With all of the threads and posts about CTE and the way "Feel" comes into play
(subconscious adjustments) nobody has ever described how to aim by feel and why it's the best way to aim. Obviously many think it is the best way to aim because it eventually takes over at some point on ALL aiming systems including ghost ball. Here are some questions regarding it:
1. Is feel the same for all players in determining what to do and how to use it?
2. Is feel transferrable from one player to the next and can it be taught?
3. How is feel geometrically correct over all other methods?
4. Can feel be illustrated on a Wie table?
5. Can the exactness of feel be shown in an algebraic or mathmatical formula which seems to be the final word to validate a system?
6. Is feel the same for an APA3 or anything in between compared to a short stop or pro?
7. Is feel consistent and exact from one shot to the next or from one day to the next?
8. How do you know if your feel manipulation is correct or incorrect before taking the shot?
It's hard to nail down feel but imo it's experience. You can't walk up to a shot for the very first time and "feel" the right angle, though if you have unusually good spatial perception.. maybe you can, sort of. But what people call feel is probably just experience. Your eyes see those balls as two flat discs and they glance at the pocket, then your memory kicks in to a time when you had two similarly-sized and similarly-positioned discs.
1. No way to prove it, but I think almost everyone's brain works the same way in terms of those overlapping discs. Maybe not. They've found patterns in how a brain recognizes text, recognizes faces, recognizes chess patterns... why not an across-the-board pattern for recognizing when you're lined up right on a shot? Again, just a guess. I won't bet anything on it =)
2. Nope, it's experience. You could say it's taught... but it's self-taught.
3. If someone masters feel (by having made any given shot a thousand times and having a straight stoke) then the ball goes in the hole with very high accuracy. I guess you could say that it must be geometrically correct. But feel doesn't claim geometrical correctness and obviously can't be illustrated as such. It just claims results.
4. Nope, see above.
5. Nope. Not many systems can. Ghostball, I guess could.
6. My guess is it's similar across the board, but again no proof.
7. Nope.
8. You feel it. Haha, what a smartass answer. No, but seriously, that's how you know.
You just know you've reached that line of aim. Sometimes you just aren't sure, you only know you're in the ballpark but not positive you're on the exact line. That's true of anything though, otherwise nobody would miss a ball using ghostball.
If I read your post right, you're sort of saying... "people who criticise aiming systems are hypocritical because they expect the system to be diagrammable and geometrically correct. But those who don't use systems have the same shortcomings."
I don't know if feel is the ultimate 'system', but I will say that all other systems use it to an extent. So it may not be perfect but it's necessary.
It's not unfair to demand that [most] aiming systems be reproduceable on paper. The systems involve imaginary balls and lines, and there's no reason those imaginary lines can't be drawn as real lines on a wei table or diagram. For example I can draw a ghost ball from a top down view. If someone teaches me a quarter-ball system and says a 1/4th full hit is a 60 degree cut, I can draw the balls in a 3D program, measure 1/4th ball from the edge of the OB (shooter's perspective), then redraw the CB so it touches the OB while overlapping 1/4th of the edge. If the result puts my cue ball where the ghostball would go in a top down perspective, then the system works on paper.
Most of the feel proponents don't make any claims except that it works. Obviously if they wanna say it works better than everything else out there, that's one pretty bold claim. But it's not like a feel guy says "my system works on paper, why doesn't yours?"
