And yet we know that ghost ball and compensating for deflection are geometrically correct. Doesn't this tell you that your personal success or failure with a system is not evidence of its geometric correctness? That's logic.
Pat, where is the geometry that makes Ghost Ball geometrically correct?
If I understand all this correctly Dave introduced a concept called Contact Induced Throw meaning that when a ball is struck the cueball will carry the object ball forward in the same direction with it before the balls release and each go in different directions.
So before the idea with Ghost Ball was to visualize an imaginary ball on the pocket line and shoot the cueball to that ball. Or go further and visualize a contact point created by that imaginary ball and try to hit that contact point.
Then we are told that we must now compensate for deflection and aim "a little to the right or left of this contact point" so that the cueball will arrive at the right point.
NOW - we are told that to use Ghost Ball properly we much compensate for Contact Induced Throw and Deflection.
All this compensating is supposed to be achieved HOW?
By guessing because there is no way for a player to accurately measure just how many fractions of degrees that they must parallel shift to achieve the proper compensation. And even if the guess right one time they have to do it all over again the next time when the shot is slightly different.
This is where the "shoot a million shots" crowd comes in and says that shooting those million balls trains the body to compensate quickly and accurately which is true because we are able to adapt to any condition.
Then along comes these people who start talking about these things called Aiming Systems which don't rely on imagining a ball and compensating for deflection and "contact induced throw". Somehow these systems seem to work to allow the shooter to deliver the cueball to the exact same spot (or close enough to also pocket the ball) as when someone uses the imaginary ball/focus on a point/compensate for deflection and CIT "system". And instead of figuring out WHY these systems do work, people want to say that they can't possibly work, or that they can't work for all shots.
Ghost ball is also an "aiming system". On paper you can explain and diagram the geometry of it quite easily which is why in my mind it has been most popular to put in print. However there is something inherently flawed in a "system" that tells you in order to use it you have to make a lot of guesses when it comes to the proper alignment.
I think that this is the real beauty of these systems. They literally take the guessing out of the process. It's much easier for me to mentally dissect the cueball into thirds and project lines onto the object ball and thus follow a path rather than to try to guess how much the cueball will deflect and (now) also have to guess how much the contact induced throw will be. If I can simply do the same thing shot after shot and it brings me to the right path and that path results in pocketed balls then I have to conclude that this is a better way to go.
And here is the other thing; All these people who espouse aiming systems other than ghost ball are all after the same thing, better play. We are all on the same side and NO ONE is getting rich off of this. Dr. Dave wrote a book with mucho excellent advice and put out a ton of videos that is so helpful it's beyond compare. We sell that book and dvd alongside books and dvds by others who teach, for lack of a better term, non-standard aiming systems.
The point I want to make is that we live in a video age. Dave's videos show us what happens and frankly some of the results are very surprising even to him. I am POSITIVE that some of the things that have been shown on video defy conventional wisdom of what is happening. Dave please correct me if you have never been surprised by the difference in what you thought would happen vs. what did happen when you filmed something on a pool table.
So in this case we have a clear situation of concepts that defy conventional wisdom, being that conventional wisdom is based on the ghost ball aiming method. Now we need to find out why these various systems work, exactly how they work, how do they allow the user to automatically and unconciously achieve an aiming path that is already dialed in with deflection and contact induced throw already compensated for?
Figure that out and you will win the Nobel Prize. By the way no one ever won the Nobel Prize for figuring out how things don't work.
Just kidding, I know if I had an hour or two with Colin I'd fix him in no time.
