Mert,
I am glad that my simple drawing allowed you to finally recognize the futility of arguing for the fuller, rather than thinner,-than-half-ball-hit bias on the opening shot. Once one sees the image of the "ghost ball" alongside the desired path of the red ball, the reality is undeniable.
You needn't have been offended when I originally contradicted your post advocating such a full hit which I thought flew in the face of facts.
I was encouraged that you've gotten past most of your issues with me and I was about ready to move on. We all care about the game here.
Yet, since you seem to still feel the need to openly undermine me about my teaching qualifications, of which you know little, I am compelled to address it.
The diagram on this link posted by my friend Ira for example seems perfectly correct, but the cue ball, played with right english, doesn't follow a straight line in real life. It first moves to the left and than back to the right again. I remember feeling like an idiot when Pedro explained it to me at Master billiards years ago."How did I not see this all these years?" Apparently I'm not the only one.
You then implied, rather amusingly, that my diagram evidenced a lack of knowledge about the existence or effects of cue ball swerve. It may have struck you as very odd that my plate, entitled "3-cushion Opening Break Analysis", did not include the path of the cue ball to score the opening break. For the purposes of our discussion on hit, I was focusing on the red ball path over the cue ball path and therefore essentially eliminated all of the cue ball traces from the picture.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/68786535@N05/6260939983/sizes/l/in/photostream/
The dotted, straight line that you decided to take literally - the one that extended through the "ghost ball", and then way past through rail, DIDN'T represent a literal cue ball path - which would have meant a jump shot off the table (!). I would have left the line out altogether, if I didn't wish to graphically highlight the overall red ball cut angle for more emphasis. In fact, had I included a parabolic spline in its place to indicate the swerving cue ball, I would have had to exaggerate its curve (in order for it to be even noticeable at its scale) - and, in doing so, moved even more emphasis away from the topic at hand. In other words, my omissions with respect to details about the cue ball's true path, were not borne upon idiocy, as in your case, but by design.
My closest friends know me to be fanatic about advancing the billiards conversation. I generally try to be as careful as I can in my use of language, terminology and notation within my written descriptions about shots, so that they can be less vague. However, for any successful communication to take place, we must rely on a minimum degree of contextual consistency between publisher and reader - which you missed here.
The diagram I assembled to address your issues this time is not unlike the illustrations that I regularly create for my private students for their study. Early on, I tended to create massive Tufte-inspired, information-dense, billiard illustrations that crammed every thinkable level of detail into a single glorified shot image - leaving very little implicit. While making such artwork is fun, and there are places for presentations like this, my experience has taught me that most learners - who just want to grasp basic concepts, don't wish to be bombarded with too much information simultaneously. To avoid this extreme, I now take pains to purge extraneous details from illustrations to stay within the context of the instruction - this helps the cause of succinctness and the goal of understanding. I suspect that you would have hoped for the densely packed version of the diagram - only so that you could find more things to nitpick on.
Still, please let's leave the teaching part to the masters.
You fail to realize is that being a great player does not necessarily equate to being a good instructor. There are other qualities in a player aside from their billiard average that can make them an effective instructor: technical understanding, working knowledge of the learning process, personal skills, patience, communication skills, passion, etc. Perhaps unbeknownst to you, I have - since the year of Sang's passing - allocated the greater portion of my involvement in the game toward giving lessons. I am driven by the inspiration and guidance that he instilled in me throughout our 13 years of close association together as players and friends. For 50 weeks of each year, year-in and year-out, I conduct weekly private lessons - and have logged over 900 lessons in my career. Teaching professionally has been both extremely challenging and rewarding for me and I am fueled by the fact that I care very much about the material and the progress of my students. Spending this much time on lessons (preparing, delivering, and analyzing) I sometimes feel that I am sacrificing too much time away from my own active billiard-playing pursuits. Regardless, I believe that the introspective process of teaching has helped me to become a more knowledgeable player than I would have been otherwise.
In any case, I'm certainly not about to stop teaching billiards because you say - so you might as well stop repeatedly suggesting it. If you were referring to me trying to teaching you anything, you don't have to worry.
I have seen books in English, German, Dutch, Flemish, French, Turkish and Korean saying the same thing. Most would say 2/3, some 5/8, some 'a little more than half' or even 'half' but less than half is just plain WRONG.
Anyway, if I've changed your mind about advising other forum members to hit the opening break with a 2/3 ball hit, then I've made some progress in the right direction.
-Ira
P.S. While you were busy trying to poke holes in my information, you failed to notice that the path of my red-ball off of the rail shouldn't have traced a perfect reflection - due to the effects of cushion inefficiency, natural roll, or transferred sidespin - which was left out. Also, a couple of posts ago, to support my less-than-half-ball claim, I mentioned that my embedded calculations were based on an estimation that "inside english will throw the object ball 4-6 degrees fuller". You should have dug into me about this slight overstatement of throw effects. Actually, the amount of throw we expect for a natural roll (as opposed to stun) with inside english is two degrees or less*. If this is the case, what other effect (attributable to inside english), would account for the difference that I glossed over in my first thread response? Hint: It also serves to reduce the cut angle.
The answer is cue ball swerve. But it was not the main subject matter at the moment which is why it did not make it to the foreground of the discussion.
P.P.S. Might you, by any chance, be scheduled for a lesson with Torbjorn Blomdahl next week at Carom Cafe? I saw a 'Mert' on our signup sheet last night.
*Reference Dave Alciatore throw research:
http://www.the8knights.com/lessons_articles/dr_dave/feb07.pdf
