"Try to put well in practice what you
already know. In so doing, you will, in good time, discover
the hidden things you now inquire about.”
-Remy de Gourmont , 1858-1915
Other than straight shot, angle shot is the
shot you will mostly encounter, so mastering it before
anything else is really a big step in your learning
curve. Read this statement slowly...when a cue
ball hit an object ball at an angle, some of the energy
from the cue ball is transferred ( law of
thermodynamics) to the object ball...then the object ball would
start to move.
To what direction? To the direction PERPENDICULAR
to the
tangential line ( yellow arrow in the illustration
below). What about the cue ball? It will deflect
to the direction of tangential line (black arrow).
Easy enough, right?
Now, given this thought....you could think that in
order for you to move that object ball to the desired
direction, you need to find that point of contact
(tangential point), and you need to be precise where
exactly that is, especially when you are faced with a
long shot. But there's always some tolerance
since the pocket has some good allowance for error, but
as I said, if the object ball is farther from the
pocket this allowance gets smaller . So how'd you go about
finding it? Easy, your point of contact should be the
intersection between the straight path to the pocket
and edge of the ball (yellow arrow). Check out the
picture below.
Now, here comes the fun part,
how'd you get the cue ball to the point of contact...
visualization...you hear me right...good visualization
is the key. There are many tips in this
bit. You could try all of them to see which one
works for you. Some people say to visualize a row of
cue balls stretched across the billiard table all the
way to the point of contact on the object ball.
The most common one is to visualize an imaginary "ghost ball"
sitting next to the object ball you want to pocket
inline with an imaginary straight path to the pocket, then hit this ghost
ball straight on.
Another one is by getting a complete sense of the whole
geometry of the billiard table and adjust your shooting
angle accordingly...this is tricky and takes a lot of
experience. Now, here's another one...follow these steps:
-
Determine the point of contact...I already
told you how to do this.
-
Line up your body with the cue ball and object
ball so that when you look behind the cue ball, it
completely obscure both sides of the object ball.
-
Do the proper billiard stance and proper holding
of cue procedures.
-
Eyeball the position of the cue ball again and make
sure still obscure the object ball.
-
Here's the important part...on the object ball, imagine
a vertical line projecting at the center, note the
distance of point of contact to that center (let's call
it the object offset). On the cue ball,
imagine a vertical line projecting at the center and apply
the object offset on the opposite side of the cue ball.
Now you have two offsets one for the object ball and
one for the cue ball ( cue offset)...both of them
have the same width. Note: You have
to do a little scaling in your head since the object is
at some distance away so it will look smaller.
-
Now move your
upper body slightly, NOT JUST THE STICK, so that the
two offsets are lined up.
-
Now Line up your cue parallel with these offsets
NOT inline with the offsets, unless of course
it's a straight shot.
-
Hit the cue ball at the center. That's it...Check
the diagram below
In situation where cue ball is bigger, the cue ball
offset should be adjusted off to the center a little
bit and vise versa for smaller cue ball. So it's
always good to have a warm-up shot before the beginning
of the real game.
Good luck!!!
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