Very nicely done! Best thing I've read in this forum in a long time.
Reply to Dan White's Questions
- Thread starter JB Cases
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Very nicely done! Best thing I've read in this forum in a long time.
GoldenFlash
Banned
I didn't pretend to answer your question, I answered your question. IF you HONESTLY cared about finding the answer you would learn the steps, even the basic ones I presented and show us where the subconscious kicks in OR you would make pages of equations OR you would conclude that it works without knowing the math. But since you won't show us that you know how to perform the steps in any way we can only surmise that you have no experience of seeing it work personally and thus can't really expect you to have a conversation on the subject from the same experience perspective.
Dan I shared a diagram with you previously where I plotted out 9 shots along the same string on a 9ft table. I took the lines and extended them through the center of the cue ball back through the cueball facing the shooter. The distances away from the cue ball were between 2.5 to 8.5 feet and the angles were in 5 degree increments from 15 to 85 degrees. The CTE line and the ACTUAL GB CENTER line was plotted and then the observation was made that those lines, the CTEL and the GBCL were separated by a distance of between .07mm and .4mm at the most.
What does that data mean? Well for one thing it means that I know it and you don't because you simply don't care enough to even learn how to use the system much less spend time plotting out the various references to see what sorts of data points come up. But for me it means that by virtue of using NO OTHER REFERENCE THAN THE CENTER TO EDGE LINE the shooter would place his body in a position where he was looking at the center of the cue ball facing him and be no more than .4mm (that is less than half of a millimeter) away from the actual ghost ball line AND he would know in what direction that GB line would be in AWAY from the CTE Line.
That means that the shooter's body would literally be a tiny tiny shift away from the actual precise shot line by virtue of using no other reference than the CTE line.
So what happens then if the shooter chooses a secondary reference? Well the eyes and body then zero in even tighter to the shot line.
That's what I meant about all the aiming happening inside of half of the ball. Half of the cueball and half of the object ball is what the shooter is "inside" of when choosing which of three perceptions to use as the final eye/body position from which to go down to the shot.
On the actual table sighting the CTE Line YIELDS a different BODY position for each shot pair (CB+OB) The actual PERCEPTION of how the balls overlap then also varies for each sighting of the CTE Line as the distance between the balls changes. Thus we see that it's POSSIBLE to sight with two fixed reference points, center of the cueball and edge of the object ball from a single cue ball position and nine object ball positions along the same string and end up with nine different body positions.
BUT AT NO TIME FOR ANY OF THE NINE SHOTS IS THE SHOOTER MORE THAN .4mm away from the actual GB Shot Line as seen from the shooter's perspective facing the cueball. I don't know how you can't see the significance of that?
It is relevant because as explained above sighting the CTE Line alone produces a different body position for different object ball positions with a fixed cueball. In effect the shooter is literally rotating around the center of the cue ball with each successive object ball CTE line sighted. Thus the HIT that would be produced IF the shooter were to lay the cue down at center ball from that body position would NOT be the same angle for any of the shots.
As opposed to POINTING THE CUE THROUGH CENTER CUE BALL TO THE EDGE OF THE OBJECT BALL AND SHOOTING DOWN THAT LINE. Each HIT would be a half ball hit from the shooter's perspective and the resulting angle would be a 30 degree result.
No, and this illustrates again that we are not even anywhere close to the same page on this. You don't understand even the very basics of the system you claim does not work as described.
ONE of three CTE PERCEPTIONS will lead the shooter to the actual (but unknown) Ghost Ball line.
Again, I don't know what math would be involved here if any. I think that there must be some. But as I said a zillion times before the math is not relevant in the slightest. The math that governs ghost ball aiming is absolutely and totally irrelevant to the actual USE of Ghost Ball aiming.
The accuracy comes in the form of using objective reference points to tighten the focus down to a literal hair's width AT THE BACK OF THE CUEBALL. The place where the shooter will have to hit the cueball, using center to Edge aiming the eyes and body are directed to be in an extremely tight zone that in fact reconciles to GB consistently. The proof is in the use Dan that's what I have been trying to get you to understand. By breaking down the motions in basic CTE aiming (not including inside/outside sweeps and the better techniques Stan teaches) I have shown you HOW the perceptions FORCE the shooter to ADOPT the only stance that can work to get them to the ghost ball line.
