catscradle said:
I don't mean randomly shooting balls, I mean structured practice repeating the same shots until mastered. Hal has explained his center ball to edge aiming system to me and I agree it has a remarkable level of success. However, the range of shots it is remarkably successful with aren't the ones the create the problem. It is the thin cuts, the length of table cuts. I'd conservatively say that the number of shots I miss due to aiming is 10% at most, the vast majority of my misses are execution and I believe that is true of anyone who has played a significant amount of pool.
I still say no aiming system can produce the results structured practice shooting can, but I will allow that, if one isn't going to spend the time in structured practice, learning an aiming system might be a reasonable substitute.
I did not mean random shooting either.
Why does one need to practice certain shots more than others?
Why is a thin cut seemingly harder than a thick one? Wouldn't it be nice if the aiming was the same for both shots?
That is exactly what Hal's system did for me. That is the whole thing right there.
That is the reason that so many of us who have learned these systems are excited about them.
How do you go from practicing by rote all manner of shots and dreading certain ones in a game to treating all shots the same?
I would NOT have believed it was anywhere close to possible if someone had said that to me prior to meeting Hal Houle.
In fact when my friend Bob Johnson called me up one day and said Hal Houle is in town and he wants to meet you I said Hal who? I barely skimmed over the posts he made on RSB and those about him prior to meeting him. Some stupid argument about aiming I thought.
So I went to meet him and when I got there I had no idea what to expect. For the first ten minutes or so I was quite baffled. Then I started to get it and started rifling balls in.
On a fairly tight table I might add at Paradise Billiards in Denver.
So from that day forth I started seeing lines I had never before seen. I started making shots consistently that I had never made before. BUt most importantly, for me, I didn't fear any shot any more.
Does this mean I never missed - I wish - plenty of people in Colorado who got my money after I met Hal can attest that I still missed plenty.
But they all recognized that I wasn't missing for the same reason. Now it wasn't because I was lined up wrong. Now it was pretty much the rest of my bad habits.
With Hal's system I could make hard shots look incredibly simple. I still couldn't get all the way out consistently but everyone recognized that I was pocketing better.
But the real kicker for me was when I showed the regulars at my local bar Hal's systems. Now I had bonafide C players making shots that most people on AZ would easily bet their house that these players could not make. I couldn't believe it. These are people that couldn't run 2 balls. Truly. APA 2,3,4s. Not sandbaggers.
They were amazed.
So that's all I meant about this - you can practice shots all day but if you are lining up fundamentally wrong your shot making will be off. One day you could line up nearly right and feel like you are getting better and the next day a little differently and feel like you aren't getting better.
With Hal's systems you simply line up the right way all the time. At least this is my conclusion after many years of thought on the matter.
On a technical note there is only 1 general line that the cueball can travel to the object ball to pocket it. Therefore there is only one way that you must be lined up in relation to the cueball in order to propel it along that one correct path. I think a more proper term would be a vector to the cueball. (not a mathematican and didnt stay at a Holiday Inn Express)
I think we could all agree that no matter how you get there there is only one single way to be lined up for any single shot that is correct. My hypothesis is that all systems that truly work do so by getting the person to be on that line.
The problem with Ghost ball and the repetition method in my opinion and Hal's I think is that it's really hard for a person to line up with an imaginary space and an invisible pinpoint consistently. Combine that with the idea that thin cuts are harder than thick ones and now there are too many variables in the process.
For me, Hal's method reduced this to fixed points that are fairly easy to line up. Edges of balls are always in the same place, on the edge of the ball. The center of the ball is always there.
So now instead of trying to focus on a finite point among a nearly infinite amount of them I was able to reduce that to lining up two lines that are much easier for me to visualize. And it works for me.
Steve, I guess we will have to disagree with each other. The people at the bar I mentioned before would testify to you that I was a practicing maniac. I would spend hours doing drills and working on specific shots.
After Hal I stopped doing that and my game was much better, people commented on how well I was pocketing balls and when I showed them how I did it and saw these C-players jump a skill level in a matter of minutes it convinced me.
I will leave you with another example that makes my point even better.
Banking systems. I think that there is no debate that there are several banking systems that work.
Tom Rossman, Dr. Cue, teaches several of these. I have watched him many times take people who couldn't make a cross side bank 1 out of ten times if they tried 200 times in a row, and teach them to make it four of five in a matter of minutes. He took them from guessing and judging by feel to calculating and measuring.
In Beezer's Billiards in Russelville Arkansas there are many lower level players who were making banks, and multi-rail kicks that they had NO CHANCE to make just 30 minutes prior to Tom's instruction.
So really that is all I want to say on this. A good system gives a player a constant baseline to start from in my opinion. That coupled with structured practice and stiff competition forms good players.
