Playing on the road for years...........
When you are playing in a room and find that the balls are being thrown off line because they are dirty how do you deal with it?
Obviously I play fewer serious cut shot that require English but that is not always possible for good position. It seems that I can shoot a little thicker and this will help. I wonder if others have found “better” solutions.
BTW it is not always possible to stop and clean the balls when an amateur tournament is underway.
I played on the road for years. You had to adapt to all conditions quickly. If you didn't your trip would be a short one.
Dirty balls was very common in many places. Alot of the places back in the day weren't very clean to begin with. Not only the balls being dirty but there were other conditions that made the dirty balls even worse.
Mix in alot of humidity and the dirty balls would get triple bad. The balls would skid and sometimes even seem to stick together a little on the shot.
One thing that helps is to play shape on every shot that you can so that you can force the shot. By that I mean if you are playing shape on a ball you want to be on the side of the ball so you can throw the shot with the english to help it go truely.
If you are cutting a ball to the right you would want to use middle to low left english to kind of force the throw so it doesn't skid. If you are cutting to the left it would be just the opposite.
This will cut down the skids and the cue ball climbing up on the object ball at least on these shots.
On other shots when you shoot the shot you want to make sure you use the whole pocket and over cut a little. When cutting to the right you want to aim to the right side of the pocket. Cutting to the left the opposite. Many of the shots will skid a little so this will help to compensate.
Sometimes I would even have a towel and I would wipe down the balls a little. This helped me because this would make the balls draw a little better than normal and the guy that shoots there all the time is used to the dirty balls. He would get too much draw and english especially right after I wiped them down.
And nobody ever complained when I was just trying to clean the dirty balls. They didn't even know the difference.
Wipe down the rails every once in a while. The chalk sometimes is most of the problem. Especially with the humidity.
This is about all you can do but it can be huge when you consider that one shot can determine if you win or lose.
