I agree with you 100% that it is all in the stroke. 100% in the stroke. Just trying to look at what that perfect stroke does exactly on the receiving end. Lots of guys have good strokes and get good English when they need it, I am one of them. But I am also aware that there are guys with much better strokes that get a lot more. I have come to the conclusion it is all about direction of the stroke and how pure it is.
This has been studied extensively. There are no ‘tricks’ to a good stroke or to applying maximum english to the ball.
Probably the biggest reasons amateurs can’t put serious spin on the cueball:
- They are hitting too high on the cueball afraid of miscuing, or because of a misshapen, flat tip.
- They are trying to hit lower, butntheir bad stroke means they hit the cueball inconcistently.
- Lousy equipment and poor maintenance of the cue tip.
There are players who still swear that the way to get lots of english is with wrist action or some other mechanism. Nope. High speed cameras have shown that the cue tip is only in contact with the cue ball for such a small amount of time that there is no way the tip can swipe across the ball to spin it, or anything like that.
If you want to get lots of English on the cueball, follow these steps:
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Learn to make a level stroke. Not only will this help with English, it will help,with accuracy because any time the cue is elevated when it hits the ball, it will cause the cueball to swerve if it’s not hit perfectly dead center. It becomes a Masse’ shot. One trick for practicing this is to put a pop bottle on the table and practice stroking the cue such that the tip goes in and out without touching the sides.
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Dress your cue tip properly. The biggest reason people miscue and therefore don’t shoot low enough on the cueball is probably because their tip has flattened leaving a ridge around the edge, and when you try to hit the ball low you only contact ot with that ride. Make sure your tip is properly rounded and chalked.
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Practice. Here’s a good drill. Put the object ball on t(e foot spot (where the head of the rack goes), and the cueball about six inches behind it. Try to hit the onject ball in a way that draws the cueball straight back to the rail. If you can do this consistently, move the object ball ahead six inches, and do it again. Keep doing this u til you can reliably draw the cueball back downtable to the rail close to you no matter how far up the table the object ball is.
Another good drill is the ‘stop shot’ drill. Shoot balls straight into pockets from various distances, with different distances between the cue ball and object ball, stopping the cueball dead after each shot. to do this you have to apply enough bottom spin to the cueball such that by the time it hits the object ball it is sliding, not spinning forwards or back.
This is the fundamental position skill in pool - the ability to stop the cueball after impact. Also, it means that if you cut the object ball, the cueball will slide perpendicular to the impact, helping you play position. Being able to do these things from any distance on the table is the first path to high quality play.
Heh. Yeah, it’s funny in your average bar with pool tables, the house “cues” almost all have mushroomed tips, and yet the would-be Earl Stricklands waste their time trying to find the least-warped cue.
I recommend carrying a cheap scuffer/shaper in one’s pocket everywhere one might end up playing a game or even just practicing if “some bar” has a never-ending loop of “Price Is Right” or something on the TV and one is bored…but perhaps be discreet if some clod bar manager thinks you’re messing with their “cues.”
Smokey Robinson may first look at the purse, but I feel the tips on house cues…don’t much care if the cue is warped that much, unless it’s some WC Fields type situation.
I’d personally get draw and stop/stun shots down 100%, plus speed control. It seems to be mostly barroom bangers who go nuts on crazy inside/outside English when it really isn’t necessary, IMHO. Sometimes they get close after making the shot to getting the next ball in line, but not that often.
IMHO that alone can turn a high-percentage shot (and next shot!), using natural spin off the object ball and the rail(s) with speed control into a near flip of the coin shot.
Good luck trying to get somebody playing biker rules 8-ball to play “Call pocket, call next” variation of 8-ball (their turn’s up if they don’t make the next shot or make a legal safety after pocketing their ball in the good pocket). They never go for that. (And as long as I’m on a rant…somebody tell these mofos to cancel that pattern racking for 8 or 9 ball! Just knock it off! It’s ridiculous! Not to mention patently illegal for any kind of 9-ball rules I’ve seen, but that’s not played much in coin-op tables because of reasons.)
But, yes, stun, follow, draw…those are the cue ball actions that are most needed. Side spin, when understood, IMHO, is always a natural consequence of those three basic approaches. I can only think of a handful of places where one really needs or wants to introduce side English, especially on barroom equipment, that come up once or more a game. They’re important situations, but first one has to see where and why they’re needed.
Extensive use of side English is generally the result of botched position play. However, it is also very commonly used in 9-ball, my game of choice.
But man, it complicates the shot, I’ve heard that the large majority of misses by pros result from needing to use English. When you hit a cueball offset from center, the following things hapoen:
- the cue shaft deflects in the other direction.
- The cueball can ‘squirt’ a bit to the side opposite the english.
