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Does top spin and bottom spin affect the cue ball's path after hitting a cushion?

S
macbookmike said:
From what I've gathered from all the replies, the cue ball will curve after hitting the object ball and then curve after hitting a rail as well until it's rolling smoothly on the cloth.

So my idea of angle in = angle out in my first diagram is incorrect if the cue ball still has a lot of top spin when it hits the rail (not rolling smoothly)? Maybe I just can't tell but when I play shots like the one in my diagram it doesn't seem like the cue ball curves off the rail and it only curves after hitting the object ball. Is it possible for the curve off the rail to be so slight that it's hard to notice?

This is opposed as to when I kick the cue ball into a rail with spin and notice immediately that the cue ball curves
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Yes, the big looping action you see after the 1st contact is kind of the only curve you'll see without slow motion.
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If you live in the SouthWest beware of this HUSTLER.

jay helfert
maha said:
the old viscene eye drops worked wonders for that or just a small shot of soap.

and never ever let your eyes off a drink when gambling at some bar.
i used to walk outside and send mine flying between games. or the flower pot if they had one inside.
i would have 5 or 6 beers with only a small slug of each when i first got them.
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Once was enough for me. Playing in a bar in L.A. five and ten dollar eight ball. I had one of those nights, couldn't lose a game. I must have held the table for thirty or more games.

Pretty soon only one left to challenge. All the other names were off the board. He asked me if I wanted to play for 20 a game. Sure, why not. I was drinking bottled water only and feeling good. Pretty soon I'm losing every game and missing easy shots. I still felt good but somehow lost my eye.

Later on I was told (by some guy I didn't even know) what they did to me. While I was shooting someone had put something in my water bottle.

I blew back maybe 100 or so, but still left the place with a decent win. Never went back there though.
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If you live in the SouthWest beware of this HUSTLER.

ShootingArts
straightline said:
Lol @ 3 dollars a game. :ROFLMAO:
In SoCal only the black guys played for that; usually one pocket. Where do you break it down? 10 games?
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This was early eighties and we usually had a starting bet of three or five dollars a game in bars. A few years after this I played Danny Medina for three dollars a game and Johnny Archer for five a game another time. Both of these sessions were in a small bar. Almost always bets started small in bars even if we knew they weren't going to stay small.

The pool room attached to the cathouse let me get in twenty a game eight or nine ball every night, fifty a game almost every week, a hundred a game a few times a year, maybe more often.

We knew damned good and well we were not going to stay at three or five a game but it was a good way to feel out things and see what you were getting into. Danny and Johnny both suggested the starting bet and neither offered to raise it. Personal ethics, I didn't raise the bet myself but would play for most anything. A road player from California came to Greenway in Baton Rouge. I went looking with $3500 in my pocket, all of the ready cash I had. About $3700 to be picky but the other two or three hundred was spending money. I was looking for $500 a game action which gave me a bodacious plenty seven barrels. I would have played for a thousand a game but three barrels was kinda thin playing by the game. You could go bust without getting a shot. This was pretty fair betting stakes at the time, that $3500 would buy a pretty nice medium sized new car.

Last I was in bars and pool halls ten years or so ago they were still betting mostly for a few dollars.

Hu
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Break Stats -- 2026 U.S. Open Pool Championship (9-Ball), August 2026

jay helfert
AtLarge said:
Yes, conventional wisdom is that the player who pushes out is at a disadvantage, because it is the other player who then has the choice on whether to shoot. I've looked at the stats on this several times, mostly years ago, and I have found no real confirmation of the belief that, overall, the pusher is at a disadvantage. Of course, some players are better at it than others.
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As I suspected, the better players are at an advantage in push out situations. You underline it here.
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Break Stats -- 2026 U.S. Open Pool Championship (9-Ball), August 2026

jay helfert
AtLarge said:
You're probably commenting on this statement: "The average minutes per game for all 12 matches was 6.8. The elapsed time was measured from the lag until the winning ball was made, so it includes time for racking, player timeouts, and commercial timeouts (last match)."

No typo there. I certainly am not intending to say that every game is started with a lag. The second sentence of my statement relates to two points in time -- when the balls are struck for the lag for a match and when the match-winning ball is pocketed (or the cue ball stops rolling). And the time for the lag (and for racking the balls for the first game if they were not racked prior to the lag) is, to me, certainly part of the elapsed time for the match. So it is included in the elapsed time I compute for each match, even though it s-l-g-h-t-l-y lengthens the elapsed time. I would guess that the lag itself rarely adds anything to the average minutes per game calculated to the nearest tenth of a minute, but if the balls are racked for the first game after the lag, that can affect the average slightly, just as racking for all of the other games does.

Now, it would be possible to calculate just the actual play time in a match, by eliminating the time spent on the lag, the racking for each game, the player timeouts, any commercial timeouts, any referee-called timeouts, etc. But that's not something I want to do. Many years ago, when I first started keeping track of, and then reporting, match lengths and average minutes per game, I thought that information might be of some interest to people planning tournaments. But I don't know whether anyone ever used my information for that purpose.
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Thnx for this. Since there is only one lag per match, which only lasts a few seconds, it would have a negligible affect on the average length of the games during the match.

Am I correct in making this assumption?
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