Open Source Pool - The Hidden Dance of Stroke and Aim

Oliver

Oliver

San Francisco
Silver Member
Hello pool fans.

My name is Oliver Ruuger. I've been lucky to be able to work on my pool game almost full time (3-4 hours a day, 6 days a week + tournaments) for the past 3 years and have traveled to some of the biggest tournaments in the US with decent results. For context i am a low/mid level "pro" at about 730 Fargo and a certified instructor. I'm focused on 1 pocket.

Increasingly I feel I am more interested in practicing, teaching and exploring the game than I am in actually competing.

I've written a bunch about the things I am working on, in my own game and with some local Bay Area students, mainly on Reddit. Someone suggested I should post my writing here on AZ, in order to have a conversation with a larger and more experienced group of people. Makes sense.

So here goes, my most recent one. It will be a long read.

The Hidden Dance of Stroke and Aim.

This wall of text is neither about how to shoot nor is it about how to aim.

Instead, it unravels the underlying relationship between these two main pillars in our game.

I believe that understanding this very personal symbiosis will significantly accelerate the progress for anyone working on improving their game.

This exploration began about 18 months ago, with an unexpected discovery during a routine practice session. What started as a simple video review of a drill led to insights about the hidden relationship between stroke mechanics and aiming that would fundamentally change my understanding of cue sports fundamentals.

Core Definitions

To properly explore this subject, let's establish some key terms:

Stroke
represents our primary tool in the game - the complete physical movement of the cue - from backswing to impact to follow-through. It's how we execute our intended shot.

Aim
encompasses both our visual perception and feel for how to apply the stroke in order to achieve our desired outcome. It's our outcome prediction system.

Straight Stroke and Straight Aim
occur when the cue is moved on a linear path along the true aiming line, resulting in the cue ball moving along that same exact path as well (assuming no intentional sidespin). This represents the ideal alignment between perception and execution.

Story time - The Initial Discovery

In April 2023, during a late night practice session with a friend, we recorded some basic drills, including the center table back-and-forth shot. The next day, reviewing the footage revealed something interesting: I noticed that my cue appeared to be always tilted slightly to the right, with the tip positioned with a subtle left english - despite this being a simple center-ball exercise.

What caught my attention wasn't just the misalignment, but how my stroke would adjust during execution. Just before impact, my cue would pivot slightly, achieving a straight hit - most of the time. I noticed that at times, when this pivot was a little early or a little late, the shots had a fraction of unintentional sidespin and in some cases were mishit altogether.

This correction happened automatically, without any awareness. At the time of shooting, I was convinced that my aim and cue were dead straight.

I had of course shot this drill many times before, but had always assumed that any accidental sidespin could only come from a poor stroke. Aiming this shot seemed so simple, it hadn’t even occurred to me that my alignment could be off. We even had a golf tee as a visual target, perfectly placed on the center diamond.

This is an actual clip from that same night. The quality isn’t amazing but you can clearly see the cue tilted to the side during aim.

https://imgur.com/UpwGZVb

After doing some research online, I came across several instances of people describing what sounded like a very similar issue, but I could not find anyone with an explanation as to what could be the cause, never mind the solution.

This set me off on this quest to understand and eventually correct what was causing these issues with my stroke.

The immediate natural reaction was of course to try and simply physically retrain my alignment and delivery. Over the next year and a half (!) I ended up tweaking every possible element in my technique, what now feels like a hundred times over, trying every last thing to correct my arced stroke and angled aim. At different times I believed the fault to be with the wrong vision center.. elbow angle.. grip.. stance.. delivery.. you name it, I tried to “fix” it!

During this period of 18 months, I recorded over 1000 (no exaggeration) slow motion videos of all the various changes I made, trying to discover why I always seem to align slightly to the right and aim the tip to CB slightly to the left. And no matter what I changed, somehow the only working recipe for a successful shot remained the same - I would have to aim slightly to the left and at the moment of the stroke pivot my cue onto the shot line.

Expanding the study to other players locally revealed that this quirk wasn't unique to my game - nearly every player showed some variation of this pattern. Among all the footage, only two players displayed naturally straight strokes: one young local player and a world champion (Thorsten).

I spent over a year to finally pin down the exact mechanics which physically caused the arc in my stroke. Way too long - it took a while to land on the correct methods. In the process I designed and built a stroke trainer which essentially forced me to deliver the cue straight and allowed me to develop the muscle memory needed to do it with some consistency.

https://imgur.com/a/wf5I71l

Fast forward a few months - I was finally able to physically perform a straight stroke - at least some of the time. With it came a different problem. Every time that my videos showed that I delivered the cue straight, I would nearly always miss the straight in shot to the right.

