AS EXPERIENCED BY JOEYA:
Aiming systems in my opinion have evolved over the years and I believe this evolution is a great thing. Many aiming systems like “ghost ball” are simple to express in a diagram but far too difficult for most people to make effective on the pool table without huge amounts of investment in time on the table. I’m not saying that learning any aiming system requires little effort. I’m not saying that at all. I think that aiming systems like ghost ball are just too simple and require far more visual imagination than most of us possess.
Other evolving aiming systems like CTE/Pro1 incorporate many other physical and visual pieces of information to help the player obtain the perfect sight picture. I’ve used most of the aiming systems out there and plan on using others as they are brought to the market place. I can talk a little about CTE/Pro1 because I have used it to a very high level.
Some people believe that aiming systems are a bunch of hooey and that if you use an aiming system the sky is going to fall down on you. Lol. But that’s ok too. I am not in this world to convince those who don’t want to be convinced that aiming systems are GREAT for your pool game. For the rest of you, keep in mind that I am speaking from my own personal experience: CTE/Pro1 has given me much, much more than an aiming system. It is a total shooting system, in my opinion. This particular aiming system involves body alignment, head alignment, eye movement, body movement, and complete visual perspective necessary to help you develop the perfect sight picture. It is not the easiest aiming system to learn as it involves lots of “new” terminology that can be easily misconstrued. Also, like anything worthwhile, it takes dedication and time to master.
I’m kind of glutton for punishment, if you have ever seen me practicing or if you were in boot camp with me in the Corps.
I don’t mind spending countless hours learning to do something perfectly well. In fact, I marvel at those who say if I practiced like you I could be a world champion. (And it’s been said to me on more than one occasion, I might add). But this isn’t really about the dedication it takes to excel at this sport or the dedication that it takes to learn CTE/Pro1.
CTE/Pro1 has helped me grow as a player by not only helping me to recognize what a perfect sight picture looks like but many other things that are probably just as important, and collectively, probably more important. In no particular order, CTE/Pro1 has helped me to:
1. It has helped me to align my body to the shot better.
2. It has helped me to improve my focus. My ability to focus has gone from a traditional one button, one bulb, flashlight to an LED flashlight with zoom lens. I believe it is the finite points on the cue ball and the object ball that does this but I can’t be positive at this time.
3. It has helped me to find the center of the cue ball better. (This should not be under-valued) Just a word to the wise.
4. It has helped me to learn what a perfect sight picture is supposed to look like.
5. It has helped me to improve my confidence in taking the shot.
6. It has helped me to trust my visual intelligence.
7. By using the finite aiming coordinates of CTE/Pro1, I feel like am fine-tuning my aiming while still standing erect, making the transition to bridge hand placement automatic. It didn’t start out automatic and I practiced with the manual CTE/Pro1 pivoting for a very long time before migrating over to the auto pilot of Pro1.
8. It has helped me to work on the rest of my fundamentals without hindrance and with a confidence that I never had before.
In all of this, I have come full circle, I can now aim with superior effectiveness, all automatically, without thinking without manually pivoting and I believe it is CTE/Pro1 that has helped me to do this. This is THE TRUTH.
Another thing that has helped me is Gene Albrecht’s Perfect Aim as I have mentioned in other threads and this too, is THE TRUTH.
The bottom line is that I am seeing the shot better than ever and I am having more fun than ever and I am playing better against better players. I genuinely believe that my journey through ALL aiming systems has helped me to become a better player. I have even recently used Shane Van Boening’s ferrule aiming system much to my amazement with great success. Maybe, it is more about noticing that on some shots different portions of my ferrule line up with the edge of the object ball. The easily seen finite points on an object ball and cue ball make aiming better.
Sometimes, I believe that the mechanical aspects of aiming systems do all of these great things but at the highest level, they train you to do what some do automatically and that is to see the perfect sight picture simply by doing.
I’m not a great player by any stretch of the imagination but I am a better player because of aiming systems. If you already know how to shoot well, you probably don’t need to learn an aiming system. But if you still need improvement in your shooting, don’t listen to those fools who tell you that aiming systems are snake oil and that if you use them, the sky will fall on your head. Just try it out for yourself and you be the judge. Like with most things in life, results will vary from one individual to the next.
Oh yes, one more thing, when I start to miss balls, I will go back to the manual pivoting of CTE/Pro1 in a heartbeat. When my game starts to flounder, I find going through the manual pivoting and the visual coordinates and the body movements satisfying and it helps me to get back on automatic pilot.
For what it’s worth, a post by CJ Wiley in Facebook inspired this thread and I agree with him. When pool is played at its highest played level, the competitors don’t think about aiming systems, they just visualize and execute. That happens when you have developed your visual perspective and your fundamentals to the point where you can operate at that level without thinking. CJ Wiley has a good aiming system in his video and I think he invented it as a way of expressing what he did automatically. The forward thinkers like CJ Wiley, Stan Shuffett and Gene Albrecht have simply described how they aim, nothing more. Putting how you aim into words in no easy task but I have all of them to thank for their contributions to my game.
If at some point, I make different directional changes as far as aiming systems are concerned, I will share them but for now, I am hoping to move on to that next level. The funny thing is that at my advanced age, I still actually believe that can be done.