The Sport of Pool Billiards 1. Ralph Eckert

side spin to the ball. Simply tensing the thigh muscles slightly, or consciously trying to feel the floor with your front foot is enough to eliminate this source of error.

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      before the first shot

      Upper Body and Head

      Bend your head and upper body down over the cue, holding the cue as horizontally as possible. It is virtually impossible, and not even necessary, to hold the cue completely horizontally. Your head should be directly above the cue, i.e., looked at from above, the cue should move in a straight line directly below your chin and nose or between your eyes. Make sure you do not bend down too far so that your chin is almost touching the cue (a hand‘s breadth or four fingers is ideal), because in this case (depending on your size) you will not have enough room to move the cue correctly with your playing arm. As long as you have enough room to play, you can bend as far as you want over the cue. The older you get, the more difficult you will find it to bend down, in any case.

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      Chapter 1

      Andreas Huber, German national coach:

      As Ralph has already said, the player should rely on his own feeling when trying to find the right stance – especially when it comes to head and cue alignment. Nearly everyone has a dominant eye and the cue will generally be slightly off-center biased towards this eye so that the player can accurately recognize a straight shot when he has played one. Ralph will go into this in more detail later, as this is the second „little mistake with enormous consequences“, along with wrong weight distribution in the stance. A lot of top players improved their game enormously in the past just by correcting this „little mistake.“

      Cue Handling

      With very few exceptions (e.g. the break), the bridge arm (front arm) should be stretched out almost to the full. If you bend it too much, or even rest your forearm on the table, there is a danger that you will be leaning forward too far with your whole body when you shoot. In this case the bent arm would act like a spring and could lead to more mistakes. I will describe the hand bridge through which we guide the cue in a later chapter. There are several points to be remembered when it comes to the shooting arm (back arm):

       In a good cue grip your hand should cradle the cue be-tween your thumb and four fingers, with the middle, ring and little finger slightly looser so that they give a little on the backswing but still remain on the cue, helping to guide it. If the cue grip is too tight there will be too much movement in the upper arm when you swing, making it virtually impossi-ble to cue in a straight line. The upper arm will automatically move slightly, but for a straight cue movement this should be kept to a minimum.

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      before the first shot

      Your wrist should not move at all if possible.

      The starting position for the forearm is, as I said before, more or less vertical and the cue grip should be approxi-mately on a level with the rear leg.

      The upper arm should initially be perpendicular to the forearm.

      When shooting, the upper arm automatically follows through. There is nothing wrong with this because other-wise you would tense your muscles in order to bring the shot to a halt and a tense shot is the last thing we want.

      The elbow, seen from above, is directly above the cue,.

      Depending on your stature, it may not be easy for you to observe all these points at once. Don‘t be afraid to ask someone more experienced for advice (your club trainer, for example). Just imagine what the league or national coach would think if you were to start playing in their team with a bad cue grip?

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      Chapter 1

      16

      before the first shot

      Hand Bridge

      Before I start bombarding you with details here are a few photos and brief explanations on the subject of hand bridges:

      Low

      The middle finger is pushed down onto the table slightly.

      Middle

      This is the standard bridge where the middle, ring and little finer are well spread out to maximize sta-bility.

      High

      The fingers are brought more closely together to raise the height of the bridge.

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      Chapter 1

      When I am training this is what I normally tell the players:

       Start off with an open bridge.

       Move the thumb towards the „top“ joint (closest to the ball of the hand) of the middle finger.

       The index finger has to be lifted at this point.

       Then I look for a crease between the thumb and middle finger with my cue.

       The index finger should still be raised!

       It may help if you bend your wrist slightly.

       When you have found the crease you should swing the cue through the open bridge as if you were about to shoot.

       Then, while you are swinging the cue, slowly move the index finger over the cue towards the thumb.

       Make sure the index finger does not impede your control of the cue in any way!

       The index finger should be placed firmly above the thumb without getting in the way of the cue when you swing!

       The purpose of the index finger is to prevent the cue going off center when you actually shoot, not during the swinging!

      Andreas Huber, German national coach:

      Two short comments:

      1. Bending the wrist also helps to prevent the fingers getting in the way of the cue. If the wrist is straight, shots often end up crooked.

      2. The bridge hand is like a third leg and has to bear some of the weight. If there is no weight on the guiding hand, shots will frequently be erratic and it becomes more difficult to make a really clean impact on the ball.

      Sometimes the cue even moves „towards the light“ (the last place it should be).