Im seriously losing my sanity with this game !!!! HELP !!!!

[j6uk]

I switch my eyes back to ob just before my back pause, I know older eyes can take longer to focus on the white but dong it on the front pause is too longer time before you hit the cue ball, could throw the timing of the shot and not surprised your jabbing. So I'm not with your coach terry on this..

Terry has been on to me about the same thing. He told me once I start my front pause my eyes are suppose to swith to the OB and stick to it like glue and send the tip of my cue right through the object ball. I got the eye problem fixed and then I started jabbing at the cue ball instead of firing the cue right through. Very frustrating game but I believe if we stick to our practice it will improve.....I hope. I try to get in a couple hours practice every night on my table.

[lesedwards]

I switch my eyes back to ob just before my back pause, I know older eyes can take longer to focus on the white but dong it on the front pause is too longer time before you hit the cue ball, could throw the timing of the shot and not surprised your jabbing. So I'm not with your coach terry on this..

I really do not have a rear pause so maybe that is why he has me focusing on the OB on the front pause.

[Belloz22]

I have maintained ive always had a problem keeping my eyes fixed on the OB, and the reason is i believe is because i have nothing to focus on - not actually spot. So then i tend to find because i cant focus on something physical, instead of an imaginary spot, i find that my eyes deviate. I think this may be due as well to my short attention span and being a fidgety person, but by god i find it hard keeping my eyes focused on something that is kind of imaginary because i do find when i conciously keep eyes focused, my potting imrpoves, but when i play naturally, my naturally inablility to focus has deterimental effects

[j6uk]

Why don't you have one?
If I was you, without a bp, I'd watch the ferrule leave the cue ball on the final back swing then switch the eyes to the ob. This should help you develop your good timing, slow down your back swing, cue straight and reveal the mechanics of what your doing.
Getting this right is key to developing your play.

I really do not have a rear pause so maybe that is why he has me focusing on the OB on the front pause.

[hotpot]

Terry has been on to me about the same thing. He told me once I start my front pause my eyes are suppose to swith to the OB and stick to it like glue and send the tip of my cue right through the object ball. I got the eye problem fixed and then I started jabbing at the cue ball instead of firing the cue right through. Very frustrating game but I believe if we stick to our practice it will improve.....I hope. I try to get in a couple hours practice every night on my table.

I,m sure Terry advocates switching the eyes anytime between the front pause to the back pause , as he stated there is no right time its personal preference .

[j6uk]

Yes it is personal but if for some reason you don't have any type of back pause then it limits you some what.

I,m sure Terry advocates switching the eyes anytime between the front pause to the back pause , as he stated there is no right time its personal preference .

[Terry Davidson]

j6uk:

Since the majority of the better pros (and better amateurs too) have a rear pause I always try to encourage NEW students to develop one. However, I've found with virtually all my older students if they learned to play without any discernible rear pause that it's very difficult for them to adopt and they would be changing their natural rhythm and timing by doing so.

I've also found with older players, myself included, it takes some time to re-focus the eyes on the object ball and if they do it at or near the rear pause it will either cause the rear pause to be too long or else leads them to rushing the shot. It's much better for older players to switch to the object ball during the front pause but I do tell all of them of the Joe Davis method which is to switch the eyes at the rear pause or other coaches anytime just before or just after the rear pause.

So if any player comes to me and he already has a rear pause I tell them this is a very good thing and that is the time they should lock their eyes on the object ball.

There is another fact that plays into this too...EVERYONE has a rear pause of some kind as the cue has to change direction but some players are more comfortable with having this as short as possible. If a player can adopt a rear pause without throwing his timing out then that is the best solution, but some players just cannot do it. This latter group includes myself as I tried for over 3 years to get a rear pause as I feel it's the correct way to go but it literally destroyed my natural timing which I have adopted since I was around 15 years old, albeit with major breaks in continuity as I stopped playing for a couple of long periods since I was young.

Basically, a discernible rear pause is not for everyone (Mark Allen & Peter Ebdon for example) but it is used by the majority of good pros from Joe Davis to Steve Davis to Hendry to O'Sullivan and I have to admit it is probably the way to go but ONLY if a player can adopt it without any harm.

You should be careful with your shotgun approach with advice since what works for you just might not work for Les or other players. The only way a player should work on his timing is when he is actually with his coach one-on-one as trying to change timing is a very large objective to take on and unless a player has ambitions to become a pro I wouldn't recommend it unless the player demanded it.

Terry


Terry

[j6uk]

Hardly a shot gun tel, strong words there for some reason. Besides I have not said what works for me..
I gave very sound advise If you read it properly, that will cause no harm to anyone
You've been this fellas coach for god knows how long yet he is still struggling and that's why he's on here getting advise from others how know what there talking about.

You should be careful with your shotgun approach with advice since what works for you just might not work for Les or other players. The only way a player should work on his timing is when he is actually with his coach one-on-one as trying to change timing is a very large objective to take on and unless a player has ambitions to become a pro I wouldn't recommend it unless the player demanded it.

Terry


Terry

[Terry Davidson]

j6uk:

Here is what I'm talking about...(by j6uk) 'Why don't you have one?
If I was you, without a bp, I'd watch the ferrule leave the cue ball on the final back swing then switch the eyes to the ob. This should help you develop your good timing, slow down your back swing, cue straight and reveal the mechanics of what your doing.
Getting this right is key to developing your play.'

