I Call it Billiards Now

Today it finally happened. I know it seems logical that if you're interested in a topic, you should read the book. I finally sat down and read the part of my billiards book that was relevant to my problem. For years, my pool game has been off. I don't feel like my grasp of geometry is off, my understanding of the amount of force (in general) needed in the stroke is off, or that I'm somehow inherently incapable of playing this game. However, I have been off by something like an inch or two for YEARS.

It was infuriating, humiliating and just plain frustrating. I found myself dreading the game with something akin to panic when it was suggested. I tried every excuse from "let's play something else" and "oh, I would love to, but I have this thing, with my, uh, thing" to "well, how about you guys play, and I'll just sit here, watch, fetch more beer and look pretty." I think my aversion to this game, which my ex husband has a passion for, was a strain on my marraige, he was just too polite to say so. After all, even tho we may think it, saying out loud things like: I can't love you as much as I could because you play pool like a drunken monkey isn't going to go over well in a relationship. My mother grew up with a pool table in her bedroom. That's right, it was worth giving up space in a house with 5 kids to have a pool table in the bedroom they all shared. (don't ask, I've never quite figured out the logistics. At least one of them had to have used the table for a bed, that's all I can figure) Playing pool with her was the ultimate in familial disappointment. She, and my ex, would do their level best to kindly and gently reduce my drunken monkey pool technique to something more appropriate, like a sedated orangatun maybe, I don't know that they had high expectations after years of effort.

Through the wonderful world of college education, I've managed to improve my fundamental shooting form, my break is now really quite wonderful, (it's not entirely unlikely I may actually get a ball in on the break anymore) and I get the cue ball to generally go where I want it. Why then, can I not get the damn balls in the pocket? Why am I off by those couple inches that are the difference between in and "that should have been in, why wasn't it??"

Let's talk about point of aim versus point of impact. With this little detail, seemingly insignificant, you can change your game entirely. Or, at least, it changed mine. This isn't to say that the most radical improvements in my ability to control the cue ball didn't come from improving my fundamentals, it did. However, until I could get the idea of where I should be aiming the cue ball, being able to put it where I wanted it wasn't going to help me much. I'm not going to geek out on the details, but the basic theory is that you draw a line from the center of the object ball to the center of the pocket you want it to drop into, extend that line out past the back of the object ball approximately the radius of the cue ball. You aim the center of your cue ball for that point (point of aim) so that the edge of the sphere that's the cue ball, hits the edge of the sphere that is the object ball at the point where it needs to be touched to deflect into the pocket. (point of impact)

Voila, the damn ball goes in the hole, just like that. That's it, no tricks, no complex algorithms. My partner and I played around with it, trying to figure out exactly how far away from the object ball the radius was, and got our minds wrapped around the idea of aiming at some vague point on the table that has little to do with the object ball at all and we practiced. We missed, then we missed, then we checked our stance and we missed some more. We put the balls back in the same approximate position, determined to make this happen. It's nice playing with people who are at about the same level. There's a few sharks in the group that make me break out in hives at the very notion of having to play with them. I break out in a cold sweat and flash back to the look on my ex and my mom's face... the tight smile and the forced helpfulness when I knew inside they were saying, "I'm playing with a drunken monkey, please shoot me before anyone I know sees me." Eventually, we got it. We took turns putting balls in, throwing any semblence of game playing out the window, and moving cue and object balls around into positions that seemed somewhat likely to meet with success. The number of times we had to shoot the exact same balls in reduced with practice, success!

She left, and I hung around to practice on my own. I shot, the ball went in, I shot again, the ball went in. It was like magic. I shot some more and said to myself, "ya? ya, who's the Drunken Monkey NOW, eh??" I was afraid to stop, afraid I found my groove and by the next time I play, it will be gone again. But not this time, baby, I have so got this down.

Edit 4-9-05: Ya, I still got it. I put in a couple rounds after a meeting today, and it went juuuust fiiiiine. Woohoo!!