Pat Johnson is right, sort of......

JB Cases

JB Cases

www.jbcases.com
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Billiards expounded to all degrees of amateur players
By John Patrick Mannock, S. A. Mussabini

Pay attention to instruction on the "half ball stroke".

This is from 1904

As you can see the discussions between "mathematicians" and "systems" players has been happening for more than a hundred years.

Given that Hal Houle comes from this era I think he should get a pass. He's had 80 years to think about all the way to aim. Now this isn't another thread to get everyone to go off. It's only intended to show that people a hundred years ago were thinking about aiming in many diverse ways.
 
Pool/billiards instructional materials from bygone eras

JB Cases said:
Billiards expounded to all degrees of amateur players
By John Patrick Mannock, S. A. Mussabini

Pay attention to instruction on the "half ball stroke".

This is from 1904

As you can see the discussions between "mathematicians" and "systems" players has been happening for more than a hundred years.

Given that Hal Houle comes from this era I think he should get a pass. He's had 80 years to think about all the way to aim. Now this isn't another thread to get everyone to go off. It's only intended to show that people a hundred years ago were thinking about aiming in many diverse ways.
Click to expand...

John:

Thank you for posting this! I have always had a keen interest in books and other instructional materials about cue sports from bygone eras. The writing technique was very different back then; "plates" (pictures) were high-cost in those days, and the author had to minimize their use to keep reproduction costs down. The author had to have a knack for describing, in words alone, how to stand, form a bridge (with all the subtleties of the contact points within the bridge), how to grip (same issue with describing the contact point subtleties), etc. And the author had to do this very clearly. Often when I post here, I make a conscious effort to resist the urge to post pictures. When I describe such things as the stance and bridge I use, etc., I do my best to emulate the skill of those bygone era writers, and try to explain it just with the written word. I may not always do a good job, though, because those writers were really talented.

Even though I pulled the .PDF of this book down to my computer, I'd love to have the actual book. I'm always on the hunt for the actual books themselves. I sometimes find myself "whitegloving it" through collections of old books at library sales, etc. That is, when I stumble into them. All too often, I miss out on these types of sales and bazaars because they're quietly held and I just have no time (too busy) to seek them out.

Oh, and on topic with your post -- I have no problems at all believing that "CTE-like" systems existed way, way back then. When you read these works from those old times, you realize that folks were more in tune with the physical relationships -- whether actual or ethereally -- of the body, the object balls, the cue ball, the table, the cue, etc. It comes through loud and clear in these old published works. With the notable exception of snooker, I don't find this in pool/billiards instructional material of today. They seem to just gloss-over these things.

Anyway, keep posting stuff like this -- there are definitely fans for it, trust me.

Thanks,
-Sean
 
WOW!
Great find.
Thanks for posting John.

I laughed when I saw the writing at the first part which indicated, that pool won't be "learnt" from a book.

Right now, I don't want to cloud my mind with additional information about pool but will read this at a later date.

Thanks again for posting.
 
JB when I read the title of your post, I thought, what did he just say,
but I agree with you 100%. We are all trying to get to the same place, we are just taking different paths to get there.
 
JB Cases said:
Billiards expounded to all degrees of amateur players
By John Patrick Mannock, S. A. Mussabini

Pay attention to instruction on the "half ball stroke".

This is from 1904

As you can see the discussions between "mathematicians" and "systems" players has been happening for more than a hundred years.

Given that Hal Houle comes from this era I think he should get a pass. He's had 80 years to think about all the way to aim. Now this isn't another thread to get everyone to go off. It's only intended to show that people a hundred years ago were thinking about aiming in many diverse ways.
Click to expand...
Cool book, but as far as I can tell from a brief skim, the section on "half ball stroke" is about cue ball control, not about aiming. I do agree the half ball hit is important (like the stun shot) to cue ball control, as I said in the thread "Is 30 Degrees (1/2 Ball) The Best Cut Angle for Position Play?".

The author brings up one aspect of the 1/2 ball hit's importance in position play that I didn't, and that can be related to aiming: "naturally rolling" is the most common and easiest to attain cue ball state of motion, and the 1/2 ball hit with a rolling cue ball gives the easiest and most reliable cue ball path for the player to estimate. In this way it's like the stun shot in that it provides a useful position-play reference from which other, fatter or thinner, hits can be estimated to help judge the resulting cue ball's path.

I've said that CTE uses the 1/2 ball hit as an aiming reference from which other, fatter or thinner, hits are estimated to help judge the resulting object ball's path. Maybe that's what you're referring to - it's similar in concept to what the author says about the 1/2 ball hit, but on a different topic (aiming vs. position play).

pj
chgo
 
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My personal theory on the half-ball sighting is that you can only go a half-ball either direction from there to get to the shot line. No matter what shot you will shoot directly to a pocket if you start with just looking from the cue ball's center to the edge of the object ball then you are at most a half ball away from the shot line.

