I guess I'm just kind of looking for what the things are that I need to focus on primarally to make the most of my time and try and speed the learning curve up as much as possible.
For instance is hitting balls ever night a waste of time if I'm not doing the right "drills"??
thanks guys!
I'm excited for this post because I get to regurgitate some of the things that I've digested myself. What I am about to tell you is coming from someone who is only a few years ahead of you. I'm not as good as some of the players on this site, but what I do have is the fresh memory of my learning curve that perhaps has gotten foggy in time with the more experienced players.
I would go every Monday, take some balls, throw them out on the table, and try to pocket them. I'd do this for hours. Maybe I'd try a drill I learned from someone or saw online, but would get bored and go back to hitting balls. Anyway, the nights that I would pocket lots of balls I would feel like I was improving, and then another nights I wouldn't pocket any balls. When this would happen, I felt like I needed to made an adjustment. So I would change my stance, hold the cue in a different way, ask if eye dominance was important, touch my chin to the cue, stand up more, stand sideways, stand square on, follow through too much, stop following through, yada yada, for years.
I was improving, but very very slowly, and more like a roller coaster.
I was missing two very important concepts.
The first one was feedback. Sure, I was using some sort of feedback... the pocketing of my object ball. And I was ONLY paying attention to the pocketing of my object ball. I would hit the cue ball, and then look at my intended pocket, stand up in anticipation, and wait for it to fall. Then I would look at where the cue ball ended up. When the cue ball ended up good for the next shot, it would boost my confidence. When it ended up bad, then I would feel bad, and think that everything I was doing must be wrong.
What I learned to do (through Joe Tucker's instruction) was focus, instead, on the cue ball / object ball collision. Focus like a cat. Focus so intensely that a laser beam comes out of my pupils and burns a small black hole in space of where I want by cue ball to end up. "Don't go blind after the shot" he says. I may flutter by eyes back and forth between the cue ball and object ball once or twice while I'm getting comfortable and situated, but my final stroke damn sure has a well known cue ball target. And I watch to make sure it hits its target. I stopped caring what my body looked like, as long as I made the cue ball go to its target.
Watching to make sure the cue ball actually ends up where you are aiming provides the feedback you need to learn properly. This brings me to the second concept: subconscious competence.
Your consciousness is simply not capable of performing repeatable motor skills. It simply isn't. This was a hard and stubborn lesson to learn. But it makes sense. Try throwing a baseball using only conscious effort, or driving a car. Sure you use your consciousness to make decisions, like how far away your catcher is, or that you need to get off at the next exit. But your arms and feet are moved by muscle which is controlled by your subconsciousness. If you try to intervene using your consciousness (by "thinking" about it), your physical pertubation will loose consistency. You ALLOW your subconsciousness to use its competence, and you TRUST it. (You trusted it to drive you to the pool hall with out crashing your car.)
Same thing for cue sports. There are hundreds of aiming systems available. And people will argue which one is the best. They even argue on this forum.
ANY aiming system will work if it is successful in distracting your consciousness from interfering with your subconscious competence. This is because the aiming system forces you to make some sort of decision (ghost ball location, contact point, pivot, CTE, praying, whatever), and allows room for all of your experience with the pool table to bubble up and slightly modify your conscious decision. People may refer to this as "feel", but it isn't magic, its just psychology (though it must still be learned from years of practice).
So I became aware of these two things and started using them, along with an aiming system that my brain likes. I approach the shot, choose which discrete unit of my aiming system the current shot represents, go down into the shot, feel comfortable with the fact that my brain is using me as a puppet and allow it to modify my chosen discrete aiming system unit if it wants to, stroke, watch the cue ball make contact, and then analyze the results. If I was too far right or left, then I say to myself "Oops, I chose the wrong number [of my aiming system]". I'll remember that next time." After a while, you will find that a direct hit on the targetyour brain chooses results in a pocketed ball as well as proper cue ball position.
Now, for the cue ball position, there are lots of drills you SHOULD do. But this is all food for your brain. If you feed it, it'll bubble back up when you need it to.
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Other small things that I learned separately from this that helped me:
- Learn not to move your head during your stroke.
- Learn not to stand up until the cue ball hits the object ball.
- Learn what a clean and full follow through feels like and do it every time, even when you are nervous
- You don't need to shoot very hard to get a lot of follow or draw
- Spin is your best friend. Learn to use it all of the time.
- Find a comfortable stance that doesn't hurt.
- Learn that you can't pocket every ball. Play a safety.
- Get the hell away from bar rules.
- Get the hell away from bar tables and go to 9-foot tables if you can.
- Get your own cue and always use your own cue for practice. Joe recommends a low deflection shaft, especially for beginners, because squirt is less prominent. I agree, and the proof is in my avatar.
I hope this helps. I had fun writing it.