- If the cue is not perfectly level, the ball will masse’ back in the direction of the English.
- When the spinning cueball hits the object ball, it will ‘throw’ the ball to the side a bit. How much depends on how much dirt/chalk is at the contact point. If you have bad luck, the chalk spot from the cue could be at the contact point, throwing the object ball more. Bar tables are terrible for dirty balls and cloth.
- When the spinning cueball hits the rail, it will come off at an unnatural angle. This is probably the most common reason for English - to move the cueball in a certain direction after contact with the rail.
Put all that together and it’s a tricky and unpredictable shot for anyone - especially if you are playing on poor equipment that isn’t very clean.
Not only principles to play pool by, but sound principles for life itself.
the level stroke is where I think the secret is. There are degrees of level, I thnk the pros simply have a higher degree of level. the wrist action helps to attain this.
Maybe. But you’re not going to get draw on a cueball frozen to the rail with the butt of your cuestick up in the air! Not the classic draw-the-cueball back ¾ of the table, then get a line on the next ball back from ground zero.
You’ll get some other stuff, maybe a controlled massé or a jump shot, both of which I see relatively often just against some pals at a bar who happen to be pretty solid players, just using house cues, on 4x8 coin-op tables.
So, yeah, sure the wrist, as it’s part of the arm and the rest of the, say, upper torso, is going to be involved!
Just for the sake of discussion, I would say the pro and the novice are playing with the same stick. I have a decent stroke myself and I can move the cue ball around pretty good in all directions. I would really like to focus the discussion on the point of impact, we all know that comes from the stroke. We know they are in contact for a very brief period of time, less than .002 of a second, so the only thing different that could be happening that I can think of is a stroke less level leaving a slightly larger footprint on the cue ball.
I’m just learning now, but it seems to me that inconsistency is my worst enemy.
Because I don’t have consistent speed, then the spins aren’t consistent from one time to the next. It’s a fun process, though.
Ok, for me it’s a consistent stroke (straight forward and straight back, and level). One thing that hasn’t been highlighted upthread to my knowledge is a good follow through with the cue stick. Make sure you follow through (don’t jab). If you have a good follow through constistent with your stroke and contact point you will end up with much better ball control in the end, especially when you need to increase speed for position shots. Lots of amateurs jab at the cue ball or hit at agressive angles thinking this will give better english transfer - neither works.
Not so because, many times, they do NOT hit the cue ball in the same place or at the same speed. The true difference between pro and amateur is that the former know how to apply the correct English to the cue ball to get it to end up in an optimum location for their next planned shot. That’s their secret to often running a table of balls before their opponent even gets a single shot. I have a very accurate stroke, but my English is abysmal. It’s more like “slang” than English. LOL
I was kind of hoping we could forget about pool, and the stroke for the time being and just look at the pure physics of the contact point. We have a 2" ball, a 1/2" tip with about a 5/8 radius, the tip compresses x amount, the tip has 20 oz of mass behind it and is moving at about 20 fps on a typical shot etc., I would be really curious what the chalk mark looks like on a ball that was hit perfectly as opposed to a ball that was hit slightly less perfectly.
There won’t be a difference. Most pros I know use a very hard tip, because you actually don’t want the tip to compress much. A mushy tip changes the center of the hit depending on how much speed you need to use, and that variable can be eliminated.
It does really come down to location of the impact point of the tip on the ball, the quality of the tip and chalk, the tip hitting the cueball with no downforce, and the speed of impact. Nothing else matters.
Some pro players hit so low on the ball that you can see their cuesticks bending on the table in the follow-through. I really think amateurs struggle with this in part because the equipment they play with is so inconsistent and poorly maintained that when they try to hit low like a pro, they miscue. So they learn not to hit so low, and then can’t draw the ball well.
Learn to dress a tip properly, and as mentiooned above its a good idea to carry your own chalk, tip tapper or dresser, etc. The physics of it all are actually pretty straightforward.
A more interesting billiard problem: If you do the math on how big the contact zone is to accurately cut a ball into a corner pocket if it’s on the foot spot and the cueball is on the head spot, you find that the area is so small it’s beyond the range of human visual acuity. Yet a pro can make that shot pretty consistently. Aiming in pool is complex.
Well, we don’t just have that. That’s the point of the stuff several decent experts have said that so far seems to be bouncing off.
The stroke determines whether the cut tip has any up / down / sideways motion at impact. The stroke determines if the cut tip is accelerating or decelerating at the instant before and after impact. The stroke determines if the line of the shaft and tip is exactly aligned through the center of the cue ball or not. The stroke determines whether the axis of the cue shaft is exactly parallel to the table or not. All of these aspects of stroke matter. Hugely.
