How to solve a Lucky Shot puzzle

8 Ball Pool's daily Lucky Shot, also called the Golden Shot, gives you a fixed table: the cue ball, a few gold balls and a target, always in the same spots for that puzzle. You get one attempt, and the angle and power that win it are rarely obvious. The good news is that the game doesn't invent a new table every day. It draws from a pool of layouts that repeat, and players on YouTube have already recorded the winning shot for most of them.

Lucky Shot connects the two. You show it your table, it works out which known layout you have, and it plays the video of the shot that wins it.

Step by step

1. Open the puzzle, but don't shoot yet. Once you take the shot the layout is gone until it comes round again.
2. Take a normal screenshot on your phone. Use the phone's own screenshot button so the image is sharp and complete.
3. Upload it on the solver page. Tap Choose screenshot and pick it. On a computer you can also drop or paste it. Sign in with a free account first: it comes with one free solve every day.
4. Watch the winning shot. The solver marks the balls it found on your screenshot. Press play on the matched video, watch it a couple of times, and note where the cue lines up against the balls and the cushions.
5. Copy the shot in the game. Match the aim line first, then the power. Small differences in aim matter far more than you would expect on these tables.

Getting a clean match

• Send the full screenshot. Cropping is not needed, and a cropped image can cut off the edges of the table the matcher measures against.
• Don't photograph your screen. A photo of a phone taken with another phone adds glare, angle and blur. A real screenshot is always better.
• Close pop-ups first. Offers, chat bubbles or notifications drawn over the table can hide a ball.
• PNG or JPG both work. Screenshots straight from iPhone or Android are fine as they are.

How the matching works

Most image search compares pictures pixel by pixel. That falls apart here, because every phone has a different screen shape, every video creator frames the table differently, and table skins and cues change colour. Two screenshots of the same puzzle can look quite different as images.

So the solver ignores how the picture looks and measures what is on the table instead. It finds the playing felt, then records where the cue ball, each gold ball and the target sit as a fraction of the felt's width and height. That set of positions is the puzzle's fingerprint. It stays the same whatever phone took the screenshot, however it was compressed, and whichever cue or table skin you use.

Your fingerprint is then compared with every layout in the catalog, and the closest one wins, as long as it is close enough. If nothing is close, the solver tells you the layout is new rather than guess. A wrong video would cost you the shot, so a clear "not found" is the safer answer.

Where the layouts come from

The catalog is built from solution videos that players have published on YouTube. Each video is checked frame by frame, and a layout is only added when several frames agree on exactly the same table. That rule keeps out frames with a pop-up or a speech bubble over the table, which would otherwise turn into a wrong entry.

The layouts come from solution videos published by YouTube creators, including Infinite Gaming, Easy Diy, 8 ball pool lucky shot trick and Y Sagala, and the catalog grows as they post new ones. Their videos play from YouTube, and every match names the creator it came from.

When your layout isn't found

The result tells you why. If no table was found, the screenshot was cropped, covered or not from the game, so try a cleaner one. If the table was read fine but the layout is new, it isn't in the catalog yet. Where your browser supports it, the result offers a button to send the screenshot in so the layout joins the queue to be added.

Every free account gets one solve a day, and uploads that don't match don't use it. For more than one a day, a plan gives you unlimited solves. There are no ads on the site. More questions are answered in the FAQ.