One of the reasons I gave up responding to you is because it is too much work to untangle your blue text because you refuse to use the quote function. All you have to do is highlight the text you want to quote and then click on the quote wrap button (4th icon from the right in the menu). Then hit preview post and clean up any stray quote tags.
Dan, let's talk man to man with each other and be honest. I'll go first. If you choose to concur with what I say, I think it would also be honest on your part.
I really don't like you based on our long term interaction as well as your constant bad mouthing of Stan, CTE, and it's users. Your not the person I would even want to have a drink with.
What makes you think I want to make life easier for you? It's easier for me to do it this way. If you don't want to ever respond, so be it. I could care less
Regarding the above, why the double standard? You seemed to like Brian's PSR yet his didn't explain why it provides a straight stroke, either.
Brian doesn't obsess about the stroke and give all the credit to it. He feels there is equal share for both aiming and stroke.
The things I do were found through trial and error with video feedback to tell me when I am doing it right. It hasn't been easy but my stroke is straighter now and nearly, but not quite, where I want it to be.
Good. I think we're always trying to learn something.
I have had to change almost everything about my set up to get there. Some of the variable I understand better than others. There is always the thought that I'm correcting for the wrong thing and if I understand that one thing finally, then maybe I can undo all the changes. For instance, I might change my foot position, eye position and elbow in order to correct for clenching the cue at impact, causing the cue to go off line. So in that hypothetical case I am putting band aids on the problem (clenching) rather than solving the problem. Maybe if I find that clenching (or whatever) problem, the rest of the changes become unnecessary.
Could clenching be corrected by what CJ Wiley teaches, have a firm grip to begin with? Then your only place to go would be to loosen or unclench which isn't natural. Where is the rule saying you should have a loose relaxed grip? CJ is quite a bit higher on the food chain than you are or will ever be.
On the other hand, I've been at this long enough that I doubt that is the case. If there were such a problem my bet is that it is in the fingers and/or wrist. Anyhow, my feet are much more sideways to the shot now, and my right eye is now over the cue, rather than my dominant left eye. Hey, maybe I'm using CTE! :wink:
You aren't using CTE but everything you said above is quite interesting with all the changes.
BTW, I didn't become a stroke "fanatic" after I got Wilson's book. I got Wilson's book because I was a stroke fanatic. Maybe you don't appreciate nuances in the stroke because you don't play straight pool much. I'm not perfecting my stroke only to pocket balls, but for cue ball control. I have found that small stroke errors (that you discount) have a significant enough impact on where the cue ball goes for position that it is worth fixing.
I don't chase down the perfect stroke like you do, I do things on purpose that destroy a perfect straight back and through stroke you're trying to achieve. What? Tuck and Roll or BHE. Something you would NEVER incorporate in your stroke because it wouldn't be perfectly straight back and through. We play differently. It's like Bustamante having the tip of his cue on the cloth at the base of the ball and going up in mid stroke to where he wants to hit the CB. Well, that's not a good comparison because I don't do what he does but just an example of something you wouldn't do.
BTW, my mechanics currently resemble little of what Wilson teaches in his book, but shot mechanics are not the only thing of interest in that book.
I had to think about how you assign a percentage to aim vs stroke for easy or difficult shots. My conclusion is that his is the wrong way to think about it. Whether the shot is 6 inches away or 9 feet away, you still know where the cue ball has to go to pocket the ball (if you've been playing any time at all).
This might be something that can be beat around and around like gravity but never get anywhere.
I think maybe we have different definitions of aim vs stroke. Example: The cue ball is in the jaws of a corner pocket and the ob is frozen to the opposite end rail at the center diamond. Tough shot, right? Let's ignore using english for this discussion. I'm saying that knowing the aim point is easy. You have to hit the spot on the rail just next to the ob to pocket it. The stroke is the problem here. You will be a bit jacked up and it is so far away and there is little margin for error so your stroke better be good. Now consider the exact same shot only move the cb to within 1 foot of the ob. Much easier to pocket because a bad stroke won't cause as much trouble from that close range. However, the aim point is the same and the difficulty of the shot doesn't change your ability to see that. You know where to send the ball from 9 feet away just as easily as you do from 1 foot away.
Here is another scenario: ob in center of table, cb in jaws of corner pocket, corner to corner straight in shot. Aim point is easy, full ball. Move the cb to within 1 foot of the ob and the shot is much easier but the difficulty in aiming the shot hasn't changed, still full ball hit.