Or to put it another way, if you and I approach a series of shots and you use pure feel but you are simply so good that you get on the right shot line and I use CTE then our cues will overlap at exactly the same position relative to the table for every shot. You simply cannot have a different bridge hand/cue position than I do if we are both on the actual shot line for each shot.
If you rotate the table then the player has no longer used the CTE "key" which pockets the ball for that shot. And again as explained above moving either the OB or CB 3 degrees means that the shooter must adopt a different position which results in a different overlap perception and thus the input is different and so then is also the output.
The 3 perceptions are merely ways to further direct the body to the right space. That is the practical result of using the system. Hence my answers to your questions.
Actually ON A PRACTICAL LEVEL - as I explained in the video - I know a LOT more than you do about WHAT IS HAPPENING. What is happening is that I follow the directions objectively (without bias) and get on the shot line. Not automagically and absolutely with full conscious FOCUS on the process and fully conscious ACCEPTANCE of the resulting shot line.
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No and I will tell you why. No system has fixed my bad habits. In fact I had to work EXTRA HARD to stop the steering which had become such a big part of my game that I almost couldn't shoot the simplest of shots without it. Even now it's there in a small way on almost every shot. (and let's not talk about my "big" match and the nine hours of clown stroking). At the beginning when Hal showed me the systems and I adopted one of them I OFTEN would line up on the shot according to the system and my brain would be literally screaming WRONG! WRONG! I had to force myself to trust the line and it would turn out to be right. In essence I had been so used to lining up wrong that right looked wrong.
Even now I will come up on shots - sometimes ridiculous angles - and I will use CTE to line it up and literally have no idea if it's the right line - I mean of course I can see that it's kind of in the right direction but I don't know FOR SURE because I have literally never tried that shot before and more often than not it turns out to be correct.
Now, that said, yes using CTE DOES force one into a pre-address routine and adoption of a line that is very calming. It does take stress off when I know that the line is highly likely to be right and I only need to focus on my stroke. Stan says CTE straightens out the stroke and I tend to agree with him to some degree as most people don't have as bad of a chicken wing as I do and so their strokes are already fairly straight and CTE use allows them to shoot down the line with no hesitation which may have formerly put a wobble in their strokes. For me I found that USING CTE meant that I have to concentrate even harder on laying down a good stroke - to the point of literally talking myself through it - because I found that once you're on the right line it's really easy to push the cueball off of it.
Secondly it's too consistent. Shots to pockets from stupid crazy positions, single and multi-rail banks.... it's crazy how I can look at a shot that I used to be scared of or even avoid and say Edge to B Right Sweep and I do that and get down and stroke and SWISH. I have had on-table conversations with dozens of people around the country and I will toss out the shots and shoot balls in from crazy angles or make a crazy multi-rail bank to the side or corner just by eliminating the keys that definitely won't work.
So to me that means that SOMETHING is there that goes beyond refined guessing. Sure I could accept the idea that this leads the shooter to ALMOST the right line and the brain does the rest. My diagram above could attest to that by virtue of nothing more than using the CTE line. And in fact when I didn't KNOW that there were secondary lines I did only use the CTE line and a half-ball pivot with pretty good success.
But you have CTE and you have 90/90 and you have other similar methods that all work to resolve to GB. So once again, as I explained in the video, the practical result is that people can do OBJECTIVE referencing - without bias - following directions to use what is effectively a "key" when aiming and CONSISTENTLY get to the actual (but unknown) shot line. It's simply too precise and accurate for me to accept that there isn't some sort of mathematical reason why it works. But as I said many times it simply does not matter if there is or isn't.
Think about this, if we simply said that CTE objectively leads your subconscious consistently to the shot line would there be any PRACTICAL difference in how a person actually uses it? Would there be any difference in the results people experience on the table? I don't think so and if so then why all the fuss?
