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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.
Yesterday in our training session we practiced jacked-up shots, namely the following position exercise from the PAT 2 System.
Standard-position exercise of PAT 2. Cue ball should stop or draw back one diamond at most
What struck me once again that mastering difficult shots often depends on very simple, basic things. I noticed that Stefan, my student, started to slightly moved his body forwards and upwards while still executing the shot and thus took his cue out of the correct line. He had aimed completely correct, but took the cue out of the line with his body movement. When I instructed him to stay down and just move the back arm, his precentage of making the shot rose magically to 80-90%. He had aimed properly before, but just hadn’t stroked where he aimed. [tweetable alt=”” hashtag=””]A basic rule that you should already teach beginners is: Stay down on the shot![/tweetable] Difficult shots, such as this shot, are also difficult just because they lead us to not doing our fundamentals right. Whether it is an unneccessary upward movement, a jerky backswing or whatever. If you or a training partner have a problem with these kind of shots, try not to doubt your ability to aim, but to pay attention to the basic fundamentals of your stroke. It could be that the solution is closer than you think.