Since a near blind person with experience on the table could make those shots, I don't think they're good examples or prove anything either way.
Finally, to address your point. You said making the far side of the cb hit the contact point is the real problem with aiming. Agreed. However, I believe that training your brain to make this happen is not all that difficult in comparison to getting the stroke right.
Oh, oh. Here's where we start breaking down and disagreeing. It's not all about training your brain and it's a done deal for life with everything automatic. There's still no real visual on the front of the CB. Obviously you can use the back of the CB closest to where you're standing but it's a different perspective than what's actually happening especially with contact point and fractions which you/I are referring to.
We aren't robots and automatons. We don't automatically perform certain actions like getting our eyes, head, and body in exact positions that respond to preset controls or encoded memorized instructions from thousands of shots.
Some days were tired, our eyes don't focus the same, stance and positions just don't feel right, the eyes are too far over the cue or too far inside. Everything changes. I watched the golf tournament on TV and Jordan Spieth couldn't make a number of short putts on Friday like he had no clue what he was doing and he might be one of the greatest putters who ever lived.
It wasn't his stroke, it was his EYES for aiming along with his setup.
You can train to make the cb hit that contact point in fairly short order
Bullsh!t! There is no short order for beginners and even for long time players it goes in and out. It's not that you don't know how to do it, it has to do with lack of sharp focus. You get haphazard, maybe too cocky and confident because of being in dead stroke for a while, and before you know it you're whacking balls around like a hack.
while the stroke/alignment takes years and years for most people. I'm not saying it will happen overnight, but it isn't the reason people don't improve more quickly. In my first example above, the contact point was the edge of the ob, in the next example the cp was the center of the ob. Those are "objective" aim points - you can't mistake the correct aim point, yet most people can't make those shots because of a bad stroke.
Maybe, maybe not. It could be both aiming AND stroke or just one or the other.
Every other shot is in between those two, and it just takes a little time to train yourself to see the line the cb needs to take.
Again, maybe and maybe not. The line the CB needs to take is a lot different than hitting the exact spot on the OB and front of the CB with contact points.
I'd even go so far as to say that aiming has a lot of room for error on many shots, depending on pocket size. On a lot of shots, you can find the contact point (spot opposite the pocket on the ob), point the cue ball at that contact point, and then just change your aim a little bit thinner to pocket the ball. In not too long your brain will figure it out. If you want to speed up the process, get a copy of Poolology and it will tell you exactly where to aim the ball. It only takes a few minutes to learn the system, so you can focus on shooting the ball, not learning an aiming system so complicated it is like learning a new language.
I'm not discounting Poolology, but I don't need it because I use CTE. And CTE is simple, very simple once you're able to see what needs to be seen. Far less than contact points or fractions.
So what do I really think aiming is? To me, aiming is knowing where you have to hit the ob (the contact point) AND ALSO knowing where to send the cb so that the back of the cb hits that spot. When you get down on a shot you can see where you want to send the cue ball. THAT process, to me, completes the aiming portion of the game. When you put the tip of the cue up to the cue ball, the rest is the stroke. At this point you know where you need the cue ball to go, but your cue might not be lined up correctly to send it there. That's a stroke problem (or call it set up, or whatever) not aiming.
If the cue is lined up at center CB it should be lined up if you're body in also where it should be. If it's offset right of left for parallel English and maybe even TOI, you're bringing in an entirely different set of circumstances.
Oh, that reminds me of one last thing. You are saying 50%/50% or 80%/20% or whatever aim vs stroke on a shot by shot basis (which I disagree with above). When I say the stroke is like 95% of the game, I see that 95% in terms of the difficulty it takes to become a good player over the years. (or 90% or 87.5%, I don't know exactly, but I believe it is in that ballpark.) It is simply a general estimate of what makes the game challenging.
Well again, we disagree. I guess all of us have to come to our own conclusions regarding what is right/wrong and what it takes to be either better or the best that we have the time and natural talent to put into the game. I'm having less and less time with a lot going on in work life. This posting on the internet needs to be cut back quite a bit also.
You have your perceptions and I have mine. All in all, I think you made an excellent post based on what YOU believe to be the best for your game and how you see the process of playing it better for yourself. We just don't see eye to eye.
Let's promise not to send Christmas cards to each other this year. Deal?
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