break come from

Item	Value
Fifteen reds	15
Fifteen blacks	105
Six colours in sequence	27

Fouls in outline: four points at least, and never deducted

A scoreboard in snooker never goes down. Whatever a player does wrong, the remedy is to add points to the other side, and the smallest amount that can be added is four.

The everyday fouls are few. The cue ball misses the ball on altogether. It hits the wrong ball first. It follows a potted ball into the pocket, which players call going in-off. A ball that was not on drops into a pocket. A sleeve, a hand or the butt of the cue brushes a ball. Beyond these the list gets long and specialised: playing with both feet off the floor, striking the cue ball twice, playing before the balls have stopped, making the cue ball jump over another ball.

The value is worked out from the balls involved. It is four points unless the ball on is worth more, or the ball wrongly struck or pocketed is worth more, and then it is the higher figure. So a player who is on a red and catches the black first gives away seven. A player on the blue who misses it gives away five. A player on a red who goes in-off gives away four, because a red is worth one and the minimum applies. If two fouls happen in one stroke, only the single highest penalty counts.

Three more things follow from a foul, and newcomers tend to learn them one painful frame at a time.

The break ends but is not wiped out. Points scored earlier in the visit stand. Only the foul stroke itself scores nothing.

Balls that went in on the foul are treated according to type. Reds stay off the table. Colours are re-spotted.

The opponent then has a choice. They may play from where the balls have come to rest, or they may tell the offender to play again from that same position. The second option is used when the foul has left nothing on, which happens more often than a newcomer might expect. If the cue ball went into a pocket, whoever plays next does so from the D.

That is the outline. The complete list, the fixed seven-point offences and the reasoning behind them are set out in our guide to every foul and what it costs.

Snookers, safety and winning a frame from behind

The game is named after a predicament. A player is snookered when a ball that is not on blocks the straight path from the cue ball to every ball that is. The rule book's test is precise: if at least one ball on can be struck on both of its extreme edges without obstruction, there is no snooker. Being unable to see the whole of any ball on is enough to count. A cushion cannot snooker anyone; only a ball can.

A snookered player must still hit the ball on. The usual escape is off one or more cushions, judged by eye, and a failed escape is a foul. This is the engine of the tactical game. A player who cannot pot does not simply try something difficult and hope. They hide the cue ball, typically by running it back to the baulk cushion and tucking it behind the green, brown or yellow, and wait for the opponent to make the mistake.

The rules acknowledge this openly. The summary at the head of Section 3 describes leaving the cue ball behind a ball not on as "a tactic employed at any time during a frame", and it goes on to say when the tactic becomes essential: when a player needs more points than the balls remaining can provide.

The arithmetic of needing snookers

Suppose the reds have gone, 27 points are on the table and one player trails by 30. Potting every ball would still lose by three. The only way back is to force a foul. One four-point penalty cuts the deficit to 26, and now the 27 on the table is enough.

That is what commentators mean by "needs a snooker". The player is not required to lay a snooker in any formal sense. They need penalty points, and laying snookers is the practical way to get them. A frame can in principle be turned by penalty points alone, and frames have been won by players who needed three or four fouls and got them, though the task gets much harder with each extra foul required. The calculations, and the etiquette of when to stop trying, are in our guide to what "snookers required" means.

One consequence is worth stating plainly. The foul rules are generous to the player who is behind. A trailing player's best weapon is the leader's obligation to hit a ball that has been hidden, and the minimum of four points per failure is high relative to the value of the balls. In a game where a red is worth one, a single missed escape is worth four reds.

Free ball, foul and a miss, touching ball: three calls from the referee

A television viewer hears three phrases from the referee that the outline above does not explain. Each has its own rule and its own page on this site, so what follows is the short version.

"Free ball"

After a foul, if the player coming to the table is snookered, the referee calls a free ball. The incoming player may then nominate any ball on the table and treat it as the ball on. If red is on and the player nominates the brown, the brown counts as a red for that stroke: potted, it scores one, goes back on its spot, and the player moves on to a colour as usual.

The reasoning is fairness. A player should not profit from a foul by leaving the opponent unable to see the ball they are entitled to play. There is a restriction, though. The free ball cannot be used to lay a snooker behind itself, except at the very end of a frame when only two object balls are left on the table. The full mechanics are in our guide to when a free ball applies and what it scores.

"Foul and a miss"

A player must make a real attempt to hit the ball on. If the referee judges that the attempt fell short of the player's ability, typically an escape from a snooker played too cautiously, the call is "foul and a miss". The opponent then has an extra option beyond the two ordinary ones: have every ball put back where it was and make the offender try again. And again, if necessary, with penalty points each time.

A miss is not called when either player needed penalty points before the stroke, or needs them as a result of it, provided the referee is satisfied the failure was not deliberate. Where the player can see the ball on full in the face and still fails to hit it, the rule tightens further, and a warning after the second failure means a third costs the frame. Our page on the miss rule and its three-miss warning explains why the rule exists and why it remains the most argued-over clause in the book.

"Touching ball"

When the cue ball stops in contact with a ball that is on, or one that could be, the referee announces it. The striker must then play away from the touching ball without moving it. Any movement of that ball is a push stroke and a foul.

The compensation is that the touching ball, if it is on, counts as already hit. A player touching a red may roll the cue ball a few inches away from it into open baize and commit no foul, which makes a touching ball one of the easier safety shots in the game.

The final black, the concession and the re-spot

Most frames never reach the last ball. They end when one player, far enough behind that the balls left cannot close the gap and unwilling to chase penalty points, offers the frame and the opponent accepts.

The rule book hedges that custom with conditions. A player may not concede unless one of the two players needs penalty points; giving up a frame that could still be won by potting is classed as unsporting conduct. An offer of concession lapses if the opponent chooses to play on, which a player on a big break will often do. Once made or accepted, it cannot be taken back.