What the author of the first book said that stuck me is that starting with the half ball give the shooter a definite point to aim at. A physical reference that does not change.
 
JB Cases said:
My personal theory on the half-ball sighting is that you can only go a half-ball either direction from there to get to the shot line. No matter what shot you will shoot directly to a pocket if you start with just looking from the cue ball's center to the edge of the object ball then you are at most a half ball away from the shot line.

What the author of the first book said that stuck me is that starting with the half ball give the shooter a definite point to aim at. A physical reference that does not change.
Click to expand...

The alignment portion of CTE/Pro One (the CTE half-ball sighting you mentioned) is what I originally thought was the most important part about it and had even called it in the past, an "alignment system", but then at that time, I hadn't taken Stan's CTE/Pro One course....
:(:(
 
JB Cases said:
My personal theory on the half-ball sighting is that you can only go a half-ball either direction from there to get to the shot line. No matter what shot you will shoot directly to a pocket if you start with just looking from the cue ball's center to the edge of the object ball then you are at most a half ball away from the shot line.
Click to expand...
Actually, even closer than that - you're at most 1/4 ball from any shot (assuming you chose the correct half of the CB in the first place). If you start by lining up center-to-center, then you're at most 1/2 ball from any shot, left or right.

What the author of the first book said that stuck me is that starting with the half ball give the shooter a definite point to aim at. A physical reference that does not change.
Click to expand...
And, BTW, both of these points have been made repeatedly by the "naysayers" for 10-15 years.

pj
chgo
 
Pat I don't really want to get into a CTE debate. I feel now and have also always felt that having a finite starting point has been a cornerstone of these aiming systems. In fact that's what Hal has said all along.

Where we differ and perhaps we may always differ is that I don't feel like I am starting at a half ball and then guessing my way into the right aiming line. Nor do I feel that I am consciously choosing it. I think that I do the steps and I get to the aiming line and I don't know exactly HOW that is occuring but I do know that IF I try to choose the line without doing it then my results are worse. And am not talking about the dinky little drunk girl scout shots. I am talking about the weird mid-table off angle difficult shots. Shots where even if I use GB and intituition I am likely to dog it very badly anyway.

At some point when I get my overhead camera set up properly I am gong to release a video on YouTube that shows me shooting the kind of shots I am talking about. The shots which most good players would recongnize as the "problem" shots that most players avoid trying because they are low percentage.

I understand that you and the anti-Hal folks have said that focusing on a half ball to begin with is a defnite starting point and that you think just the act of focusing on "aiming" is itself a benefit. And of course that's true. I know that when I really try hard to use GB then I have better results with GB in general.

I personally believe however that Hal has discovered something else that connects the same starting point method of alignment/aiming to the getting into position/perception phase that allows a shooter to get to the right line by starting at a point that is fixed and is the same (or nearly the same) for any given shot directly to the pocket.

I think he figured this out after messing with it for years. It seems clear to me that not all billiard authors of 100 years ago were of the same mind concerning how to aim. Some thought it so basic that they hardly bothered to address it, others stood fast on Ghost Ball, some were proponents of a half-ball aim to start the aiming process. Others claimed that the best way to aim was to use mostly full ball, quarter ball, half ball and "fine" overlap with just minor adjustments in between.

I just thought it very interesting that the debate on the "proper" way to aim has gone on far longer than the internet has been around for longer than most of us have been. In fact it appears that a lot of the comprehensve books on billiards technique were written between 1850 and 1880.
 
excerpt from: William Hendrick's History of Billiards... 1974

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" By 1807, billiard players were well on their way to discovering the full potential of the cue. [E.] White described, in addition to the center stroke, the low stroke already mentioned and two types of high strokes. Significantly, White in his artful descriptions was the first writer to use the terms "cue ball" and "object ball". He also uses the term "bridge" which may be another first.

Although he is not aware of right and left english, he explains carefully the use of high and low strokes. "When a ball is struck beneath its centre," he explains, "it recoils from that against which it is propelled with a slow whirling motion, a circumstance which affords an advantage peculiar to the cue player, and which often enables him to score under the most adverse circumstances..."

....With the high stroke the cue contacts the ball "above the centre and [is] parallel with the table"

A ball, when struck above its centre, imparts only a portion of its velocity to the ball against which it is propelled, and continues its motion onwards in a direction more or less straight....If it be struck under the center it will recoil; but if it be made to receive the impression of the cue above its centre, it will continue to roll onwards.

White's "high oblique stroke" causes the ball to jump off the table surface.

In this stroke the cue, instead of being held in the usual way, upon a level with the table, is applied to the ball with considerable obliquity, in some cases nearly perpendicularly....so that the ball is forced against the table, rather than pushed smoothly over its surface, in consequence of which it obtains a leaping, instead of a continued motion; and the striker is thus enabled to force it over a contiguous ball.

All this before 1807. "
-------------------------

And when most Americans still played with a mace...
 
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