Hijacking this thread to ask
@dr_dave a question.
Regarding miscues, TP_2.1 neglects frictional forces between the cue ball and the cloth.
In my divorced ways I find myself in 3 leagues, two of which are played primarily on 7’ Diamonds with new Championship cloth, also my home table is an 8’ Olhausen with Simonis 860.
The third league is played on bar tables, which I believe to be outfitted with the shag carpeting from the back of a 1974 VW van
(TBD: either way I’d wake up with a rash if I had a pillow case made out of this stuff - it’s the type of cloth that would give you the chills if you ran your hand across it).
Regardless, I’ve been working on being more annoyingly pocket-speed robotic in my play, using more bottom English to compensate for speed on stop shots, etc…
After getting this pretty well dialed in on the Diamonds, I miscued 3 straight times on similar shots on the rougher cloth using medium to slow speed (but more bottom) to execute some longer distance stop shots.
Intuitively it makes sense that rougher felt may bring the miscue limits tighter to centerline (in the extreme case, the cue ball is glued to the table with a coefficient of friction (COF) of infinity, and anything outside of dead center impact would result in a miscue).
Also intuitively, I’m a mid-to-high range APA 5 who would be dead money at an AZB tournament, so it can’t be dismissed that I was just out of stroke, and as a desperate act of ego preservation I chose to blame the table conditions.
So is it plausible that the COF between the cue ball and the felt is non-negligible in certain conditions? And if so, would it cause an asymmetric effect in terms of miscue limits (e.g. not impacting the top English impact limit as much as the draw impact limit, as top isn’t “fighting” the cloth friction in the same way as the bottom).