You are telling Les to completely change his eye rhythm along with his actual technique rhythm. The problem is I don't think Les can accept the fact that learning snooker takes a lot of time and practice and he is looking for instant improvement and is not willing to stick with just one technique and try and get some consistency with that. I'm trying to get him to focus on just getting the basics correct but he obviously isn't satisfied with what I'm telling him and seeks advice from the Forum. Some of this advice goes directly against what I'm telling him, which is basically 'get the very basics correct first, and then work on the incremental corrections. Les is doing himself a lot of harm (which I've also tried to tell him).

However, Les takes all the advice on here to heart as he is looking for that 'Silver Bullet' which doesn't exist and every time I see him he has changed things to reflect that advice he has found (for instance the last one was keeping the cue off the chest and I had to get him to get his chest and chin down on the cue...again!).

This led immediately to better potting in practice (maybe it's his silver bullet) but then he has a bad match on really crappy tables and decides there must be some kind of advice out there which will help him to IMMEDIATELY get over not playing well in pressure matches, no matter that I told him before the tournament that he would not play to his practice standard since a lot of it will be due to these absolutely crap tables we have to play on (very slow, bad rolls and very poor cushions so everything has to be hit hard).

Watching the ferrule come back was my next step as this was advice I got from Steve Davis a few years back when I asked him about developing a rear pause. You did hit on the real 'secret' though which is a very slow and deliberate backswing and that coupled with watching the ferrule come back and then starting the delivery slowly will encourage a rear pause.

Terry

[j6uk]

No not telling, suggesting ..
Les has had a table for a year and a half, he never practices lineup and can't string 3 balls together in a comp so, please, he's hardly got a concrete so called eye/ technique rhythm and if he does 'it aint working'..

You are telling Les to completely change his eye rhythm along with his actual technique rhythm.

Terry

[j6uk]

You said you played every week for 3 years on the UK pro-am circit. You would know how bad the tables were, its the same for both players and its no excuse for bad play..

j6uk:
This led immediately to better potting in practice (maybe it's his silver bullet) but then he has a bad match on really crappy tables and decides there must be some kind of advice out there which will help him to IMMEDIATELY get over not playing well in pressure matches, no matter that I told him before the tournament that he would not play to his practice standard since a lot of it will be due to these absolutely crap tables we have to play on (very slow, bad rolls and very poor cushions so everything has to be hit hard).

Terry

[j6uk]

Oh so not so much of a shotgun then, I do know a little? Thanks tel

j6uk:
Watching the ferrule come back was my next step as this was advice I got from Steve Davis a few years back when I asked him about developing a rear pause. You did hit on the real 'secret' though which is a very slow and deliberate backswing and that coupled with watching the ferrule come back and then starting the delivery slowly will encourage a rear pause.

Terry

[Belloz22]

See for me I don't have a FP, but I find when I draw the cue back I cannot focus on the tip. Though when my cue is back, I do a RP, and adjust my eyes in the OB, but my eyes will stop stay focused on BOB which sucks - and then I pull shots massively off line due to this I find. But again this is partly coming back to my cueing, mainly, finding it increasingly hard to have a longer back swing and to stroke the cue slowly thru and build acceleration, because it gets to the stage where I feel stutter or I am going thru slow that I feel like im pushing the white and not stroking it. Hard to explain

[Terry Davidson]

j6uk:

Bad tables will bring down the standard of every player however the stronger player loses more since he will find it much harder to put together higher breaks. We see this in our ranking tournaments here on those really bad tables (worse than I ever saw in Britain in the 80's) where we do get some uneven results with the better players losing more frequently and also the tournament high breaks are always lower than on the better tables.

The other problem is the pockets in this club narrow after the fall and if you hit a ball which juggles it will stay right over the pocket and the weaker player can mop those up. Last weekend I hit a blue perfectly to the inside jaw of the yellow pocket at pace and it rattled and stayed right over the pocket but of course my position was good so my opponent grabbed a few points. On my own table that blue would have been in as mine are pro templated.

Terry

[alabadi]

j6uk:

The problem is I don't think Les can accept the fact that learning snooker takes a lot of time and practice and he is looking for instant improvement and is not willing to stick with just one technique and try and get some consistency with that. Terry

Terry bang on there, this is something i have had to accept myself, as an older player who took up the game in my 40s i was in the same boat, i kept feeling that i need to improve fast because i don't want to wait 10+ years to get to the level i want.

so i tried everything i could to get better, which included getting advice from this forum and others too, buying videos , snookering aids/gadgets, coaching you name it i've tried it. some helped and some didn't. but what i will say is we have to give something time, unless it really messes everything up and feels so uncomfortable.

i found that most changes had almost instant success, but then after a while improvements halted, so instead of sticking with it i changed it, and it just went round in circles.

i have come to realise that some of the changes which helped were good and the reason for the plateu were due to some other issue which needed addressing, i observed that when changing one aspect of a technique that improves our game it can only take you so far, once it reaches the limit of what improvements it can provide we reach that stalemate state.

so instead of thinking its not working and change it again we have to look at other areas of our technique which are not working and correct them instead.

its like building a house first you start with the foundations, once they are solid you build the first floor, if one wants to get to the second floor they have to build the stairs before the second floor, you can't say because i can't get to the second floor there is a problem with the foundations or the first floor and change that, as you will never get to the second floor. everything has to be in a logical sequence one thing at a time.

so as i have said for me its accepting that each change will take time and i will just have to be patient and work on it before i see any solid improvements.

thats my opinion on the matter, sorry for the weird house analogy, i hope you get the gist what i was refering to.

Alabbadi