The tip doesn’t just have ~20oz of mass moving at ~20fps behind it. What happens at impact is also affected by the inertia of the player’s hand and lower arm. And their relatively stationary upper arm. The effect is not huge, but it’s not tiny either. If you just rigged up some sort of pendulous cradle hanging by a thread that held the cue then cocked it back and let it go to simulate a human arm, you’d get a much different result from using an actual human arm attached to an actual human.
Here’s the difference. Set up a repeatable test shot. A pro will hit the ball with negligible dispersion from 1 trial to the next. If an amateur tried the same shot 100 times, they’d hit it exactly as the pro did maybe once. Maybe zero times. If they’re skilled, maybe 5 times. And each time they did that they’d get the same result as the pro: ball down the center of the pocket and the cue ball stops right where intended over [there].
The other 95 or 99 times they’d hit it differently in ways they can’t sense. And since they can’t tell what they’re doing wrong, they can’t correct it next time. The next shot is just as randomly wrong as the last one; just in a slightly different manner. Even if they know “I hit too far left” they can’t adjust their behavior finely and repeatably enough, to actually correct. Given enough time and practice, maybe, but you typical barroom ball-whacker isn’t in a learning mode here.
If you really want to focus in on the tip vs cue ball interaction as physics, try this:
For a typical “square” shot by a pro the line of approach of the tip is exactly through the center of the ball. So the slightly curved surface of the slightly flexible tip would leave an exactly circular “dent” in the ball. Or mark on the ball if we had some kind of idealized transfer medium. Chalk doesn’t really do that all that well. If we plotted the centerline axis of the “dent” as a 3D shape down into the core of the ball it would pass exactly through the center.
The amateur will miss the center. So the two curved surfaces will intersect leaving a crescent-moon shaped “dent” in the ball. The axis of the 3D dent won’t extend into the ball through it’s center; it’ll come out someplace else, not at the antipode. And the center of mass of the dent won’t be aligned with the center of mass of the ball. So the ball will be pushed sideways and/or up/down a smidgen. As well, the axis won’t be parallel to the table. Which won’t affect the shape of the “dent” in the ball, but will effect where on the ball the dent was initially formed.
I could go on, but I think I’m about out of words on the whole topic.
This is what I was looking at and I guess you could apply a specific amount on each aspects influence. One aspect I am particularly interested in is the compression point on the tip. Look at it like a target with circular energy absorbing zones. I suspect that a perfectly hit ball would have more of the energy directed into a smaller portion of the circle at dead center, which would of course come from a perfectly executed stroke. .
'Zactly.
With an extremely stiff and properly curved cue tip, the actual “contact patch” between the utterly stiff ball and the slightly less-stiff tip will be very close to a point. Maybe a circle less than a millimeter in diameter. With a soft gooshy tip the contact patch might be 1/4" in diameter. And with all sorts of different forces at each point within that gooshy 1/4" circle.
With a more realistically typical tip in good but not pro condition, the contact patch will be WAG 3mm in diameter.
ISTM part of the reason pros play with extremely stiff tips is precisely to get that very tiny contact patch that they can then use their skill to put exactly where they want it. In their case, where only the bullseye matters, using a bigger softer tip, like using a shotgun, doesn’t put more results in the bullseye; it just scatters results around near the bullseye.
The nice things about suspecting things rather than being rigorous is that one can imagine whatever one wants.
This problem has been studied quite rigorously over the years because it’s great for teaching university students about physics. For some reason showing an image doesn’t work like it did before so here is the link.
http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~cross/Billiards_files/image004.jpg
When the cue stick impact the cue ball, there is the force of the stick on the ball, but also, the amount of spin is directly related to the location of impact on the cue ball, with the further the impact is off center, the more spin will be induced.
Focusing exclusively on the amount of energy a pro can impart compared to an unskilled player misses the mark in that it’s completely ignoring this part of the equation.
Other factors include the angle of the cue stick to the ball, as that direction affect velocity (speed plus direction). As in a golf swing, acceleration through the point of contact is important because decelerating objects are not as stable, which affects the location and direction of impact.
A skilled player will be good in all of these factors, which gives balls more controlled spin.
In short, it’s not simply a difference between the velocity of the tip at impact.
I think some misconception comes when people notice that a good player plays with a loose gripm, opening the hand on the backstroke. This looks like they are using some kind of wrist action, but in reality you open your hand on the backstroke and drop your grip a bit because that’s the only way to keep the cue level. If you death grip the cue, it wll move up and down and your arm swings throug the vertical. A tight grip means an uneven stroke.
A common piece of advice for novices is to hit through the cue ball and not stab at it.
I confess though, I’m not sure how this changes the physics, as obviously a push shot is illegal.
Perhaps if you’re “stabbing” you’re decelerating prematurely, just before contact?
Yes, this is a critical part of a good stroke.