Articles, Help and Advice

Some things have come up which are going to prevent me from playing pool this week - at all it seems.  This is quite annoying after last week's seemingly unending hours of play.  However, I think/hope this will be a good thing.

I bought 2 books last week: Byrne's Complete Book of Pool Shots and Zen Pool.  I'm hoping/expecting that between these two titles, I can gain both information and confidence in both the physical and mental aspect of the game.

Byrne's book appears to be a nice collection of how-to and what-if shots for nearly all types of situations/positions.  The next time I go to practice seriously, I'll be taking this book along with me. I hope to work through all the situations/position/chapters eventually - but for now I'm just starting small and choosing a few that caught my eye as I flipped through it.

Zen Pool is more of a 'what to do, how to prepare *mentally*' kind of book.  I expect to read these throughout this week and am looking forward to putting my new skills into action.  This will take considerably more time and effort, I expect.  But I'm looking forward to bringing my game to the next level.  This means I'm going to have to spend more time doing drills to hammer out the mechanics, further train my body and allow my subconscious to handle those high-pressure shots.

Lastly, I just added a new link on my sidebar to www.poolstudent.com (AKA Pool Synergy).  I just found this site, and already I am favoriting the URL.  Here are a few articles I particularly enjoyed reading today:
Play Pool Without Fear, How to Practice, How to Practice Part 2 and finally one that I find drives me up the wall more than just about any other topic: Learn to Win Under Pressure (why we choke and how to avoid it).

That's all I have for today - but it's plenty of information for you to browse through.

An application using side english

Using the previous layout, lets go ahead and add some english to the shot. Specifically to win a game 9-ball.

Look at this:



A) is the first shot. Shoot the cue-ball with low-medium speed with good left english and it should travel the path outlined, leaving an excellent shot on the 9 ball. (B)

Lets say the 8 was a little closer to the rail and the pocket, while the cue ball was also a little more in-line. Then you would have this scenario:



There are 2 ways to shoot this. The first and somewhat less difficult is to go three rails around the table using medium/medium high power (depending on your stroke and the speed of the table) and tip and a half right english. The 2nd way to shoot it is to use low left english and draw it across the table then let the english bring back across diagonally for position. You can see this on the 2nd page of this diagram. I found this to be a more difficult shot, and opted to go around the table instead.