iusedtoberich said:

There was a guy in the pool room a few nights ago that brought in a contraption. It sat on the table vertically. It was made of plexiglass or possibly glass, about the size of 2 pieces of typing paper, one on top of the other. It had lines drawn into it, and I think might have been a mirror surface, I'm not sure. I was half the room away in an action match so only paid it slight attention. I think it was meant for the player to stroke into it and it would show him the flaws.

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One device like that is a mirror that sits above the cue ball. If you cue straight at the mirror, the reflection of the stick will be in the same line as the stick. If you are off a little, the stick will look broken.

dr_dave said:

This could be calculated based on the compression of the balls, but I have not done this. I would guess the range is in between your two guesses, maybe in the 0.05mm to 0.01mm range, but that is a total guess. Faster speed would make the range a little bigger (since the balls would compress more).

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I think you can figure overlapping contact from the speed of the cue ball and the contact time. After first contact, the direction of the cue ball and its speed will be changing to the new path, so it's a little complicated, but you can take an average to determine how much it will move towards the other ball during contact. The time will be about 0.1 millisecond. If the cue ball is moving towards the other ball at 1 m/sec on average during the contact time, it will move about 0.1 millimeter, so any shot within +-0.1 mm of the exact center will result in overlapping contact. That's for a medium speed shot. A slower shot has to be more centered because the contact time will be about the same but the average speed sideways will be smaller (and directly proportional to the incoming speed).

uk_9_ball_convert said:

Accents are ridiculously regional in Scotland. Higgins is from Wishaw (hence the Wizard of Wishaw nickname) which isn't that far from Glasgow, but I'd say the accent is still subtly different from a true Glaswegian accent.

I don't actually think McManus sounds that Glaswegian either, didn't realise he was from Glasgow. But feel like he's probably toned his accent down for the media a lot more than Higgins.

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mcmanus has the greenkeeper willie variety of scottish accent. brilliant pundit, loves the game passionately, knows every technical aspect of the game and can verbalize / analyze it.

There was a guy in the pool room a few nights ago that brought in a contraption. It sat on the table vertically. It was made of plexiglass or possibly glass, about the size of 2 pieces of typing paper, one on top of the other. It had lines drawn into it, and I think might have been a mirror surface, I'm not sure. I was half the room away in an action match so only paid it slight attention. I think it was meant for the player to stroke into it and it would show him the flaws.

Hungarian said:

Only access are Illegal Aliens but excluding Illegal Pool Players

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At least we don't need a pool player license. Whew...

I knew him for years in SoCal and then it seemed like he followed me to AZ...He will definitely be missed.

Blue Hog ridr said:

Good, and yourself. Been a long time. I was just checking on a fellow who made me a kind of custom Sneaky quite a few Moons back now.
I had already bought one of his on here also. I was saddened to hear of Leon's passing. Leon was a great guy. He was a Night Owl working in his shop, we used to chat for long time in the evenings, I don't think that he got much done.

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It has been awhile. I've asked about you on several occasions over the years. Always enjoyed your straightforward style. Hope you continue to frequent the forum/s.

Oikawa said:

Dave, how wide (physically) you think the margin within which the "semi-simultaneous hit" happens is? e.g. from the draw shot example in that video, it seems definitely smaller than 0.1mm. With semi-simultaneous, I mean the range where the CB is sent back inbetween the two "normal" routes. So not going straight back (which becomes a definition issue, even seemingly straight has a slight bias to other side if you zoom in enough), but rather just the entire range where CB contacted both OB's simultaneously even for a brief moment, causing that inbetween draw reaction.

~0.1mm?

~0.01mm?

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This could be calculated based on the compression of the balls, but I have not done this. I would guess the range is in between your two guesses, maybe in the 0.05mm to 0.01mm range, but that is a total guess. Faster speed would make the range a little bigger (since the balls would compress more).

dr_dave said:

I bet even a well designed machine would have a tough time achieving and repeating simultaneous hits. The balls still need to be set up absolutely perfectly every time, and the machine would need to be aligned (and stay aligned) perfectly relative to the balls, and the cloth in between the balls can’t change at all in between shots (no fiber changes, no dirt or chalk dust), and the CB needs to be absolutely perfect so things don’t change with CB orientation. The machine would also need to be built with extremely tight tolerances, and it would need to be very stiff and mounted very firmly to the table. That’s a long list of things that can go wrong (and I’m probably not considering everything).

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The machine needs rigidity because it has no real time guidance. (troubled childhood etc...) but human can focus on going through the CB as effortlessly as he please. Few thousand hours of that should be worth a couple nanometers.

GideonF said:

The “he” in my sentence (that Yapp was in the road and he couldn’t see the shot) was FSR. FSR couldn’t see the hit - the ref could see the hit but just blew it.

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Ok. Miner badden. He did crane for a look like it mattered to him. Let it go obviously. Maybe he's turning into Hunter Lombardo Speaking of Hunter Lombardo, if he had ferocity, he'd be ferocious.

Propeller head thinks maybe ref was waiting for the 8 to stop short and she got hypnotixed in the moment. 'Course speculation always goes way past collusion...