Playing hard shots such as a ball with an elevated cue (“jacked-up”), are a mystery to many players. They accept that such shots are simply reserved for better players and do not even try to expect more of themselves than to hit the ball correctly, perhaps in 20% of cases. Better players can aim better, period.
Everybody is familiar with the expression “You have to want to win the tournament in order to be able to win it.” I found out yesterday what is really meant by this. I’m currently reading a great book called ”The Millionaire Fastlane”. This deals with the fast lane to riches and the comments are applicable to many areas of life. The author, MJ DeMarco, writes, that there is a difference between “wanting to” in the sense of being “interested” in something, and “wanting”, in the sense of being “committed” to something. (more…)
An important aspect of playing pool is to visualize before the shot. Our body works much better when we give pictures and sensations to our body than when we simply give verbal commands. So it works much better to have an inner idea of the right sensation in your arm, the right sound of the impact and the visual appearance of the shot than to say to yourself: “You are shooting smoothly, follow through with the shot straight through the cue ball, while keeping your wrist loose, swinging back slowly…”.
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In this very informative and well-produced video, Ralph Eckert presents the different variations of the standard break in 14.1 / Straight Pool. That’s good stuff and you should practice it hard. What you also need to train is the ability to see the kiss shot tangent correctly on these balls. It took me a while. It’s best to do it like Ralph did in the video, to put the cue ball close to the object ball first and to look closely in which direction the ball goes. In the real match you can’t do that, so it takes some practice to judge the line correctly.
Unfortunately, the video below is in German. There’s another video on Youtube of a match between Thorsten Hohmann and Charlie Wiliams where Ralph was the commentator and where he explains the gist of the video below in English.
Many players flog themselves if a plan doesn’t work out; if they run out of position, if they don’t make the safety, if they get a good position with luck. Then they curse and vindicate and summon fate. “I’m such an idiot”, “I can’t feel the table”,”my opponent plays too slow”,”I suck at draw shots” etc….
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