Four-ball break
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. The four-ball break is by far the easiest way to score all the points 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