enzo said:
me personally, if i was an advanced player, and hal told me these 4 aims covered "any shot on the table; banks, caroms, combinations, and so forth" i would never speak to him again. that is extremely erroneous information. how can you make a 25 degree cut when 3/4 of a ball would send the object ball in a 15 degree angle and a half ball hit would send the ob on a 30 degree angle. the only people he should be telling that to is beginners when they are getting a feel for how things work on a pool table. thats my opinion.
Maybe I should have just let this go to sleep, but I want to mention why I feel so strongly about this.
enzo, you are saying 'beginner only'. I can't whole heartedly agree. I only agree if that particular beginner has no aspirations of becoming a good pool player. I guess it would be OK if the only thing the beginner had in mind was to have fun on APA night and if they stay a 2 or 3 for the next 20 years, that's ok. If they want to go farther than that and get into position play, banking, making difficult shots on purpose, they need to go with something that uses contact points.
Why?
Because using contact points will more readily move the beginning player in the direction of playing by feel. Say you are using contact points to make a long tough shot and you miss the shot. At this point you know that either you miss judged the contact point or you didn't hit the contact point as you intended. If you are using Hal's system and you miss the same shot you could be under the wrong impression. You could have hit it exactly as you meant to and missed because that particular shot fell into one of the gaps in the system. So there you are trying to figure out what you did wrong when you didn't do anything wrong. It would really piss me off if I looked at a shot determined a 1/4 ball hit, hit it exactly how I meant to and miss the shot. I'm not saying that I never missed a shot when I hit it exactly how I meant to, but when it has happened it was because what I meant to do was wrong. It wasn't because the system was wrong.
We are continually hearing from the people that swear by this system. I'd like you to think about this before you swear by it again. We all miss shots. You are using this system and saying how great it is like you never miss, but we all miss. The question I'm asking is why do you miss. These threads that show the gaps in Hal's system tell you that at least some of your misses are not your fault. At least part of the time when you have missed a shot, you probably hit it exactly the way you meant to. So your standing there trying to figure out what you did wrong, and can't.
What about the very good players that are using Hal's system? This is a little more difficult to explain, but I propose this.
Have you ever thought when you made the stroke that you missed the shot and were pleasantly surprised when it goes in center pocket? What may have happened is your subconscious made a correction that was needed. I think that the very good player that is using Hal's system is subconsciously making the corrections needed to fill in the gaps in the system. Don't get upset here. That was a BIG compliment and shows an enormous amount of natural ability. I'm wondering if such a person was to switch their concentration from Hal's system to feel assisted by contact points just how good they could really become. This puts me right back to the beginning statement that contact points will more readily head a player in the direction of playing by feel.