I mean you're not a neuroscientist who is keenly interested in the conscious/subconscious roles here and even if you were it would change nothing in the practical use. You're not going to hook everyone up to ekgs to monitor their brainwaves to identify what parts of the brain are lighting up at each stage.
So we are left with a simple question - does the player benefit from the use of CTE?
I think that the answer is yes and that for most the practical result of using CTE (or a similarly good aiming method) is that the user gets to the shot line more often, makes more shots consistently, makes "tougher" shots more consistently, is able to bank more accurately and has a big increase in the arsenal of banks and shots "available" to them.
I have a life outside of AZB.
Since that initial phone call what did you do? Since my initial meeting with Hal I took what he taught me and used it in competition successfully for years. Then around 2009ish I guess I saw people talking about CTE and saw that it was connected to Hal and after some conversation I got the idea that CTE was pretty much the final system that Hal came up up that incorporated everything a player needed to know about aiming. I tried to glean what I could from the forum and from friends who sent me private advice. My early videos attest to this "quest" to learn "CTE".
Then I saw that Stan had really taken it even further and seeing how much shit he was getting I figured he was clearly going to be Hal's foremost successor online.
Anyway the point is that I have been THINKING about this for a long time and playing with it on the table and through diagrams, experiments, videos, on toy tables, have explained and taught it using coke cans, beer bottles, coins, even palm trees. To me Hal started an aiming revolution and brought the focus on aiming in a way that was bigger than any previous time in the history of our sport. And it only lives on by the efforts of people like Stan and myself and those who get interested enough to not only learn the systems but then to pass them on.
Which is why I get so angry that folks like you seem to be doing everything you can, literally going out of your way, to dissuade people from trying them. You ignore all the practical benefit and imply and sometimes outright say that they are snake-oil and those who "sell" (promote) are thus snake-oil salesmen. You went out of your way to try and "debunk" Stan's curtain videos by claiming that they are nothing more than a trick which anyone can do. But you did it in a way that Stan doesn't do it and you didn't duplicate his videos and prove you could actually achieve that level of performance without seeing the pockets. Why would you do that except to be malicious?
Hal didn't charge you a penny and he would have accepted your call and talked to you as often as you would have called. He gave his time and knowledge selflessly and you seem to want everything he did to just fade away judging by your actions.
Or are you just completely OCD because we say it's an objective aiming system? Does the word objective used in conjunction just drive you so crazy that you feel a duty to knock Stan and anyone who promotes CTE and do your part to turn as many people as possible off to even trying CTE?
Excellent.
The video was made in response to actual questions you posted on this forum.
There is no such "emperor has no clothes" thing going on. We don't consider Stan to be any sort of guru....just simply one of the premier instructors who has spent a lot of time on Hal's systems and developed solid foundations from them. What Stan teaches WORKS and that's the only true test we use to give him respect.
You say you discovered a "serious flaw" but did you ever give Hal feedback on it? Did you ever continue with it to see if that "flaw" could be fixed? No of course you didn't as you said you stopped using it. Did you think Hal stopped thinking about systems and stopped trying to refine them?
Nope, you just stopped after 30 minutes of phone instruction. Now you see to think that this qualifies you to denigrate those who didn't stop learning and didn't stop exploring and didn't stop innovating.
Thank you Stan! Look forward to buying your book when finished. Hope you and yours are well!
Dan I shared a diagram with you previously where I plotted out 9 shots along the same string on a 9ft table. I took the lines and extended them through the center of the cue ball back through the cueball facing the shooter. The distances away from the cue ball were between 2.5 to 8.5 feet and the angles were in 5 degree increments from 15 to 85 degrees. The CTE line and the ACTUAL GB CENTER line was plotted and then the observation was made that those lines, the CTEL and the GBCL were separated by a distance of between .07mm and .4mm at the most.
What does that data mean? Well for one thing it means that I know it and you don't because you simply don't care enough to even learn how to use the system much less spend time plotting out the various references to see what sorts of data points come up. But for me it means that by virtue of using NO OTHER REFERENCE THAN THE CENTER TO EDGE LINE the shooter would place his body in a position where he was looking at the center of the cue ball facing him and be no more than .4mm (that is less than half of a millimeter) away from the actual ghost ball line AND he would know in what direction that GB line would be in AWAY from the CTE Line.
