Tips of english or stroke?

[Ghosst]

The problem is the picture quality and poor vantage points involved.

I chose this example for one reason...his follow through. He doesn't drop his elbow and lift his tip for the force follow. He is cueing above center (remember I said a half tip or so)...

He strokes down through the cue ball. I started a thread previously about this stroke with few takers. Instead of disagreeing it's not possible, why don't we discuss it and take a closer look at the video?

Ask yourself this question...have you ever hit a ball with a small amount of follow or draw and had it really take off? You probably cued close to center and were surprised with the results.

Unfortunately, yes, the video wasn't recorded in HD so it limits some of this. It does remind me of a certain instructor renting a high-speed camera many moons ago in a squirt discussion where being able to replay the events in high quality and speed were necessary.

I can't say I agree completely where the ball was struck. It just happens too fast and without an original copy of the video to edit I'm stuck with YouTube's frame rates. I do enjoy honest discussion, so I am all for delving into this.

As far as my own shot-making surprises, the only one that really comes to mind was using extreme reverse side to make the CB come back against it's natural path after potting a ball. I was also hitting at the miscue limit. What surprised me was how well the cushion took the spin.

Having had some health issues a while back I had problems getting back into the sport and focused a lot of on my stroke and basic fundamentals as everything seemed to just fall apart. After getting help from some of the instructors here and hundreds of hours of practice, I have been able to make my way back to playing half-decently. I have tried numerous shots to see how large of a contact patch I get on the CB and I'm fairly consistent within a 75% of a tip's width at maximum reasonable power (a 9- or 10-speed). Why that is important, is that I know within a good degree of certainty where I'm hitting the CB. For the best follow it is about 40-50% of the maximum radius of the ball I can hit. Since we're using different measurements, I'll convert it:

3/4 tip above center with a 12.7mm shaft.

If you cue downward compared to the bed of the table, that xx% above center is now relative to the line of the cue itself. It may not look like a large amount above center if you, as a spectator, are watching relative to the slate. It may also look like more depending on the shot.

For the shot by Efren in the video I would say he both hit the ball very firmly, had unintentional right side, and was above center relative to the line of his cue. I'll have to watch more of it later but those are my initial thoughts.

 

[Mikjary]

Ghosst,

The shot selection was my choice, so it's on me to provide a better example. I appreciate your help with the last pictures you posted.

Best,
Mike

 

[LAMas]

Duplicate post without the pic.

 

[LAMas]

I grabbed two screens of it; one on his final warmup, and one just at contact. He is quite far above the center on the ball. I was just curious to see what you were describing but unfortunately the poor quality of the video might make it harder to pin down just where he hit on a smaller screen.



Interesting amount of deflection in the shot though.

In the second photo, it looks like the CB is squirting to the left of the cue tip.
The OB/shot misses the pocket to the left as though it was shot straight - swerve?

 

[champ2107]

I'm curious. What was the technique?

lead with hands and the bat follows,generate more power and bat speed,like chopping a tree down, whip that bat you guys are so closed minded and old school, time has stopped for you

 

[victorl]

I hit as close to the center of the cue ball as I can, without hitting the center. Believe it or not. That's were you get the most spin.

Tom, you hit it right on the head. Learning this was one of the biggest breakthroughs in my game.

 

[Mikjary]

I'm curious. What was the technique?

A simple answer is by swinging the bat with our body rather than our arms and hands. Differentiating the two is the challenge.

The result is in front of our eyes every time we watch Pujols swing the bat. But without the insight of what he is doing, we won't "see" it.

Best,
Mike

 

[Mikjary]

In the second photo, it looks like the CB is squirting to the left of the cue tip.
The OB/shot misses the pocket to the left as though it was shot straight - swerve?

Big E,

It is swerve. Tell me more about Efren's follow through lengths.

Best,
Mike

 

[LAMas]

Big E,

It is swerve. Tell me more about Efren's follow through lengths.

Best,
Mike

I concur, he was trying to clear the 8 ball with squirt to the left using a bit of right english (to get the CB to come down table after hitting the top rail for shape) and because of the separation to the OB would allow swerve to contact the OB to pocket it, but there was too much swerve.

It appears that the length of his follow through is about the same on most shots - stroke hand stops at about his chest.

Watch from 0:29 - soft kill shot -short slow follow through.

Watch from 3:22 - hard hit on the CB on the rail shot - quick stroke/hit - right english.

The rest of the shots are pocket speed and the stroke/hit is slower - similar follow through.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JM3FLwCrCk

Your thoughts?

 

[Mikjary]

LAMas,

The shot at 3:49 is interesting. Watch his back hand. He does something most say is unnecessary and adds nothing to the shot. They call it the wrist flick. It's not really a flick. It's more than that for quick spin.

Archer, Earl, the Pinoys, on down employ it. I see the stroke on video matches, but it gets dismissed as a wrist flick and nothing more. Since our tip only contacts the cue ball for 1/1000th of a second (not sure of the actual period), the guy with the most powerful, fastest swing should impart the most spin depending on where they contact the cue ball. Hmmmmm?

Best,
Mike

 

[BasementDweller]

I hit as close to the center of the cue ball as I can, without hitting the center. Believe it or not. That's were you get the most spin.


___________________________________

http://tommcgonaglerightoncue.com

Tom, you hit it right on the head. Learning this was one of the biggest breakthroughs in my game.

:scratchhead:

Okay - what am I missing here???

This pretty much makes no sense to me. Please enlighten me.