When a frame does run to the end, the black is governed by a rule of its own. With the black the only object ball left, the first pot or foul ends the frame. A player seven behind who pots it has drawn level. A player seven behind whose opponent fouls on it has drawn level as well, because the penalty on the black is seven.

Level scores lead to the re-spotted black. The black goes back on its spot, the players draw lots, the winner decides who plays first, and the cue ball is played from the D. The next pot or foul decides the frame. It is rare and it is nerve-shredding. The 1998 Masters final at Wembley Conference Centre went to one in the deciding frame, Mark Williams beating Stephen Hendry 10-9, and our guide to how a tied frame is settled walks through the procedure.

1. 1ConcededA player offers the frame once penalty points are needed, and the opponent accepts.
2. 2Claimed or awarded on the blackWith only the black left and a gap of more than seven points, the frame goes to the player in front without the black being potted.
3. 3Final blackWith only the black on the table, the first pot or foul ends the frame.
4. 4Re-spotted blackIf that pot or foul leaves the scores level, the black is spotted again and the next pot or foul decides it.
5. 5AwardedThe referee gives the frame to the opponent after a third miss following a warning, or for unsporting conduct or time wasting.

Drawn from Section 2 Rule 1 and Section 3 Rule 4 of the WPBSA rules. Most frames in professional play end by concession.

Frames add up to what the public calls a match and the rule book, a little confusingly, calls a game: "an agreed or stipulated number of frames". Formats are expressed as best-of an odd number, so a best-of-nine is won by the first player to five. The World Championship final is the longest, a best-of-35 spread across four sessions. The rules also provide for matches decided on aggregate points across all frames, a format that survives in some amateur leagues and hardly anywhere else. Lengths for each event are listed in our guide to how many frames a match lasts.

What changes on a club table

On a weekday evening in a snooker club in Leeds or Leicester there is no referee, no marker and no overhead camera. The rule book anticipates this in a single line near the end of Section 3: when there is no referee, the opposing player is regarded as the referee for the purposes of the rules.

So the opponent re-spots the colours and rules on fouls, and both players keep the score. The system works because of a convention older than any printed code. Players call their own. A double hit on the cue ball, a shirt cuff brushing a red, a feather that nudged the white: often only the striker can know, and the striker is expected to stand up and say so.

Several rules bend in practice.

The miss rule is the clearest case. Replacing balls to the millimetre needs a trained referee and, at the top level, a camera image to check against. Two club players cannot do it, so most do not try. A failed escape is a foul, four away, and play goes on from where the balls finish. Local leagues usually publish their own position on this, and anyone joining one should read it before the first match.

The free ball, by contrast, is applied everywhere, though arguments about whether a ball can be "seen" on both edges are a staple of club life. The courteous method is to ask a neutral player from the next table to look.

Table size varies too. The rules define only the standard table, but clubs and homes have ten-foot, nine-foot and smaller versions, with the spots scaled to match, and many shorter games are played on them with ten reds or six. The book permits this directly: a simplified form of snooker "can be played with any number of red balls". The coin-operated table in a British pub, however, is almost always a pool table, which is a different game with different rules, and our comparison of snooker and pool sets out the differences.

Etiquette fills the remaining gaps. Stand still and out of the striker's eye-line. Do not chalk the cue while leaning over the table. Put the rest back on its hooks. Re-spot a colour for an opponent on a break without being asked. Much of this is in Section 4 in drier language, where the non-striker is told to avoid "any movement or action that may interrupt the concentration of the striker".

Readers who follow more than one sport will find the same approach, rules first and folklore second, across the rest of our guides for readers in England.

From an officers' mess in Jubbulpore to a rule book in Bristol

1875, by the WPBSA's own account. The rule book credits the game to Lieutenant Neville Chamberlain, who "created the sport of snooker in Jubbulpore, India" in that year. He was a young army officer, and not the Neville Chamberlain who later became prime minister.

What Chamberlain did was combine two gambling games already played on billiard tables in officers' messes. Pyramids used fifteen red balls racked in a triangle, with a stake paid for each one potted. Life pool gave each player a ball of a different colour. Putting coloured balls from the second game onto the table alongside the reds of the first produced a game with two kinds of ball and two kinds of value, and that is still the structure of snooker.

The name is army slang. A "snooker" was a first-year cadet at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, and by Chamberlain's later recollection he applied the word to a fellow officer who had missed a pot. It stuck to the game. The earliest written rules are traditionally associated with the club at Ootacamund in the Nilgiri hills in the 1880s, and by most accounts the first version used fewer colours than the modern game, with the blue and the brown added afterwards. The dates in this part of the story rest on recollection more than documents and should be read with that in mind.

The institutional history is firmer, because the rule book prints it.

The Billiards Association was established in 1885 and the Billiards Control Club in 1908. They amalgamated in 1919 as the Billiards Association and Control Council, which was renamed the Billiards and Snooker Control Council in 1971. For most of the twentieth century that body owned the rules. The WPBSA, the professional players' association established in 1968, purchased the rights in 1992 and has published the rules since.

The text is still being adjusted. A reprint dated November 2019 was followed by a run of amendments: a new definition of a ball "forced off the table" in July 2021, a rewritten concession rule in May 2022, and in August 2024 a change to the free-ball clause for the final two balls. All of them are folded into the edition revised in September 2024. None touched the fundamentals. A player from that Jubbulpore mess would recognise the red-then-colour sequence at once, and would probably be more startled by the standard of the potting than by anything in the rules.

For the longer story of how a mess-room pastime became a television sport, see our history of the game from Jubbulpore to the Crucible, and for features beyond the rule book there is the site's blog.