Tor Lowry recommends shooting certain shots some 30 times in a row to make it " automatic ".
Delivering the cue properly takes hundreds and hundreds of practice shots.
People shouldn't even mess with aiming systems till they shoot consistently straight.
Tor Lowry is awesome. But I guarantee you he doesn't simply mean that shooting any particular shot 30 times is all you need in order to make it automatic every time the shot comes up. That's just not how the brain works. Shooting it 30 times every day for a month is more realistic in order to make it automatic, as long as you successfully pocket it 90% of the time or better.
Let's say one player is 50/50 on a particular shot, consistently makes it 15 out of 30 times. Now let's say on the same shot you are 80%, making it 24 or 25 times out of 30 most of the time. If both of you practice this one shot everyday, diligently, shooting it 30 times a day until you are pocketing it 27 to 30 times in a row everyday, it will likely take the 50/50 player many more days to reach a level of automatically knowing the shot, when compared to you who can already hit it 24 to 25 times. So there's no way that simply shooting a shot 30 times is going to magically make that shot automatic -- it takes successful repetition to make it happen.
I agree with the bold statement, depending on the aiming system. If the system is objective, free of any guesswork, it could really help the player develop a consistent stroke much quicker. Example: Place an ob 2 diamonds from the end rail and 1 diamond from the side rail. Place the cb 1 diamond out from the side pocket, same side rail as the ob. This is a dead 1/2 ball shot to the corner. Explain to the player that he must aim his cue through center cb so that his tip would split the edge of the ob if his stroke could follow through that far. Shoot a normal medium speed, not soft or hard. If he can pocket this 10 or more times in a row then his stroke is fairly consistent within the margin of error for this shot.
Now move the ob to the center table spot and the cb to the head spot. This is also a 1/2 ball shot. From here the margin for error is much smaller. If the player struggles with this shot, begins to rattle the ball more, then he knows 100% that he has a stroke issue. The aim point hasn't changed. We only tightened up the margin for error, and his stroke isn't consistent enough to deliver the cb accurately within this tolerance. If he were to just set up a shot that he wasn't 100% sure about as far as aiming, then there would be 2 possible causes for inconsistency -- fault in the stroke or fault in aiming.
If the stroke is consistent and accurate, then aiming comes quicker because you already know your stroke can deliver. You just have to align it properly. By the same logic, if your aim is consistent, meaning you know exactly where you are aiming everytime -- no inconsistent guesswork -- then any misses can be attributed to an inconsistent stroke or alignment issue.