 

[Neil]

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[Neil]

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[JB Cases]

This ball is set up on one side of it with little circles that are about the width of the "contact patch" that the chalk makes when the ball is struck. I put as many circles as I could out to the miscue limit.

Today I spent a few minutes playing with this and using a snooker cue with a 10mm tip to apply spin. I wanted to test how accurately I could hit the ball and see what happened.

For the most part I did NOT hit the ball where I was trying to hit it. The results however were pretty much in line with what I thought. With the same stroke speed (or as close as I could get to the same) hitting the ball farther away from center resulted in more follow and a longer roll for the cueball. Hitting the ball closer to center resulted in less roll for the cue ball.

When trying to "juice it" with a little extra speed I found that I could hit closer to center and still get the ball to roll almost as far as hitting it farther away with less speed. But juicing it AND hitting farther away produced more roll still.

I am not sure how the video looks because I ran out time to play around with it. I had the camera set up looking at the ball from the bridge hand's view. So I had to elevate the cue a little to get over the camera. But I think that the preliminary experience bears out the conventional wisdom which is farther away from center means more spin.

Another way to test this is to do the old sit and spin test.

The idea is to hit the object ball and the cue ball stops dead an spins in place. How long can you make it spin? I am betting that no one on the forum can make it spin longer by hitting the ball one tip from center than I can hitting the cue ball farther out. I say this in full and complete knowledge that there are a LOT of players on the forum who are much better than me. But I will make the bet that no matter how good you think you are, no matter how powerful your stroke is, you can't make the ball sit and spin longer than me if you stay close to center ball. And trust me, I have seen Rafael Martinez and Jamison Neue both doing this exercise so I KNOW what it looks like when champions do it.

In case anyone wants to buy one http://www.cuesight.com/csbbtb.html

 

[dr_dave]

For good examples of how people can sometimes think wrongly about how stroke "type" affects the outcome of a shot, see Tom Ross' April '08 and August '08 BD articles. All that matters is the tip position, cue direction, and cue speed at OB impact. A "smooth stroke with large follow through" and a "punch stroke with little follow through," both with the same cue speed and tip position, produce the same result.

Regards,
Dave

 

[tom mcgonagle]

Here's how I look at it.

Picture yourself as the cue-ball. The center of the cue-ball is the center of your body. If I push you to spin you around. The further from the center of your body, I go, the less you will spin.

Most of the energy is deflected, the further from the NEAR CENTER, a half a tip out, of the cue ball you go.

That's the way I see it. I know it works for me.

 

[Bambu]

Interesting points here guys. Maybe its a full wrist roll, like driving a screwdriver quickly forwards. Here is another wrist shot at 23:50 which I posted a few weeks ago. In this case parica uses left spin. I dont think its his way of "slightly flicking" to get right spin, as he would have to flick outwards, the opposite way.

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

I think the only way to really know would be to slow the film down enough to analyze it. We would have to see how much of the cue the player is actually grabbing when they flick, how much of the cue actually turns, and whether the flick effects the final direction of the cue. I suspect this would vary from wrist to wrist, player to player.

 

[BasementDweller]

Here's how I look at it.

Picture yourself as the cue-ball. The center of the cue-ball is the center of your body. If I push you to spin you around. The further from the center of your body, I go, the less you will spin.

Most of the energy is deflected, the further from the NEAR CENTER, a half a tip out, of the cue ball you go.

That's the way I see it. I know it works for me.

I don't know about that analogy?

How about we consider a spinner that is used for a board game. Where do you think you would get the most spin? I think everyone instinctively knows that you get the most spin by spinning at the very outer edge of it. I've never seen someone try to spin one of those things right near the base.

I don't think you are hitting the ball where you think you are hitting the ball.

 

[tom mcgonagle]

But if you look at it realistically. It's the base that's spinning which makes everything else spin. You don't grab the outside when you spin it.

 

[JB Cases]

Here's how I look at it.

Picture yourself as the cue-ball. The center of the cue-ball is the center of your body. If I push you to spin you around. The further from the center of your body, I go, the less you will spin.

Most of the energy is deflected, the further from the NEAR CENTER, a half a tip out, of the cue ball you go.

That's the way I see it. I know it works for me.

As it happens this is something I know something about. I was a springboard diver and a competitive trampolinist. You don't get more spin by trying to torque from close to the body center. You get more spin by starting with your arms out and pulling them in quickly to the center.

You can see this in gymnastics, ice skating, and dancing. At no time do you ever see lots of body spin being generated without corresponding arm movement to get the movement going.

You can do this experiment a hundred ways to see that it's really harder to get a lot of spin the closer you are to center. Put a tire on a spindle and reach in close to center and try to spin it. Now go out to the edge. Obvious.

Do this with any free spinning wheel of any size. The closer you are to center the harder it is to get enough leverage to generate significant rpms.

With a pool ball you have the following action to contend with: ball speed combined with friction of the cloth.

There is NO WAY that you can hit the ball close to center with the SAME speed and generate more spin than if you hit the ball as far out as possible with the same speed. Impossible.

Now the next trick is to give it a little more juice which means to give the cue a little extra flick at the moment of impact. Which is another way of saying hitting it harder. Well when you do this you are increasing the cue ball speed so that it can get to the target faster but you aren't giving the cue ball more rpms.

Do the stop and spin test and you can easily see this.

What I think you are possibly doing is that you are aiming at just off center and when you come through the you are swiping the cue tip across the ball at the place you would need to hit it anyway if you were just stroking straight through. Thus it looks and feels like you are hitting center ball but actually you are hitting farther out than you think.