The only reasonable explanation remained that I must be aiming wrong. So next, I tried manually propping up the shot and cue to be perfectly straight and looking down the line of a shot that I knew was set up correctly. As you might have guessed, for some strange reason, this simple straight-in shot didn't look straight to me! Surely I must have set it up wrong. But no matter how many times I repeated the setup and tried to adjust my vision center and head alignment, a straight cue on a straight shot line ALWAYS looked angled and the center of CB looked and “felt” like left spin.

Now what? I figured that I just had to get used to how the correct aim looks. HAMB and all that. So I forced myself to play with what looked like the “wrong” alignment for months hoping that it would somehow click into place and I would start to see it as correct… Well, things got a bit better, and there were some days when things felt okay but it never lasted. I discovered later that any improvement that I was able to achieve was there only for the straight shots that I was actually actively practicing for hours every day. When I switched to just playing the game, it was incredibly difficult to force myself to shoot shots that looked “wrong” to my eyes. The moment I let my guard down, old muscle memory would inevitably creep back in until I was right back to where I started.

So what was the solution? First let's look at what caused the issue.
 
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Understanding Stroke Development

To understand this phenomenon, let's examine how players typically develop their stroke mechanics through different stages of progression.

The Beginner Phase

New players start with basic physical movements, learning to connect their cue with the cue ball. Their stroke is initially uncoordinated and inconsistent. Parallel to this physical learning, they begin developing basic predictive abilities - although at this stage, each shot remains largely experimental.

As players accumulate table time, their physical movements become more consistent and they start forming basic associations between action and outcome. This marks the beginning of aim development, occurring naturally alongside stroke refinement.

The Regular Player Phase

With continued play, players develop muscle memory. This allows the body to execute regularly occurring actions more efficiently and with less and less conscious thought involved. This is how humans naturally optimize physical movements: by finding the path of least resistance that feels natural and comfortable.

Playing pool, our body tends to adapt its motions to minimize strain or awkwardness. This can feel smooth and even consistent, which seems like a positive thing. However, this "comfortable" natural movement rarely achieves our goal of moving the cue linearly straight on the shot line.

The takeaway here is that the body naturally prioritizes efficiency and comfort, not straightness. This means that while the stroke movement does become more consistent and repeatable with practice, it has no incentive to develop to be ‘straight’.

How does aim develop in conjunction with a consistent but non-linear stroke?

First let's look at a scenario when a player's alignment and visual perception (aim) is true, but their cue moves in an arc. The simple answer is that the CB will not move along the aiming line.

This leads to a crucial development during this phase: the player's aim adapts to complement their personal stroke path. This adaptation happens gradually through thousands of repetitions, typically without conscious awareness. Most players don't ever realize they're consistently addressing the cue ball slightly off-center and off-angle to achieve a straight center-ball hit - to their perception (just like mine), their alignment appears correct and their brain interprets it as “straight”.

This creates an interesting dynamic: the stroke and aim become interdependent. The stroke's path influences the aiming adjustments, while these adjusted sight patterns reinforce the stroke's characteristics. This forms what I call "closed loop dependency."

In plain terms, as the player's arced stroke has caused them to learn to aim “wrong”, the player is now dependent on always having to pivot their cue off their aiming line, in order to make shots as intended. A straight stroke will no longer work for this player.

The Competitive Phase

As players reach a competitive level, they often encounter a progress plateau, as the “learning” phase of their game slows down and consistency and execution become higher priority.

This typically triggers a search for mechanical improvements, leading to "fragmented learning" - a collection of disconnected technical adjustments gathered from various sources:

- Random non-objective advice from other players
- YouTube tutorials promising quick fixes
- Copying professional techniques without understanding context

This is also where the biggest weakness of the non-linear stroke and aim loop dependency starts to show.

Competitive players with this issue often experience significant variance between their best and average performance, particularly magnified under pressure. A common scenario emerges: faced with a routine shot in a crucial situation, they focus intensely on perfect execution - only to miss unexpectedly - with no apparent reason why.

This occurs because conscious focus on "perfect" technique or straight delivery disrupts the subconscious adjustments their game relies upon. Instead of allowing the established stroke-aim system to function naturally and subconsciously, they attempt to force a technically different stroke that is in conflict with their ingrained aiming pattern.

Myself and I am sure many others are familiar with this scenario. It is incredibly disheartening and can feel like an inescapable loop as there just doesn’t seem to be any logical explanation why things go wrong. What's even worse - the natural response is to again look for fault in your mechanics and tweak and tweak some more, introducing even more discord and inconsistency. I’ve seen players get obsessive in looking for these “faults”, trying to implement little tweaks and changes over and over again while their game stagnates and confidence drops.

