For some of you what I'm about to write may sound boring, useless, but I'm sure others may appreciate some of it. It's a short summary of my thoughts/feelings on the subject , collected over the past 10 yrs.
Depends on your physiology and your vision center... IF you are opposite eye dominant squaring up is pretty hard without introducing some serious stress on your back and neck to get your head in position... With that said Lee Brett and many others are starting to push the snooker stance which is square... It does have merit but I am not sure everyone is made in a fashion that makes it always the best stance.....
I'm oppposite eye dominant and have been struggling for years to get into a stance of my choice. It's definitely not easy. any help/links/videos/info would help. i was thinking of making a videos of myself by camera and see if some people could see what's wrong or not.
i used to practice bert kinister's long straight one-handed shot, then two-handed stop, and two-handed straight draw. it was good, i i was able to improve, but honestly the stance was still an issue and opposite eye dominant is tricky and as you said , adopting a square textbook stance is not really good in my case i found out.. it puts stress on neck and back. etc.
Originally Posted by BobN
I'm with RandyG on this one. Your stance has to be comfortable for YOU and it has to be such that you see a real vision of the shot or shot line.
much respect to you trying to help, but that particular advice just isn't going to cut it for me. I've tested and been "comfortable" in many different stance positions, as a matter of fact i may be like a cameleon adapting to almost any stance. what this means, is that I've been able to draw the ball at fairly consistent rates with different kind of stances, but never really feeling "on the money" with my stance, that feeling only came to me after playing for some time (a couple of months) on a 30hrs+ playing + practicing stance and stroke in different ways... but then it goes all away .. and then good luck getting it back.
my problem is that to get the feeling of being on that "on the money" stance, that feeling only comes "by luck" by trying a few things.
back in may I tried the MAx eberle 8-video series which he gives , and that worked pretty well, actually i found "on the money" stance within a 1 week or so. the problem is that i stopped playing for 6 months, and now ive tried to apply those same Max eberle video tips, and it seems I feeel completely off.
it's a strange world.. nothing is the same, over time things change and you feel like you're back at square one.
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on a side note that "The Fundamentals Of Pool With Greyghost Part 1 of 2" video posted earlier by Tony_M_D, is good. By looking at it and meditating on my fundamentals, I think i've narrowed the problem now to my wrist / grip.
believe me if you would see me do my stance and hit the white ball you would probably say there is nothing wrong with it , but inside it feels wrong, still.
back in may of this year during my re-adjustments of fundamentals I realized there was something wrong with my grip because the side of my thumb skin right where it folds, that part which is closer to the cue grip - the skin there used to be a lil more used up if you know what I mean, especially I remember when I practiced those draw strokes for many hours, etc.
so a good gentleman bobcmbsu made me realize that the thumb should definitely not be touching the cue at all and the minute i started correcting that, my cue delivery improved by 200%, combined that with the few Max Eberle video tips (find the stroking line then go down on the shot) made me feel again "in the money" since a long time.
however the problem now is, the 6 months of not playing screwed it all up , so it seems. .. now i tried to get back into stance using previously collected info in my mind, but then unocnsciously the "thumb problem" or "Wrist problem", or God only knows what else, all or some of these unknown or known bad habits kept coming back very slightly but enough to make me off my game. I mean you align yourself for a straight in shot 4 diamonds apart and you miss it, you miss it consistently on the same side of the ball. you wonder why because you seem to be aligned etc.. then you wonder if your eyes are the problem. lol
overall when reflecting upon all this, i think to truely improve your game one would need to go at war against one's own bad mechanical habits and correct it practicing it 5-6 times a week for at least 3-4 months , to completely replace the new habits by the old ones. it seems that a few weeks or 1 week is simply not enough.
those are the times when you wish you could start playing pool all over again and forget the old bad habits. and i'ts not like you got those bad habits carelessly. i've seen at least 3 instructors, two of them pro players. but honestly none really truely understand the little intricacies such as your cue grip etc.
but in the end is it really their fault ? plus the "pro player" instructors have their own pefect fundamentals which suit "them", so I can only imagine how hard it can be to find the "perfect" fundamentals for your student.
like in my case, they probably didn't see that my thumb was slightly rubbing against that pool cue and furthermore I thought this side-effect of a fairly rougher skin on the thumb of the grip hand was just a normal side-effect, etc. etc.
i'll end this here before it becomes a book.
With comfortable i mean (if i personally use the word comfortable) that the player is able to build his stance *around the cue* having the important things on a baseline- and hopefully this result will *soon* get natural. And furthermore the stance has to be rockstable so that he will not have non-necessary body-movements.
