My Fabulous Pool Lesson!!!

Mike the Beginner

Mike the Beginner

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
I'm a beginner (started playing again in April of this years--before that, I played as an untutored teenager, 35 years ago), and I naturally don't post much here...I lurk.

So they won't let me post links. But I wrote a review of my first pool lesson with Jerry Briesath in Madison at my own website, The Online Photographer. If you want to read it you can go there and search "Pool Lesson Jerry Briesath." Pics included.

Just got back from my SECOND lesson yesterday, and if anything (if this is possible) it was even better than the first. Jerry is such an outstanding teacher. I was relieved that all my practice in the interim seemed to pay off. And amazed at how much more there is still to learn.

I started off thinking that lessons were just an expensive indulgence, and that I wasn't far enough along to take lessons. How much more wrong could that be? The big tragedy of my teen years is that no ever ever showed my brother and me the basics of the proper way to play pool--we had to work it out ourselves, and of course we didn't get but so far. I wish I'd been given lessons right from the get-go.

I mean, they don't throw you in a swimming pool and expect you to learn the breast stroke on your own, do they? They don't hand you a saddle and say "the horse is over there." In marksmanship in the Boy Scouts they start with gun safety before you even touch a gun and that's just the beginning. Nobody would give a kid a couple of golf clubs and a sleeve of balls and drop him off at the golf course and tell him to amuse himself. People take lessons to learn skill sports.

But with pool everybody just thinks it's obvious. Buy a pool table, turn the kids loose on it. Let the teenagers have fun. "How to do it" seldom enters in.

That is really a shame.

My lesson yesterday was quite demanding. I told Jerry I felt like my brain was brimming over and didn't have room for anything else. I really slept last night. (Jeanette Lee called him a "slave driver"(!). Jerry's a sweet guy, extroverted and outgoing, friendly and personable, the furthest thing from a slave driver. But what that says to me is that he can challenge players at every level.) As I explained in my review, I think he's one of those naturally gifted teachers. Born to teach you might say.

Anyway. I'd say you can get 40% of Jerry's goodness from the video set he filmed with Mark Wilson that you can buy on his website (I can't post links remember). But it's really the in-person lessons where you get the full 100% benefit of his ***50 YEARS***(!!) of teaching experience.

Forgive me for saying so, but Jerry's semi-retired now and he's not getting any younger. If you have ANY possibility of taking lessons from him, you really ought to grab it while you can. (He teaches in Madison WI in the summers and Phoenix AZ in the winters.) I've just had the BEST experience. I'm going back for a third lesson in September, and I'm actually considering flying to Phoenix this winter for another lesson (and I'm not rich). Really some of the best learning experiences of my life, and the most fun.

I'm so psyched about pool I can hardly tell you. This is such a fabulous game.

Mike J.
 
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A good reason to get jealous.
Perfectly spent time and money.
I enjoy threads like this so much when someone gets home from pool lessons completly happy snd satisfied.
And i m sure jerry was satisfied as well.

Gesendet von meinem GT-I9100 mit Tapatalk 2
 
The great part about lessons is that it's just accelerating the learning process. Suddenly I know what to practice and how to practice, instead of just bashing balls.

AND, Jerry's even answered emails a couple of times when I had questions...sorry to hype Jerry like this, I don't have any stake in his business, promise, but the guy is good.

I wonder if there's anyone else out there who's been teaching pool for 50 years? There must be, but there can't be very many. From what I've read, cue sports teachers used to be even more uncommon than they are now.

I practiced for three hours today (that's a lot for me, but Saturday's my day off) and really had a blast.

Mike
 
Excellent to hear!

Do you have the link to your blog?

If you get up to 5-10 posts here on AZ (somewhere in there), you can post links, private message, among other things.

Feel free to interact as much as you like with us. Most are nice. Some are not. But, that's life.
 
aiming system

Takumike said:
The great part about lessons is that it's just accelerating the learning process. Suddenly I know what to practice and how to practice, instead of just bashing balls.

AND, Jerry's even answered emails a couple of times when I had questions...sorry to hype Jerry like this, I don't have any stake in his business, promise, but the guy is good.

