Interesting topic, and one I have thought about through the years every time I had another one of those "Aha" moments where the light bulb lit up.
Certainly a good instructor would cut your learning curve way down. The key word here is "good". Finding one may be more difficult than you think, and the wrong one won't do much for you at best and mess you all up at worst.
I have some very strong feelings about instructors. ( I play mostly straight pool) I truly feel they had to have experienced multiple rack runs and falling into dead stroke to even know how to convey the concept. Some instructors claim to fame is running 4 or 5 racks of nine ball. That wouldn't cut it for me.
Now on the other hand you may find someone who runs 100s and couldn't convey to you some of the basics.
I say these things to make you (or anyone beginning to enjoy the game) aware that the "good" in good instructor is FAR from a given.
That said. THE NUMBER ONE TOOL >>> I wish I had access to all those wonderful Accu-Stats DVDs that are available today.
Listening to the commentary is HUGE and watching the players with the ability to go back and review things is probably the tool that can cut your learning curve the most if you are sensitive to what you are seeing and able to absorb the intricacies of what the players are doing.
Understanding that ultimately "feeling the game happen" is what it is all about. That also might have sped up the learning process faster than me beating my head against the wall trying so hard to consciously aim and execute until I realized that in and of itself that was stonewalling progress.
And finally one of my favorite quotes that I think of all the time and take to heart realizing I don't know all of what I would have done, because there is always something else to learn, comes from Danny DiLiberto. He said very prophetically,
"If you knew what ya didn't know, you wouldn't not know it."
Much deeper a statement than you initially give it credit for.