That means that the shooter's body would literally be a tiny tiny shift away from the actual precise shot line by virtue of using no other reference than the CTE line.
Thanks for the reply. Let me address a couple of things, and then I hope to be done with these conversations.
Regarding the diagram above: Your interpretation of the results is flawed. I know you don't want to hear this, and will argue strongly against it, but if you take a step back and actually think about what I'm saying, maybe you will agree. The diagram you made uses the center of the cue ball as the origin for your two lines that go to the CTE line and to the ghost ball line. The two lines intersect at the center of the cue ball. At one end, where the object ball is, the two lines are separated by close to a half ball diameter (the sharpest angled shot) while at the other end, where the two lines exit the cue ball, the lines are very close together.
The fact that the two lines exit the cue ball close together is meaningless. Why? Well, the direction the cue ball travels does not depend on the contact point on the cue ball. It depends on the angle of the cue itself. A more accurate diagram would be to start your lines from the contact point on the cue ball. In that case, all the lines would converge at a single point on the back of the cue ball. Every shot has the same contact point - center cue ball. The difference from one to the next is simply the amount of pivot on the cue itself. (Of course there are considerations of the tip being rounded and the ball being rounded and the contact point being more of a patch than a point, but you get the idea).
Next, I wanted to push you to answer the central question as far as you could, and I think you've done that. In my opinion, you cannot answer the question, and I think we both know that your explanations are more like grabbing at straws. I appreciate the attempt and I promise not to keep harping on this stuff. I had not posted here in a long time when one day you posted a video of Stan on my youtube page. I noticed that Stan had been practicing his curtain shots as evidenced by the chalk marks on the table. You guys got all upset and then Stan admitted he had been practicing the shot before taking the video in which he definitively states that he made the shots "on the first try after setting it up." OK, fine. Next you make a long video to answer my question, which I actually was happy to see. Unfortunately, and we can agree to disagree, you did nothing more than repeat that it just works... Sorry, that's not an explanation.
Finally, my position is that if CTE helps some people like yourself, then great. I believe most supporters here have rose colored glasses when extolling the vitues of CTE - making crazy shots all over the table with no effort. OK, we can all do that, sometimes, but if it worked that great then you should all be on the tour.
I've used this analogy before: CTE might work with some subconscious adjustment at some point in the process, or it might simply be done by adjusting the pivot. What I mean is that in ghost ball aiming, you keep your stroke the same but you vary your aim point. For instance, if I have a 30 degree shot, I'll aim at the half ball hit. If the shot is a little thinnner, I'll aim just outside of the half ball hit. In both cases, I am stroking the cue straight through without any pivoting. The only thing I am changing is the aim point.
In CTE, on those two shots, let's say I am aiming with the CTELA perception. In both shots, I am now aiming at the same exact spot - the place where the CTELA perception tells me to aim the cue. But this time, I am not stroking straight through like I did above. This time I am pivoting the cue. I think this is probably what makes CTE work. You are changing the shot with a different amount of pivot.
In a nutshell, with ghost ball you aim at different places with the same stroke. With CTE you aim at the same place with different amounts of cue pivot. Both require experience to get good at, and both depend on the shooters knowledge gained by time at the table (some call this feel).
I don't know for sure if that's how it works, but to me it is a strong candidate. Even Stan shows signs of last second cue pivot on some of his shots, as I've illustrated before. If you want to lead beginners down a dead end by telling them this system is objective, then at least tell them the full story - the aim point is more or less objective, but the pivots are not. (Of course this begs the question, why not just learn to shoot intuitively by aiming at the correct spot in the first place rather than pivoting to get there?)
So I'll try to leave it at that. I may decide to make my own video showing what I'm talking about, but I dunno.
I'm satisfied that I have the best explanation you can provide. Now it's on to seeing what Stan comes up with in his book. He makes pretty strong claims as to his understanding. Time will tell.
Unless you want to continue discussing your shot diagram and why I think it is flawed, it is probably best to avoid arguing about all the other stuff. You can have the last word on that if you want.