I wonder if there's anyone else out there who's been teaching pool for 50 years? There must be, but there can't be very many. From what I've read, cue sports teachers used to be even more uncommon than they are now.

I practiced for three hours today (that's a lot for me, but Saturday's my day off) and really had a blast.

Mike
Click to expand...

What aiming system did you learn, Perfect Aim, "Ghost Ball," or CTE Pro 1?
 
CJ Wiley said:
What aiming system did you learn, Perfect Aim, "Ghost Ball," or CTE Pro 1?
Click to expand...

Hi CJ,
Jerry recommended trying to see a "speck" or point where the line to the pocket passes out of the ball on the back side. But he basically said there are lots of aiming systems and I should use whichever one appeals to me and whichever one seems to help.

I think his real method for teaching aiming is that whenever you miss an easy shot you have to stop what you're doing and make ten in a row. You make sure you're going through your whole stroke routine as you get down; aim first, then trust your aim when you stroke, then just notice where the ball is going and adjust. He says that what you want is consistency in the stroke so that you can tell where your aim is going, and that "a miss is as good as a make" as long as your stroke is clean and pure because the result is a report card on what you did. So he likes it, for instance, if I'm missing a shot by consistently overcutting, because the misses are telling me how to correct. Then I correct, and I've got it.

This is all in practice, of course.

Please do note that I am not speaking for Jerry, I'm just a student reporting what I took away from my lesson--and I've only had two lessons. In several cases I have imperfectly understood what I was being told (I didn't get the tangent line at first, for instance), so you shouldn't take this as a cast-in-stone report of Jerry's method or belief necessarily. Get the idea?

(Jerry always says that, "Get the idea?" He also likes to say "Whitey never lies," meaning the cue ball--whitey--tells you how you actually shot regardless of how you intended to shoot.)

Anyway the system is working for me.

In fact one of the really valuable things about an in-person lesson is that Jerry recognizes instantly what the cause of my error is on a stroke-by-stroke, real-time basis. He might say "You steered that at the last second. Don't stroke until you're satisfied with your aim and then trust your aim. If you miss, you miss." Or he might say, "You jerked back the cue at the end of the stroke. Follow through and hold," or perhaps, "You aimed low enough but you dropped your arm on the actual stroke and hit the ball too high. Maintain your aim throughout the practice strokes."

Why that's super helpful is that is helps me sort out instantly what the cause of my error is. Since there can be about 150 errors and I don't know which is the one I'm doing, this is worth gold.

By contrast, during the interim between my lessons, I had a "breakdown" that lasted a few days. (A few long days.) I suddenly couldn't hit anything, and the problem persisted. Finally in desperation I stopped at the local pool hall and stroked the ball for an hour on a 9' table with a house cue, just to change everything and see if it made me see what I was doing. I realized pretty early on what my error was--I was gripping the cue too hard and angling down on the ball, which is exactly what I did when I was a kid...so, in other words, tension was making me revert to ancient bad habits.

But the point is that it took me three days to work that out on my own. If it had happened during a lesson it would literally not have taken as long as three strokes to figure it out. Jerry would have seen it right away and simply told me.

The cumulative effect of all these individualized corrections is that I'm learning the typical ways in which tension comes out in my stroke. And everybody's different, which is why an in-person lesson helps so much. Everybody feels tension but everybody's tension manifests in different ways. For instance, I never position my chin off center or raise my head during, or right after, the stroke--those don't happen to be among my personal flaws. But I tend to jab at the ball when I'm anxious about the shot. And my backstroke is too quick. I've heard that numerous times.

The way this is translating to my practice sessions is that I'm developing a sort of mental list I can run down to check my stroke when something starts to go wrong--based on the things I hear from Jerry during the lesson sessions. I'll just pause in my practice, start stroking some balls off the foot spot, and run through the typical things Jerry might say to me during a lesson. Get the cue level. Relax your grip. Slow backstroke. End with the tip on the cloth and hold it. Etc., etc. But all the things on my checklist came from him watching me during lessons and recognizing my personal tendencies and then telling me about it. For somebody else the list might be completely different.

Sorry this is so long, but writing can be easy to misunderstand and I wanted to be clear.

