Some Comments on Keeping The Grip Loose

[CoachGavin]

Watch Davis play in the 80's. His elbow hardly moves with each shot. Especially the pot at 4:30

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysgJHBSoEMc


Now watch Ronnie O sullivan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pthXRHxj18A

His elbow drops considerably. That is what is meant by dropping the elbow.

There are numerour threads on here about advantages/disadvantages of it and how to do it. If you are interested try looking at the video of Del Hill teaching it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n53CGDi-JM starting from about 4:20 he speaks of dropping the elbow etc.

Hope that helps.

[Dannyboy]

Thank's CoachGavin,

I fully understand Dropping the elbow now and thank's for helping me

Danny

[linglomsri]

Should we tighten our grip only after the cue hit the cue ball? I always tighten the grip before -_-'

[CoachGavin]

If you tighten the grip before you strike the cue ball you will clutch at the cue and cause it to decelerate and go offline. You definately do not want this!

[Terry Davidson]

linglomsri:

As Coach Gavin has said, your answer is YES!!! If you can find a 360 training cue, give it a try and see what happens.

Terry

[linglomsri]

Thx so much Terry, I've tried it today and my delivery lil bit better but not get used to it yet so i'll keep trying.

[Terry Davidson]

linglomsri:

If you've been playing for awhile and have gotten used to tightening the grip before hitting the cueball (which will move the butt of the cue sideways and take the cue off-line) this will feel VERY unnatural to you.

The way to get this (fairly) easily is to ensure your backswing is long enough so you can develop the power required for a power shot. Remember the power law in snooker - POWER IS DETERMINED BY THE LENGTH OF THE BACKSWING AND NOT THE RATE OF ACCELERATION OF THE CUE, WHICH SHOULD BE SMOOTH AND NOT ABRUPT.

Initially though, it will seem real weird but once you 'get' it you will find your potting and cueball control will increase dramatically, especially if you also stop the quick acceleration which will cause body movement too

Terry

[Sidd]

linglomsri:

If you've been playing for awhile and have gotten used to tightening the grip before hitting the cueball (which will move the butt of the cue sideways and take the cue off-line) this will feel VERY unnatural to you.

The way to get this (fairly) easily is to ensure your backswing is long enough so you can develop the power required for a power shot. Remember the power law in snooker - POWER IS DETERMINED BY THE LENGTH OF THE BACKSWING AND NOT THE RATE OF ACCELERATION OF THE CUE, WHICH SHOULD BE SMOOTH AND NOT ABRUPT.

Initially though, it will seem real weird but once you 'get' it you will find your potting and cueball control will increase dramatically, especially if you also stop the quick acceleration which will cause body movement too

Terry

Excellent advice Terry, as always. This I will keep in mind to double the attention ont eh loose grip matter...!

[Terry Davidson]

Sidd:

As I said in the other post, remember to ONLY WORK ON ONE THING AT A TIME, especially with a dynamic element.

So for you some separate items might be:
1. Loose grip (master this first without thinking about anything else)
2. Slow backswing (using your now mastered loose grip)
3. Longer backswing
4. Rear pause (maybe and only if it 'feels' natural)
5. Focus on keeping the grip loose and at the same tension from the rear pause all the way through to striking the cueball (this is VERY difficult and should only be worked on in isolation from the other elements)
6. Driving the grip hand through to the chest.

After you get all of those mastered one at a time now concentrate on staying still on the shot and ONLY at this point check out your alignment to ensure everything is still on line and your set-up is comfortable

Terry

[thelongbomber]

linglomsri:
The way to get this (fairly) easily is to ensure your backswing is long enough so you can develop the power required for a power shot. Remember the power law in snooker - POWER IS DETERMINED BY THE LENGTH OF THE BACKSWING AND NOT THE RATE OF ACCELERATION OF THE CUE, WHICH SHOULD BE SMOOTH AND NOT ABRUPT.

Thanks for this useful advice Terry. Somehow I know the above statement is true, but I'm not entirely sure why it's true and I would love to hear your thoughts on it. It's an area of cueing I think about a lot and wondering if you felt that below is a possible explanation?

Power shots or any shots require the cue and cue ball to travel accurately along the intended path as determined by the player. If a player exaggerates cue acceleration and tip speed beyond a controllable amount, the result is that the cue and cue ball travel offline. This happens because of the arm's inability to accelerate beyond a certain speed with any amount of accuracy. Each player has at any point in time, an in-grained, in-muscle speed limitation on how fast their arm can cue. This can be trained and improved in practice however. The term power shot is in fact misleading because it's not arm power at all and should really be named "Your personal maximum ability to time the cue ball, get the required spin, and still keep the cue on the line of the shot." Some players may think about tip speed and believe it's like hammering a nail: the harder your hit the deeper the nail, when in fact tip speed and power shots is more about how well the hammer accelerates past the nail head.

[Terry Davidson]

longbomber:

I'll revert to the Terry Griffiths school of thought and explanation on this one. Terry G advocates the more power required for a shot the longer the backswing should be AND THAT THE RATE OF ACCELERATION IS THE SAME (OR NEARLY SO) FOR ALL DIFFERENT LEVELS OF POWER.

OK, now for your explanation, which is really quite simple. If the speed of the tip when it reaches the cueball is called 'P' for power, then the amount of 'P' will equal the rate of acceleration times the distance traveled by the tip (or cue overall in this case). Therefore, as you stated in your second paragraph THERE IS A LIMIT TO THE AMOUNT OF POWER ANY INDIVIDUAL PLAYER CAN IMPART INTO THE CUEBALL assuming he has the same rate of acceleration for every shot and that would be the distance the cue travels while accelerating or in other words the length of the backswing.

This is one good reason why every coach and training book I've ever seen advocates somewhere between 9" to 12" of cue shaft ahead of the 'V' of the bridge and this is to allow sufficient room for the backswing to be somewhere between 8" to 11" but this length of backswing should only be as long as the player can positively control it and keep it straight and the same goes for the delivery back to the strike on the cueball.

However, in a way we're all kidding ourselves a bit since if I am using a 3" backswing for an easy putt shot around the black I doubt very much the acceleration of that shot is the same as if I was trying to pot a 10ft shot and screw back a couple of feet. I believe I would naturally be trying to not only backswing say 10" but also accelerating a little more rapidly that for the putt shot.

Where things usually go wrong is on a power shot but a player can reduce those errors IF he increases his backswing to maximum allowed by getting the ferrule back to the 'V' and also trying not to rapidly accelerate the cue at the start of the delivery as this will lead to most players gripping the cue tighter in order to forcefully accelerate the cue abruptly. BAD TECHNIQUE (but I know I'm guilty of it as I just did it yesterday on a power black where I needed to power up and screw back across the face of the pink and I ended up clutching the cue so badly that I miscued and almost dented my wall with the cueball.

It takes training, discipline and lots of practice to master this but you can easily see it by watching Ronnie, Hendry, Higgins, Murphy, Maguire, Allen, especially Mark Selby but with any of the top pros.

Terry