Recently in Hollywood: Playing pool like the big boys

Dieser Beitrag ist auch auf Deutsch verfügbar.

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…”.

But how does it work now exactly? For example, one of my students has some difficulty with the draw shot exercise from PAT 1:

There was a lack of action, he hit the cue ball too high and didn’t follow through properly. The interesting thing was that the player definitely has the playing ability and the cue action to make the shot regularly. So my guess was that the cause is more likely to be found in the mind – this is often the case with draw shots. It doesn’t work, you try to do “more”, try to make more effort, you get tense and don’t do what it’s all about: accelerating the queue low and level through the cue ball (that’s actually it).

The visualization obviously didn’t work out, instead the player fired verbal commands internally, which the body doesn’t understand that well. First I thought, ok, then I demonstrate the exercise, so he has a picture and can copy it. That didn’t work out so well, presumably because the main finding was that I, the coach, could master the shot. I remembered an exercise by former German national pool coach Andreas Huber, who once gave us the task to act like a pool professional, with the result that all course participants played much better and more concentrated instantly.

This resulted in the following exercise: My student and I played the shot alternately. My directive was that we both should act like actors. Within three attempts, the player suddenly managed to produce the desired action on the cue ball, regularly. He simply copied what I did, created the same sound of the impact, made the same movements and omitted the verbal commands. Finally, his body was able to retrieve what he was capable of, because he had a sensual imagination and not just words and conscious commands.

Playing pool is wonderfully easy:

• We train our body to be able to carry out certain movements. For this we need words and conscious attention at the beginning, because the body is not yet able to produce the movements unconsciously.
• When the body internalized the movements, we have to switch off the conscious part of the brain, including the verbal commands. Instead, we present it with images, sounds, and haptic sensations so that it can unconsciously recall what it has learned.

This also shows how important it is to regularly observe very good players. This is the only way to get pictures of how certain processes should be. In this sense, here’s a video by Ralf Souquet vs. Thorsten Hohmann. If you copy them, you can’t be very wrong: