About Me

I'm Mayur. I've been playing snooker for over 15 years and coaching for more than 10. I run Snooker Delight — this site, the blog, the coaching. All of it.

If you've read any of my writing, you'll know I don't think like most coaches. I take a contrarian view on a lot of what gets taught in this game. Not to be difficult. Because I genuinely believe most of the conventional wisdom around technique is either no value or actively harmful. I've written about why most competitive players are playing the wrong game — getting stuck in a mechanical stage when they should be moving toward natural play.

My Philosophy: Your Cue Action Is an Instrument

I believe your cue action is a self-tuned instrument — not a textbook form to copy. Over thousands of shots, your body builds what I call alignment intelligence: a self-correcting system specific to your physique, your eyes, your cue, and your rhythm. It's yours. It's not transferable. And the worst thing anyone can do is take it apart and try to rebuild it from someone else's template.

I think of development like building a guitar, one string at a time. You start with a limited range of shots you can make reliably — your three-string guitar. You add strings by introducing specific challenges that stretch your current range, practised with deliberate attention to how your body solves the alignment problem. Over time, shots move from "difficult" to "reliable." Your instrument gains range. I've explored this idea of player development as a life cycle — from beginner through to mastery — and the stages map closely to how many strings your instrument has.

I wrote about this philosophy in full depth: Your Cue Action Is an Instrument You Tune. It covers the guitar string analogy, why your cue is part of your alignment system, and how the "correct" form emerges naturally from the tuning process rather than being imposed from outside.

What I Don't Do

I don't do lineups. I think most of them are useless — and the ones that aren't useless are often damaging. A coach stands behind you, tells you your elbow is two inches too far left, adjusts your grip, moves your bridge hand, and sends you off to practice a stance that feels completely foreign. You spend the next three weeks fighting your own body. Your potting gets worse. Your confidence drops. And then you go back for another lineup.

I don't "hack" strokes. Adding an artificial pause to your backswing. Shortening your follow-through. Changing your grip pressure on certain shots. These are all tinkering. Patches on top of patches. I've seen players turn a minor inconsistency into a full-blown mechanical crisis because someone told them to add a pause they didn't need. The pause didn't fix the problem. It introduced three new ones. If you're wondering whether your own mechanics are actually the issue, I wrote about how to self-diagnose your cue action — because often the problem isn't where you think it is.

I don't try to replace your alignment intelligence with mine. If you force yourself into a textbook stance that doesn't fit your body, you introduce conflict between what your body has learned and what you're making it do. The result is hesitation, inconsistency, and missed shots you used to make.

What I Actually Do

My main aim is to get you into flow state. That feeling of stepping down and delivering without thinking about every moving part — where your alignment intelligence is running the show and your conscious mind gets out of the way. Flow requires trust in your own system. And trust comes from repetition and understanding. It's fragile, too — distractions, doubt, and overthinking can shatter it. Learning to find it again despite the chaos is part of the work.

I use both sighting techniques (visual reference points to check alignment) and non-sighting techniques (feel, rhythm, body awareness) to help players expand their range. Some are about giving your eyes better information. Some are about removing visual noise so your body can do what it already knows. Some introduce controlled difficulty so your alignment system is forced to adapt and grow. I've written about why certain angles consistently give you trouble — and it's rarely about mechanics. It's about your alignment system not yet having a strong model for that specific shot.

How do we get there? Through the smallest possible set of technical constraints — discovered together. Self-evaluation. Video evidence. Conversation about what's happening in your mind and body when you play. I've done this kind of detailed video analysis with players and it's one of the most effective ways to see what's actually happening versus what you think is happening. Working with me isn't about me telling you what to change. It's about us figuring out what matters and what doesn't. What's real and what's noise.

Sometimes the answer is something mechanical — a genuine flaw that's been hiding in plain sight. Sometimes it's mental — a habit of second-guessing that's crept in over years of bad advice. Sometimes it's strategic — you're playing the wrong shots and blaming your technique for the results. And sometimes the answer is simpler than you think: your cue itself might not be suited to your game.

Why I Coach This Way

Because I've been the player who tinkered. I've been the player who added the pause, changed the grip, moved the bridge hand, shortened the backswing — all because someone told me to. And every single time, it made things worse before it made things better. And most of the time, it just made things worse.

I've also been the player who stopped tinkering. Who went back to trusting the stroke. Who focused on feel instead of mechanics. And that's when the game opened up. That's when scoring heavily became possible — because I wasn't fighting my own body anymore.

Every player I've coached who has made a real, lasting improvement has done it the same way. Not by overhauling their technique. By understanding it. By learning what their body is already doing right — and doing less of what it's doing wrong. By self-correcting through awareness rather than through force. By learning to evaluate their misses honestly instead of getting upset about them.

The difference between coaching and instruction: instruction says "do it this way." Coaching says "let's figure out what works for you and make it more consistent."

Get in Touch

If any of this resonates — or if you're working through your own mechanics and want a second set of eyes — reach out. I offer free 30-minute video calls to discuss where you're at and whether I can help. No pressure, no sales pitch. Just a conversation about your game.

Email me at mayur@snookerdelight.com or find me on X at @snookerdelight (DMs open).