Keith McCready's comments about mud ball transcribed by me:
McCREADY: First of all, a mud ball is different than a big cue ball. It's smaller, but heavier than a regulation cue ball, the way the blue dots used to be.
Myself, I didn't like playing with mud balls, not that I couldn't play with them. They will jump off the object balls with the type of english that I'm not looking for. When you go to use cue-tip high lefts, cue-tip high centers, and cue-tip high rights, the mud ball deflects off the object ball. It's hard to put a smooth stroke on it.
Your draw shots and your stop shots, you can do that with a mud ball, but any time you're going off angle, it's different.
To me with the mud balls, I go off my balance point where I hold the cue farther back with my right hand, long stroking, a little bit more longer of a stroke. When you go to follow balls off the rail with the mud ball, it's difficult, especially if you've got to come back down table and you're straight in, a little bit off angle, left or right, either way, where you have to put a stroke on it.
My best advice is to practice your longer strokes with the cue-tip highs, left, right, and center. When you go to draw the ball, say you're a little off angle and you have to draw and then hit the rail and then suck the mud ball back, there's where your longer stroke will come into play, because holding the cue stick a normal way and you go to draw that mud ball, it won't go nowhere. You got to put more of a power stroke on your draw shots And remember, you're farther back off your balance point when you practice the drills.
Back when I played, we had Valleys, but the Irving K's were more difficult to play on with a mud ball.
