Four-ball break: a walk in the park
by Jeff Soo · 5 December 2008
Check out the two-ball break and three-ball break tutorials if you haven’t already. You may want to watch the croquet shot videos first, particularly if you don’t know what a drive shot or half roll shot is.
The four-ball break is even easier to play than the three-ball break, although the pattern is a little more complex. As with the three-ball break, you always keep a ball at your current wicket and the next wicket. The fourth ball goes in between as a pivot ball. Correct placement of the pivot ball eliminates the need for difficult split-roll shots, and is the secret to the four-ball break. You may not always be able to creat a four-ball break, but when you do, it is by far the easiest way to score all the wickets for one ball on one turn.
Click through the Flash animation below to see the four-ball break in action. This time it’s the start of the fifth turn of the game. Blue and black, each having scored #1 and #2, have sensibly joined up on the boundary. Meanwhile red and yellow have merely taken position at their respective wickets. Now it’s blue to play:
Click anywhere in the frame to advance
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