How straight or consistent is your stroke if...

[BRKNRUN]

Here is a simple little drill that will check your straightness of stroke and your focus at the same time....(it drives me nuts)

Put a OB on the spot...Place a CB for a dead straight in shot into the near corner pocket...You can place it as close or as far as you want..just make it straight in.

Pocket the OB and draw back...Place another OB on the spot and repeat (without moving the CB)

See how many times you can pocket a ball into the same pocket (from the spot) without hitting a rail......Cheating the pocket is allowed....unless you are using CTE...(JK)

My humble average is about 6 or 7 shots before it gets all haywire......My best is a modest 12....A good goal would be to complete the whole rack of 15 balls.

Seems easy right????

 

[thefonz]

usually both

I quess what i was trying to get at was this, we all miss shot for basically two reasons, poor stroke or bad aim or alignment. I feel that you can work on your stroke mechanics to get it straight and I was looking for some sort of a way to measure my stroke to be able to eliminate that as a cause of most of my misses.

you have to fix your alignment first before you fix your stroke. if your alignment is consistantly out, you will build a stroke (a crooked one) that compensates for being out of line. same thing that plagues golfers. that being said, focus on how you get the cue through the ball straight, and not pulling the cue back straight. naturally, not everyones arm swings straight on the backswing, people usually force it to do so bu turning the cue, wrist, folding the elbow in/out. many times you will go through the ball straighter if you don't focus on pulling the cue back straight, there is nothing wrong with "cueing around the corner" so to speak if the end effect is that you go through the ball straight. in fact trying to keep your cue dead straight back can adversly affect your natural stroke. and again, like for golf professionals, there are more differences between eachother in their backswings than there are in their throughswings after impact, they all pretty much are the same through impact.

-try keeping your elbow and wrists aligned on top of eachother in neutral positions, directly in your line not cocked one way or the other.
- keep your elbow as still as possible without having it effect your impact with the ball, your type of shot you play will dictate whether your elbow will fall (there's lots of threads on this forum about elbow drop)

Snooker legend Jimmy White is a prime example, his cue goes back really crooked but just before and after impacting the cueball it's bang on.

good luck

 

[JB Cases]

Here is a simple little drill that will check your straightness of stroke and your focus at the same time....(it drives me nuts)

Put a OB on the spot...Place a CB for a dead straight in shot into the near corner pocket...You can place it as close or as far as you want..just make it straight in.

Pocket the OB and draw back...Place another OB on the spot and repeat (without moving the CB)

See how many times you can pocket a ball into the same pocket (from the spot) without hitting a rail......Cheating the pocket is allowed....unless you are using CTE...(JK)

My humble average is about 6 or 7 shots before it gets all haywire......My best is a modest 12....A good goal would be to complete the whole rack of 15 balls.

Seems easy right????

That's a great drill. I tried it four times and the best I got was five. Doesn't take much to get out of line.

Also gives even more respect for this accomplishment by Allen Hopkins. Reportedly he once ran 35 balls without touching a rail in 14.1.