Mike
 
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Takumike said:
Hi CJ,
Jerry recommended trying to see a "speck" or point where the line to the pocket passes out of the ball on the back side. But he basically said there are lots of aiming systems and I should use whichever one appeals to me and whichever one seems to help.

I think his real method for teaching aiming is that whenever you miss an easy shot you have to stop what you're doing and make ten in a row. You make sure you're going through your whole stroke routine as you get down; aim first, then trust your aim when you stroke, then just notice where the ball is going and adjust. He says that what you want is consistency in the stroke so that you can tell where your aim is going, and that "a miss is as good as a make" as long as your stroke is clean and pure because the result is a report card on what you did. So he likes it, for instance, if I'm missing a shot by consistently overcutting, because the misses are telling me how to correct. Then I correct, and I've got it.

This is all in practice, of course.

Please do note that I am not speaking for Jerry, I'm just a student reporting what I took away from my lesson--and I've only had two lessons. In several cases I have imperfectly understood what I was being told (I didn't get the tangent line at first, for instance), so you shouldn't take this as a cast-in-stone report of Jerry's method or belief necessarily. Get the idea?

(Jerry always says that, "Get the idea?" He also likes to say "Whitey never lies," meaning the cue ball--whitey--tells you how you actually shot regardless of how you intended to shoot.)

Anyway the system is working for me.

In fact one of the really valuable things about an in-person lesson is that Jerry recognizes instantly what the cause of my error is on a stroke-by-stroke, real-time basis. He might say "You steered that at the last second. Don't stroke until you're satisfied with your aim and then trust your aim. If you miss, you miss." Or he might say, "You jerked back the cue at the end of the stroke. Follow through and hold," or perhaps, "You aimed low enough but you dropped your arm on the actual stroke and hit the ball too high. Maintain your aim throughout the practice strokes."

Why that's super helpful is that is helps me sort out instantly what the cause of my error is. Since there can be about 150 errors and I don't know which is the one I'm doing, this is worth gold.

By contrast, during the interim between my lessons, I had a "breakdown" that lasted a few days. (A few long days.) I suddenly couldn't hit anything, and the problem persisted. Finally in desperation I stopped at the local pool hall and stroked the ball for an hour on a 9' table with a house cue, just to change everything and see if it made me see what I was doing. I realized pretty early on what my error was--I was gripping the cue too hard and angling down on the ball, which is exactly what I did when I was a kid...so, in other words, tension was making me revert to ancient bad habits.

But the point is that it took me three days to work that out on my own. If it had happened during a lesson it would literally not have taken as long as three strokes to figure it out. Jerry would have seen it right away and simply told me.

The cumulative effect of all these individualized corrections is that I'm learning the typical ways in which tension comes out in my stroke. And everybody's different, which is why an in-person lesson helps so much. Everybody feels tension but everybody's tension manifests in different ways. For instance, I never position my chin off center or raise my head during, or right after, the stroke--those don't happen to be among my personal flaws. But I tend to jab at the ball when I'm anxious about the shot. And my backstroke is too quick. I've heard that numerous times.

The way this is translating to my practice sessions is that I'm developing a sort of mental list I can run down to check my stroke when something starts to go wrong--based on the things I hear from Jerry during the lesson sessions. I'll just pause in my practice, start stroking some balls off the foot spot, and run through the typical things Jerry might say to me during a lesson. Get the cue level. Relax your grip. Slow backstroke. End with the tip on the cloth and hold it. Etc., etc. But all the things on my checklist came from him watching me during lessons and recognizing my personal tendencies and then telling me about it. For somebody else the list might be completely different.

Sorry this is so long, but writing can be easy to misunderstand and I wanted to be clear.

Mike
Click to expand...

Mike, don't apologize for making a very good post! Keep in mind everything Jerry taught you, and in time it will become automatic. It's in knowing what we do wrong that we improve!
 
Hi Neil,
I'm improving slowly. I've been trying to play 9-ball recently. It ain't pretty.

BTW here is my attempt to post a link to my review of my first lesson:

"My Pool Lesson with Jerry Briesath" from TOP

...But actually, with the 9-ball, every so often I manage to hit two or three balls in a row the way you're supposed to, so I guess I can't complain. The most frustrating thing is when I play position perfectly for the next ball...but miss a fairly easy shot on the one I was aiming for. You know what they say: Oh well.

