When you are on the “money” ball, are you suddenly smitten with uncertainty? Do you feel like the eyes of the world are watching and waiting for you to embarrass yourself? Does a spear of fear embed itself in your guts? Do any of these situations seem a bit familiar when you finally have a shot at the ball that can win the game, match, a million dollars and the “world’s greatest player” trophy? Continue reading
How do you know when your passion for pool as taken over your life? Here are a few indicators: Continue reading
One of the “problems” of loving the Green Game is that pool practice is necessary to fix problems and improve skills. Think of pool practice as similar to basketball practice. If you don’t spend time shooting balls and developing the moves to help get baskets – how can you expect to become a better basketball player? If you are playing “horse”, you will always lose. The same applies to playing pool. You have to get on the table and work on shots and setups. When you can make shots during pool practice, you can make shots during competitions with your buddies. Continue reading
Most of the time when you play casual matches; they are, at best, played as a matter of friendly competition or something to pass the time of day. In either case, the games and matches are rarely anything of importance or have anything of value at stake. Game wins and losses mean little to the players. Continue reading
Whenever you play competitive pool matches, you will once in a while find yourself on the losing side. When that happens, there are reactions. For some reason (certainly no fault of your own), you experienced this setback. Continue reading
It is important to be able to have an exact center line stroke and hit on the cue ball. If any fundamental is off, you can be hitting the cue ball to the side as much as 3/4 of a cue tip off the center line. That is almost guaranteed to miss all but the simplest of shots. Continue reading
Anyone who says that pool players don’t have to be in good physical condition hasn’t really played much pool. If you know a scofflaw, challenge that person to 100 shots, within one hour. If they’re not in good physical condition, they’ll be huffing, puffing and dripping sweat. The Green Game is a lot more physically demanding that it appears. Continue reading
Unless you have our own home table, finding a table for pool practicing is one of the problems you face in your goal of becoming a better pool player. It often takes more time to get your stuff together and drive back and forth to your local playing environment (pool hall, senior center, lodge) than actually spend time with practicing pool shots and setups. A dedicated practice trip will take 20-30 minutes to get there for a practice time of a half hour, and then the trip back. BTW, playing with friends is NOT practicing, so get that idea out of your head. Practice is practice. Use your playing friends to demonstrate your new skills. Continue reading
An advanced 10 Ball player will find this information to be moderately helpful. If you are an intermediate player, this advice will improve your win-loss record by about 10% to 20%. Continue reading
The term “bad shooting habits” takes in a lot of territory. It could fall into one of the body, i.e., feet position, butt (yours) position, head position, arm & elbow, etc. It could be due to your cue handling, i.e., bridge hand position/length, butt (cue) grip, etc. It could be a shortcoming in your stroke, such as jerky movement, follow-through failure, speed control, or unintended cue ball spin. Or, it might be a problem based on your mental abilities, such as layout analysis, shot selection, unwanted consequences, etc. Continue reading
The weekly newsletter gives you ALL the posts for the previous week!!