Two Paths Forward

With this in mind, two viable approaches to improvement can be considered:

Path One - Embrace and Refine

The first approach involves thoroughly understanding and accepting your personal stroke and aim patterns. This means:

- Analyzing your specific stroke characteristics through video analysis
- Understanding how different body positions affect your aim and execution
- Developing compensatory techniques for various shooting scenarios
- Building a strong mental game to maintain consistency under pressure

Understanding exactly how different circumstances affect your stroke (with the aid of slow motion video) will help remove the mystery from many scenarios and then making specific adaptations to your aim and alignment is an effective way to increase consistency of execution.

An example: A player who often scratches in the left side pocket on their break should not focus on trying to hit the cue ball in the center, but instead focus on finding the correct aiming point and angle which produces a center ball hit. It will likely be a little off angle and with some intentional side english.

The main challenge with this path is its reliance on subconscious corrections, making it vulnerable to pressure and external disruptions. Success requires you to practice all shots regularly to maintain reliable execution. Any distractions, on or off the table, can have a pronounced impact on your performance.

Path Two - Reconstruct Your Stroke AND Your Aim, together.

The second approach involves rebuilding both stroke and aim simultaneously - a more challenging but potentially more rewarding path. This approach requires understanding a fundamental truth: the body has a powerful mechanism for finding comfort in discomfort through homeostasis, but this process requires patience and disciplined practice. Key elements include:

- Identifying and correcting underlying mechanical flaws affecting stroke straightness
- Retraining visual perception to align with straight mechanics
- Developing new muscle memory patterns
- Building confidence in the revised technique

The critical insight here is that mechanical improvements alone often fail because they don't address the underlying perceptual adaptations. Both elements must evolve together for lasting improvement.
 
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The Role of Visual Perception

In order to understand how to ‘reset’ our vision, we have to understand what actually happened when our aim adapted to our stroke.

In cuesports, we use both eyes to aim because depth perception is very useful to assess the geometry of the table and estimate angles. Our brain essentially receives information from two points of reference (binocular vision) - calculating and showing us a composite image.

What this means is that neither of our eyes is actually aligned with the shot line or the cue. Each of our eyes sees the line from the side, at an angle. And our brain will translate these two angled views into a single visual that from a specific position will appear to us as “straight”. What this means is that there is no objective “straight” line as long as we use both eyes to aim - there is only our personal perception of it. And this perception can be tweaked and changed.

The amazing thing here is that in the scenario of the player with the arced stroke, their brain will over time start to interpret the angled cue as correct (straight), and the side of the cue ball as center (which is the only scenario for that player to achieve a consistent center ball hit). This happens, it appears, by effectively registering less information from one of our eyes. It's called eye suppression. Our brain still receives the picture from both eyes, but chooses to ignore part of it.

It is an effect similar to how our nose is always in our vision but our brain filters it out and we don’t actively see it. We only “notice” our nose if we consciously focus on it. You can try it now.

I’ve arrived at this conclusion through personal experimentation and research. I would love it if a professional in the field would share their expertise here.

The result is that once your brain has configured your vision and therefore your aim to your arced stroke, a straight shot will now look wrong! Center of the cue ball will look as either left or right and a perfectly straight cue will look angled.

How to learn to see “straight” again?

In my trials to understand what was going on with my vision, I saw an eye doctor and started reading about various vision and eye conditions. A breakthrough came when I stumbled on something called a “Brock string” - a vision therapy tool, used to train eye teaming and focusing abilities.

I had an idea to tweak the the traditional Brock string into a pool specific tool more out of curiosity than anything. When using it for the very first time, I immediately noticed something odd - when I placed the tool at the exact spot under my chin where the cue would normally be - the vision picture of the tool from one of my eyes became much fainter. The vision from my other eye almost completely took over.

Somehow I was seeing the string (cue) almost exclusively with my right eye. My left eye was somehow partially “switched” off. As a result, the string looked “straight” to me only if I moved it about half an inch further towards my right eye, which was very close to the same amount that my cue was always offline by!

There was a simple exercise to address this. I closed my right eye, “forcing” my brain to show me the sight picture only from the (previously suppressed) left eye only. When I then opened both eyes, the previously faint image from the left eye now appeared much stronger. It literally felt like a switch was flicked and the sight from my left eye got turned “on” again.

It only took a few minutes of this exercise and all of a sudden I could see the cue correctly in my peripheral vision with both eyes when I was playing, and for the very first time it became trivial to line up perfectly straight.

It no longer looked “wrong”.

At first, the effect wouldn't last very long, and I had to keep “reminding” my brain to show me the vision from my left eye. But as I kept doing the exercise for about 10 minutes every morning and night, it has now, after about 4 months, become pretty much permanent.

Once I was finally able to line up and aim “straight”, the straight delivery version of my stroke I had previously built finally had the right circumstances to start to work properly. And once the shots started going in with straight aim and a straight stroke, the whole thing became easier - it became a self reinforcing system.

