phreaticus
Well-known member
OK, here we go… basically my approach is really what CJ teaches as his TOI system, which I consider to be a slightly unusual form of 1/8b fractional aiming and integrates what I find to be useful components from the CTE guys and what some folks call “shaft aiming”. For lack of a better term I call my mashup approach “iCTE” (for inside index CTE), its just a silly name to slightly differentiate from the other variations - I take no credit for any of the concepts, this is just the result of me exploring & testing all of the main systems out there and a description of what I found to work best and easiest for my own game, and to teach to my daughter and a few friends.
In my mind its a simpler, more “pure” form of CTE in that all one ever looks at on the object ball is the center or edge. No contact points, fractions, or A, B, C, D aimlines. On the CB you only always look at the center and index very slightly to the inside of center CB to create what is essentially 1/8b fractions to make the cut angle. It easy & simple because our relationship to the CB is close, under our control, consistent and can be done by looking at fractions of the tip/ferrule, namely center, 1/4, 1/2, or full tip offsets which are pretty easily seen. A wonderfully convenient relationship that I find very helpful in the approach and not mentioned in any literature that I’ve seen is that a full tip of the avg pool cue size (12.5 mm, or 1/2”) roughly equates to 1/4 of a 2.25” pool ball and a 1/2 tip roughly equates to a 1/8 ball (and of course 1/4 tip roughly equals 1/16b). But knowledge of the ball fractions & shot angles is not at all necessary to use the system, its just an interesting factoid. Essentially one is really simply only ever aligning the center, or edge of the ferrule to one of two basic CB/OB alignments; CTC or CTE. 1/4 tip sounds tough to see/feel, but since its really just 1/2 way between center and edge of the tip, its also quite easy to develop a feel for. Another point worth mentioning is that all we are ever really dealing with on pool cuts is the outer 90 degree quadrant of the OB sphere that is facing us; due to 3D distortions, 2D fractional aiming concepts on paper are not really accurate. Due to this curvature perception issue & the pockets being 2x the ball size, practically this means that the 3/4 ball (15 deg) shot and tiny variations of it can make lots of shots covering a wide range of thick shot angles, and the 5/8 fraction (between 3/4 & 1/2 ball) is almost impossible to actually see & can basically be ignored. Similarly 1/2b perception (CTE, 30 deg) can be used to make a lot more shots than is intuitively obvious, as the thinner the cut angle, the smaller the ball fraction becomes, as there is literally much less contact area/line to physically see, even if one was hunting the actual contact point or virtual slice.
CTC & CTE references are very easy for anyone to see and to align our center vision & stance to during PSR and I believe this approach resolves numerous issues with some of the other CTE and traditional fractional aiming approaches, all of which have you attempting to visualize some form of semi imaginary points on the OB, and wrestling with confusing pivot concepts. More specifically, when staring at balls for hours on end visualizing the actual tiny physical contact points or imaginary fraction lines on the OB can be difficult to perform reliably & are very optically/mentally stressful for many folks. This approach also resolves the common question often posed by folks new to these approaches which is: “well, how to I determine what fraction/angle/shotline is correct to use for the shot I’m looking at?”. Brian developed a very cool math based system for addressing this issue: Poolology. IMO his system is facinating, but still quite complex and not necessarily practical to implement on the table, at least not for me, and not so easy to teach. In CJ’s approach, its very easy to first determine whether a cut is thick (CTC) or thin (CTE). From there, with practice one can quite easily determine if center tip, 1/4, 1/2, or full tip inside offset makes the cut - even in early stages, when developing the feel for this, one can simply rapidly mentally cycle through those options and arrive at a solution very quickly. In reality, something like 80-90% of most pool cut shots are < 35 degrees, so for the vast majority of our game indexing a 1/4 to 1/2 tip inside from CTC or CTE makes the shot. With practice this turns into more of an analog triangulation system, essentially a feel approach, based off the very simple fundamental CTC/CTE alignments.
In my mind all these CTE ish systems are in fact derived from basic 1/4b fractions, and the reason they all work pretty well is that our human visual processing & proprioception systems operate on contrast & are concentric in nature. This means that we automatically look to the edges & centers of things, and we can easily bisect objects & spaces into into halves. This “simplified” approach based on CTC/CTE builds on these concepts and reduces complexity even further. There is a related very simple algorithm in computer science known as binary search. Babies intuitively point at things from birth - by age 5 most of us can look at a light switch on the wall one time, look away, and then again blindly point at it - 80% of folks will hit it the first time, other 20% will get it after only 2-3 tries. Try it right now. These natural visual systems can be further developed through education & training.
As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I think the addition of a secondary visual reference line which I call the “inside edge reference line”, when coupled with the CTC/CTE lines, (inside edge of CB to inside edge of OB on CTC, and inside edge of CB to center of OB for CTE) is a very powerful construct to help reduce parallax issues during PSR.
There you go - not really the simple explantion you asked for, but the result on table is quite simple and at least it doesn’t take a book. My take on things, since you asked - just some views from some nerdy pool bum on the Internet.
Cheers
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