Putting this here instead of new thread.
Ronnie O'Sullivan's Touch of Anything But
Deserves its own thread tbh bc a complete hijacking is taking place lol
Interesting vid. Mike Sigel said the same thing as Ronnie about always playing a little bit of side and never really wanting to hit it dead center. The idea being, as mentioned by some above, that the vast majority of your misses will be on that side of the ball to slightly varying degrees compared to 50/50 left/right of center. Same reasoning as golfers never playing for str8 shots and always choosing a str8ish fade or draw instead....it manages the miss.
The real interesting stuff in the vid tho starts around 6:45 when the guy breaks down Ronnie's delivery and explains a 'wheel-piston' stroke where Ronnie drops the cue to initiate the backswing and raises it back up to complete the backswing before the downswing from there. The motion is described as circular or a loop. It is continuous and has no real 'pause' in the backswing. I play this style as does, Earl, Efren, SVB, Mika, Varner,and many more, including just about any flowy Pinoy stroke. Fran sometimes describes the Filipino stroke as a "continuous loop". It is interesting Ronnie's stroke falls under the same category.
When comparing various golf swings, there is a category of swings that are 'physics-perfect'...swings featuring gravity and manipulation of momentum as the main drivers. A common feature of them is 'effortless power'. For pool, and I guess snooker thanks to Ronnie, this type of motion with the down/up component, or continuous loops if you will, is closer to being 'physics-perfect' than the str8 back, str8 thru cuing, which is often considered preferable mechanics-wise. If you are trying to understand Pinoy strokes, SVB's or any other of these (vertically) wobbly strokes, this move that Ronnie does, highlighted in the video, is at the core of them.
