Fred Agnir said:
These aren't the old rules. These are the real rules of 7-ball. The bastardized rules of ESPN are, IMO, why ESPN needs to stop screwing with pool rules.
The rules that your friend is talking about can be found in the BCA Rulebook. ESPN should have gotten one.
The basic strategy for the chooser is to look at the 7-ball and the ball previous to the 7-ball to see what the easiest pattern is, then choose that side of the table. For decent players, it becomes a banking contest. For intermediates, it can become a movers game, but with only 7 balls less whatever was made on the break, it becomes a pure offense game rather quickly.
Fred
Thanks Fred for the insights, very helpful, as have been your posts on using your adapted methods of Hal Houle's systems. Without realizing it, I think I happened upon some of the backhand english and offsetting of the aim on the cue ball techniques you explained, and have been incorporating some of those techniques.
A question for you: I imagine you are familiar with Bert Kinister's "60 Minute Workout" and wonder (as I haven't had a chance to go shoot some pool to experiment with your systems) if the kinds of shots he incorporates on that video work well with your system; I imagine they do. The shots I'm especially referring to are those where there is approximately a 45 degree cut on the object ball, sending it to a corner pocket, and the cueball is shot with inside english and a tad bit of follow to go three rails and end up back in the center of the table. At the moment, that shot is more or less a feel shot with a heavy amount of correction and extreme inside english with just the right speed of stroke to get the object ball to pot and the cue ball to come around. It's a pretty tough shot, and when I go from a slow table to a fast one, or to balls that are polished to those that are dirty, all bets are off, and a major adjustment is in order. Not at all a simple shot, at least for me... I've been shooting the shot with a parallel aiming method, compensating for throw, and squirt and so on, and have been getting it to work, but not as well as I would have liked.
Does your system work well with that shot?
I basically use two cues, one a Meucci with modified black-dot shafts to reduce squirt, the other a sneaky pete with a modified shaft, that has been "predatorized"... the top 3 1/2 inches of the shaft have been drilled out.
Does your system need cues whose squirt characteristics are similar to a house cue, or will low squirt cues work well with your system, too? Thanks so much!
Flex
