In 1995 pro's were asked, "What is your secret to aiming"
Steve Mizerak - "Pocketing balls is an instinctive skill that is learned from trial and error. It can't be mastered from playing once a week. Instead of hitting twenty balls to learn a shot, I hit two hundred balls. I haven't found an easier way yet!"
Loree Jon Jones - "Aiming comes naturally for me, where I've always just known where to hit. It's very difficult for me to teach people to aim because of this!"
Mike Massey - "I've tried a lot of systems but mostly you have to play from feel. You have to practice all types of feel, practice all type of hits."
Earl Strickland - "I've played so much that I don't have to think about it. But I also spin the balls in, as I think many of the pros do; they're using so much english all the time. Pros spin the ball in the hole and that's mostly from feel. If you're really going to learn to aim, you have to know better how to spin the ball, and what effect that's having on the object ball."
Nikki Benish - "This is how I learned, but I doubt if I use it anymore because when you're a professional every shot you see you've seen and shot at least a hundred times before. On the toughest shots I was taught to try to pick out a spot on the object ball, combined with the imaginary cue ball method."
Jim Rempe - "I aim directly at the contact point. I also use the ghost ball theory, but it's more repetitious in your mind when you play a lot. In other words, I don't really visualize the ball anymore, it's automatic."
Efren Reyes - "When you put a lot of english on the cue ball you adjust a little bit, often aiming exactly at the contact point of an object ball. So it very much depends on my next shot how I will aim."
C.J. Wiley offers that you must aim before you get down on the ball by lining up correctly, of course, but adds that as far as his aiming method itself,
"There are certain things you don't tell. Last time I wrote anything about aiming, somebody copied it and started selling it."
Bottom line: everyone does it differently and there is only one thing they have in common...they spend a lot of time practicing shots and less time trying to convince people their way is the only way!