I no longer have “terrible” days where I miss routine shots for no reason. I still have good days and bad days, sure, but my A game is much much closer to my B and C game. It is an incredible boost to your confidence when you can shoot under pressure, without having that “good” gut feeling about a shot and you still make it perfectly, purely focusing on good mechanics. I no longer rely fully on subconscious corrections to make the shot work.

Conclusion

This struggle revealed that the relationship between stroke and aim is much more complex than traditionally thought. Whether choosing to refine existing patterns or rebuild from foundation, success requires targeting both the mechanical and the perceptual, at the same time.

Thanks for reading

Once again, whoever has read this mammoth of a post to the very end, thank you. It has taken me months of work to put together. I hope it will help someone and I would love to hear from players working on similar issues.
 
Great post, Oliver. Glad to see you posting here as well. Have you considered starting a Substack? I would definitely subscribe.

It's really interesting to hear your topics on this because I have a similar issue. I align slightly right of center, steer to the left on follow through, and I'll naturally miss a straight shot to the right (CB too far left) if I don't compensate. I've also been working on it for the past 18 months, including getting help from Thorsten and Stephen Feeney (coach of Ronnie O'Sullivan and Mark Williams). It's funny that you mention Thorsten as having a naturally straight stroke because he frequently mentions that he feels like he has a similar issue.

A common scenario emerges: faced with a routine shot in a crucial situation, they focus intensely on perfect execution - only to miss unexpectedly - with no apparent reason why
Click to expand...
This resonated a lot and led me to continuously tweak my mechanics, even though my game was "perfectly fine" by many people's standards (~630 Fargo).

For the two paths, Thorsten also offered me the same choice by different names: "compensating" or "fixing". He seemed to imply that neither one was the right choice and many top players have went with the "compensating" route.

The Brock string is interesting because it seems similar to the SightRight tool that Stephen Feeney uses in his lessons. These types of tools seem really helpful in learning more about how you "see" and what is optimal.

My latest change was to rotate my shoulder a few inches farther back to be completely in line with my head (which you already do). It's been about a month, but this seems to have completely solved my alignment and vision issues, but not the issue with steering the cue to the left on follow through. We'll see where this latest adjustment will take me!
 
This is very interesting to me. I have vision issues that require a very strong prism in my glasses lenses to keep me from seeing double. Some of the things that Oliver described are exactly what I deal with. I can line up a perfectly straight-in shot, and when I get down over it, it does not look straight. It looks like I need to cut the OB slightly to the left (IOW, it looks like I need to aim the cueball slightly to the right.) I am left eye dominant, right handed. I have to consciously keep my head to the right so that the shaft is more under my left eye. I see cut shots much better this way, but still have the distortion. Likely caused by the prism in my lenses
 
Oliver said:
Yes it's long. I can't make this topic into short form.

You really think this is AI?
Click to expand...
I had a few beers last night and I seem to have offended by being flippant. Sorry if I offended you. No, I do not think is is AI.

What I do think is that your points could have been made more concisely. However since I really have nothing to contribute to your thread, I will take my leave.

Bon Chance
 
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Thanks very much! I encourage the naysayers to read the whole post. To entice them to do so, I respectfully submit the following TL;DR generated by AI:

TL;DR: The Hidden Dance of Stroke and Aim

Oliver Ruuger, a low/mid-level "pro" pool player and instructor with 3 years of full-time practice, shares insights into the relationship between stroke mechanics and aiming. His journey began 18 months ago with a discovery that his stroke was slightly misaligned, even during simple drills. This led him to explore how his stroke adjusted subconsciously during execution to compensate for this misalignment.

After extensive video analysis and experimenting with various adjustments to his technique, Oliver realized that nearly every player has a similar issue. Over time, players develop "closed-loop dependency" between stroke and aim, where their stroke pattern shapes their aiming, and vice versa. This results in players naturally aiming slightly off to compensate for their stroke arc, which disrupts their ability to consistently perform straight shots.

Oliver presents two paths for improvement:

  1. Embrace and Refine: Players can accept their unique stroke and aim patterns, adjusting them to improve consistency.
  2. Reconstruct Stroke and Aim Together: A more difficult approach, requiring rebuilding both stroke mechanics and visual perception to align with straight execution.
Through experimentation, Oliver discovered that visual perception plays a crucial role in this process. His breakthrough came when he retrained his eyes using a vision therapy tool, the Brock string, which helped him see straight shots more naturally. After months of practice, he was able to consistently line up straight shots, improving his performance and confidence.

Oliver concludes that success in pool requires addressing both stroke mechanics and visual perception simultaneously, and that both aspects must evolve together for lasting improvement.
 
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