Which ball should i watch first when i hving drill ?

[nrage]

terry, do you have any drills to detect if a miss is caused by either, not picking the correct BOB contact, bad cueing eg applying side spin, or not looking at the object ball on striking the white?

This is really hard to do in the general case, the best you can do is try to rule one or the other out.

So, for example, line up some absolutely perfectly straight short blues and play them with top spin. In this exercise you will have an 'easy' BOB contact spot to aim at and can therefore assume that you will not aim incorrectly in 80-99 out of 100 attempts. Meaning, you can assume any inaccuracy on the final position/path of the white and object ball is due to cueing.

Ideally both balls go into exactly the same part of the pocket. If the object ball misses, you've played with a lot of side, enough to cause the white to "squirt" to the left or right. If the object ball goes into the side of the pocket, and the white misses on the opposite side, you've played with less, but still some side.

From here you progress to longer blues, where smaller mistakes cause larger effects, and so on.

[Terry Davidson]

stephenm:

It's safe to assume in 99% of misses the cause is you failed to deliver the cue straight and along the line of aim you've chosen. In order to prove this is difficult though, however I will give you a simple exercise which should set you on the right path to discovering what you may be doing wrong.

First off all put a light chalk mark on the face of the top cushion in the middle and directly behind the black/pink spots. The mark must be thin and visible from the baulk end of the table. Now take 3 red balls and freeze them both to the cushion and to each other so the middle ball is centered on the chalk line. Now pull out the centre ball and move the two outside reds 1/8th" to the outside.

Go to the baulk end and place the cueball on the brown spot or just in front of it if there's a pit there on the spot. Get down on the shot and with just enough pace for the cueball to return to the tip of your cue hit the chalk mark without touching either red on each side. If you miss the two reds and the cueball comes back to your tip (leave the cue extended and hopefully the table is level) then you have learned 2 things, i.e. - your are selecting the correct line of aim for the cue and you are delivering the cue straight with no siding.

If you miss the reds but the cueball comes back to one side or the other of your cue then you are putting on a slight bit of unintentional side although even with a very little bit I suspect you will hit one of the reds.

Keep working on it until you can hit the chalk mark without disturbing the reds and once you can accomplish that then up the power on the shot to 4 lengths of the table. This is very tough to do without hitting the reds.

If you disturb the reds at all with either the slow pace or the harder shot then you are not delivering the cue straight down the line of aim but because there are about 10 reasons for this to happen you might need a coach or else video yourself from directly behind the cue with good lighting on the butt of the cue and see if the butt stays on line (if you are hitting the reds then the butt will be going off-line for some reason.

The most common reasons are:
1. Upper body movement during either the backswing or delivery.
2. Backswing not straight
3. Backswing too fast
4. Grip too tight to start with
5. Tightening the grip too early in the delivery (shouldn't tighten until AFTER the cueball is struck).
6. Tightening the grip too much in the delivery
7. Upper body movement during the delivery
8. Crooked delivery (cause by grip being too tight and gripping too early usually).
9. Decelerating through the cueball (again caused by grip usually).
10. Wrist turning during delivery.

Note that 'selecting the wrong line of aim for the cue' is not among the reasons and therefore selecting an incorrect BOB is not one of the reasons as it almost never happens except with long and fine cut shots.

Terry

[gharrop]

Just a quote from memory from a book by Joe Davis - many times world champion - keep down on the shot until the ball is in the pocket - never watch the ball going there but LISTEN to its going in.