i’ll preface by saying you’re a good player and i am not, so these questions are genuine and not some kind of attack.
do you NOT adjust aim or stroke anyway?
i use LD, parallel english and i know i bridge further up than the pivot point on my shaft.
every single shot, before i even get down, i think i am adjusting my aim or stroke depending on what kind of ball i intend to hit.
deflection isnt much of a concern for the most part and really only seems to come up on long slow spin shots. i grew up on maple so these shots just kind of take me back and i seem to aim accordingly.
is there some kind of magical combination of mechanics and cues that allows you to just straight up not correct for squirt and swerve?
Nope. it's kind of funny. I've told this story many times, because I didn't believe it was possible. Growing up I was always a feel player, you feel where you need to aim and with experience, you make the shot or you don't.
This is sometime in 1999. I was at a place in Riverside Ca called shooters. At the time the GM there was like Efren's best friend, a guy by the name of Alex. He ended up opening his own room in Rancho Cucamonga called Stixx. So Efren came in often, whenever he was in the states. So I'm practicing and in walks Efren and starts practicing on the table next to me.
He was shooting this shot that was insane to me at the time. The 8 and the cb are at one end of the table dead straight about a 1/16" off the rail. The nine is on the rail on the other end of the table. He proceeds to shoot the 8 with top right and shoots it dead into the pocket on a table with 4.25" pockets, and sends the cueball down table with perfect shape on the 9. He does this like ten times in a row.
So I ask, how in the hell are you putting that much $h1t on the ball and still being accurate?
Alex translates, well answers for him really, saying, just aim normal, like center ball and rotate over for the amount of english you want.
I thought about this and said, to myself, not to Efren lol, there's no way, he's gotta be compensating subconsciously.
Now fast forward three years. I'm in the Navy, I'm playing all the time (because I was intelligence and when we were in port we didn't really do anything) and a really good player out of San Diego was talking while I was practicing, and I over hear him. His name was Chip Klein. He starts talking to someone and I see him describing what Efren described.
Long story short, even though it was EFREN REYES saying it, I didn't listen, or even try to use BHE for 3 years.
I've used it ever since...and learned a lot more about it, like the fact that you need to bridge at the cue's pivot point. But remember, everyone taught back then that you should bridge at 8-10 inches and that is the natural pivot point for standard hard rock maple, so for most people even without knowing about the pivot point, BHE would work.
Now, it works for the vast majority of shots, obviously if you hit too soft, then swerve is a bigger factor, etc, etc. But there's no reason to guess or compensate manually for side spin.
You need to try and minimize swerve, so you should elevate and lower your bridge for follow and draw, but for the majority of shots, it works without any other compensation.