Would you clarify, please? ....You indicated that you use the "same stroke" for all shots for the GB approach.
Stan Shuffett
Sure. When I say "same stroke" I mean that I am going to do everything identically from one shot to the next. The only thing that changes is the orientation of my feet (and body of course) to the ghost ball line.
In CTE, as my theorizing goes, you are not doing as above. You are choosing a fixed "key" such as CTELA and you are orienting your eyes/body to that key. Something has to give, and in my opinion I think it is the amount of pivot or sweep that allows you to line up with the same initial key yet achieve a different direction with the cue ball to pocket the ball.
I would never and I mean never give students the fatal notion that all shots are executed with the same stroke.
Professionals use multiple stroking strategies based on the shot at hand.
If there is an interest in this I may also do a free stroking series, too......cause same stroke won't cut the mustard and aspiring players might appreciate the knowledge.
Plus, when I see a visual......I can align and I can teach others how to align their cues to CCB...yes, objectively. CTE is visual....See and align. The eyes do the work in CTE. And the body has to learn to follow in the form of how to align the cue to what is seen.
Stan Shuffett
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I didn't think such a simple point was necessary to point out. We are discussing the mechanics of two aiming systems, ghost ball and CTE. That has nothing to do with your point.
But now that we are on the subject, why is it that in your thousand videos on YouTube every stroke you take is exactly the same? How come you never pocket any balls at pocket speed rather than warp speed?
Simple point! You are a self-proclaimed stroke expert and for you to make the "same stroke" comment can and does have negative effects with others. I guess I am surprised that a stroke expert would allow themselves to get trapped like that.
Let's agree today to do an online stroke series., Your stroke is straight. You are an expert at evaluating strokes in slow-mo and such. So, be my guest. You get first honors!
Concerning what I do for video teaching, it is apples and oranges compared to what when teaching stroke. I punch and poke a lot on videoas my purpose is heavily aim loaded but I promise my online series will reflect something quite to the contrary. Ten years of aim studying prompted me to be very poke oriented for efficency sake....
Will you step forward and dedicate yourself right now for the goodness of pool to do at least a 60 minute online stroke series?
Stan Shuffett
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I'm beginning to wonder if your misunderstanding of what I said is intentional. Also, I never said I was a stroke expert. I do however have my own opinions based on my own experiences just like everybody else. I would challenge you to find anything I have said about the stroke which is incorrect.
As far as the rest of your comments if you want to improve your stroke having me do a 60-minute video for you is not the best option. I would suggest you purchase Mark Wilson's book, Play Great Pool. This book is all anyone needs to become a high-level player if they have the desire.
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As far as I can I tell you are a one trick pony when it comes to understanding and describing stroke. You can roll Whitey up and down the table. LMAO! I understand why you would not want to put a stroke series online! Anyway, if you change your mind and want to do a dualing online stroke series, just let me know.
Stan Shuffett
GoldenFlash
Banned
I think Mr. Dan White would argue with an empty school bus.:boring2:
Nothing about this will ever satisfy him.....nothing.
There will always be just one more "reason" why something is flawed, etc. etc.
You seem to be trying to get me off topic. You said you can align yourself to a CTELA perception with two different cut angles and still pocket the ball without any subjective adjustments like a little different pivot. You said you would explain how this can be done in your next book. Why not remove the suspense and educate not only me, but guys like Bob Jewett and Dr. Dave on how it is done? I don't enjoy having contentious discussions with people, really. Just end the bickering with your new explanation.
I'll personally buy the first 10 copies if you can do that.
Not at all. I've had exactly one question put out there for the last few years that I've posted in here, on and off.
Golden, I don't know you. I like your sense of humor but you do have a nasty old codger aura about you as well.
And yet, JB answered your question in this very thread, and you again totally dismissed it. You failed to even recognize that it was answered. That is simply because your understanding is so low that you can't even see the answers when they are printed out for you.
Like you have been told many, many, times before, take it to the table and actually try and learn it, then you will start to understand. But, you won't do that because you have no intention of actually learning that which you want to spend so much time mocking.