Mike
 
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Very nicely written, Mike, welcome to the game of pool, it's a journey

Takumike said:
Hi CJ,
Jerry recommended trying to see a "speck" or point where the line to the pocket passes out of the ball on the back side. But he basically said there are lots of aiming systems and I should use whichever one appeals to me and whichever one seems to help.

I think his real method for teaching aiming is that whenever you miss an easy shot you have to stop what you're doing and make ten in a row. You make sure you're going through your whole stroke routine as you get down; aim first, then trust your aim when you stroke, then just notice where the ball is going and adjust. He says that what you want is consistency in the stroke so that you can tell where your aim is going, and that "a miss is as good as a make" as long as your stroke is clean and pure because the result is a report card on what you did. So he likes it, for instance, if I'm missing a shot by consistently overcutting, because the misses are telling me how to correct. Then I correct, and I've got it.

This is all in practice, of course.

Please do note that I am not speaking for Jerry, I'm just a student reporting what I took away from my lesson--and I've only had two lessons. In several cases I have imperfectly understood what I was being told (I didn't get the tangent line at first, for instance), so you shouldn't take this as a cast-in-stone report of Jerry's method or belief necessarily. Get the idea?

(Jerry always says that, "Get the idea?" He also likes to say "Whitey never lies," meaning the cue ball--whitey--tells you how you actually shot regardless of how you intended to shoot.)

Anyway the system is working for me.

In fact one of the really valuable things about an in-person lesson is that Jerry recognizes instantly what the cause of my error is on a stroke-by-stroke, real-time basis. He might say "You steered that at the last second. Don't stroke until you're satisfied with your aim and then trust your aim. If you miss, you miss." Or he might say, "You jerked back the cue at the end of the stroke. Follow through and hold," or perhaps, "You aimed low enough but you dropped your arm on the actual stroke and hit the ball too high. Maintain your aim throughout the practice strokes."

Why that's super helpful is that is helps me sort out instantly what the cause of my error is. Since there can be about 150 errors and I don't know which is the one I'm doing, this is worth gold.

By contrast, during the interim between my lessons, I had a "breakdown" that lasted a few days. (A few long days.) I suddenly couldn't hit anything, and the problem persisted. Finally in desperation I stopped at the local pool hall and stroked the ball for an hour on a 9' table with a house cue, just to change everything and see if it made me see what I was doing. I realized pretty early on what my error was--I was gripping the cue too hard and angling down on the ball, which is exactly what I did when I was a kid...so, in other words, tension was making me revert to ancient bad habits.

But the point is that it took me three days to work that out on my own. If it had happened during a lesson it would literally not have taken as long as three strokes to figure it out. Jerry would have seen it right away and simply told me.

The cumulative effect of all these individualized corrections is that I'm learning the typical ways in which tension comes out in my stroke. And everybody's different, which is why an in-person lesson helps so much. Everybody feels tension but everybody's tension manifests in different ways. For instance, I never position my chin off center or raise my head during, or right after, the stroke--those don't happen to be among my personal flaws. But I tend to jab at the ball when I'm anxious about the shot. And my backstroke is too quick. I've heard that numerous times.

The way this is translating to my practice sessions is that I'm developing a sort of mental list I can run down to check my stroke when something starts to go wrong--based on the things I hear from Jerry during the lesson sessions. I'll just pause in my practice, start stroking some balls off the foot spot, and run through the typical things Jerry might say to me during a lesson. Get the cue level. Relax your grip. Slow backstroke. End with the tip on the cloth and hold it. Etc., etc. But all the things on my checklist came from him watching me during lessons and recognizing my personal tendencies and then telling me about it. For somebody else the list might be completely different.

Sorry this is so long, but writing can be easy to misunderstand and I wanted to be clear.

Mike
Click to expand...

Very nicely written, Mike, welcome to the game of pool, it's a journey, not a destination.....and of course the game can also be your teacher. ;) Aloha
 
A Pool Lesson...LIVE with JB. :thumbup::thumbup:
Time and money well spent. Thanks for posting your review.
 
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