Billiards Fundamentals

[Orville Marquez]

Nomatter how good anyone gets to be as a pool player, the fundamentals of pool is where the foundation of your game rests. Even for advanced players, small improvements in how solid your bridge is, the smoothness of your stroke, the quality of your stance, etc.. can all have a noticeable impact on your game.

The easiest way to have fun and be more confident is to play well and continually improve. And the best way to do this is to have solid fundamentals (grip, bridge, stance, visual alignment, pre-shot routine, stroke). Here are some useful documents and resources for helping you diagnose problems and improve:

Today, we're going to talk to you about advanced fundamentals. We're going to cover everything from your stance, the basic stance, to the stroke, and how to execute the best stroke possible to get the maximum amount of spin.

Let's start with, in my opinion, what's the most important; the vertical alignment. So Valerie here is going to demonstrate you how to shoot a shot, like a proper stance. So we're going to start from the five here. So as you can see, the five is going to be in line with the cue ball, in line with the cue is her hand, right there, up to the wrist here, the forearm and the shoulder. So everything is in a vertical straight plane there. So the thing is, it doesn't really matter if you have a great stroke, a great bridge, or anything like that. If you don't have this vertical alignment, you will not be able to shoot straight. So really, really important to have that.

The stance and the foot stance is particularly important. So I want to talk about the snooker versus the pool stance first. I know it's a big controversy, but the two games are quite different, so you really need two different stances. So let's cover the snooker stance first. So Valerie's going to demonstrate the one. So what you can see is the feet are basically on the same line. So it's basically the foot line is perpendicular to the cue. Now it's not really a proper pool stance, in my opinion, because in pool, you need to get a lot more position play, so you need to free your right arm. So she's going to demonstrate the proper pool position now. And as you can see, the feet are not really aligned, it's more of an angle, so I'd say 30 degree angle type thing, and that's what help us free the arm.

In my opinion, this is the proper pool stance. Now the one thing if your, Valerie, if you want to go back down again, we can look as the back foot as well. So I know there's another thing here. So this, she's keeping it pretty straight, which is really good. Some people decide to get it lower a little bit, but you really don't want to get too low like this, because that's too heavy on you, it's not comfortable. And the whole point in pool is to be as comfortable as possible, especially when you're stroking. So just make it so you're comfortable and nothing feels heavy and hard on you.

Let's talk about how to address the cue ball now. So the first thing is, and probably the most important, is you always have to first start outside the box. What I call the box is the four feet distance between, between here, there, and the cue, and then the object ball. So you always want to go away from it because then you can step into it and dominate the shot rather than feel like you're threatened by it. So that's one thing.

Now, the next thing you got to know is the distance you have in between your tip, your arm, grip arm, and your foot here. So this is basically something you'd have to remember. This is your distance. This is nothing we can really teach you, you just figure out by yourself. So I'm going to have Valerie here demonstrate how she gets down into the shot and address the cue ball. So as you can see, she's stepping away from the table coming in there and she's going to stand right there. As you can see the hands right there, right above the foot, exactly what we're talking about. You can see that she really was away and stepped inside the shot. Now we're going to do one more time. Can you show us again?

You can also see the descent. So when I mean the descent, it is how she gets the cue down. So this is the next really important thing. You don't want to go across, swipe this way, swipe this way. You really want to go down as much as possible in a straight line, again, it's because it's going to make you perfectly in line and keep you straight.

The back hand, or a grip hand, this is another very important part of your stroke. The biggest mistake most people do is they grip it too hard like this, and this is really not good for you because you're going to miss on the left or on the right, your cue's going to move a little too much. So the best is really to have a loose grip. And I like to really use basically only the second finger. So I'm going to show you a little exercise. Actually, Valerie is going to do it. She's going to get in position right there. And she's going to hold the chalk in between her index and her thumb. So I'm going to put it right there. And you see that basically it's going to force you to not hold it tight. And it's one little exercise you can do to just really help you out, for the rest you can see her wrist is right straight in line.

A lot of people have an issue, it goes like this. This is really bad for you, so we're going twist it. And then the other side as well is also pretty bad. So you really want try to get it in line as much as possible. This is going to really help you shoot straight. The last part is on the pinky. I don't know if you can see from here, but this one is really not used and pretty much the last one as well. So you're really only using one, two fingers. And really what's going to do is the loose grip is going to help you to really stroke the ball through and really helps you get maximum spin.

So what's really important is that 90 degree forearm, upper arm angle, which I'm going to show with Valerie right now. So she's going to get in position. The important part is to have that angle, that 90 degree right angle when the tip is hitting the cue ball, so the contact point is when your arm is perpendicular to the cue. Now what's really more important than this is that the forearm is actually perpendicular to the floor. So not just this one, but actually this line here, this is what's going to make you hit the ball straight or not straight. Okay, that being said, you can hold the cue in different spot on the grip. Personally, what I do is I have three different lengths of grips for three different kinds of shots.

So let's say we're close to the rail like this on the one ball. I'm going to hold my hand closer here so I can shorten my grip so I can have the 90 degree angle right when I hit the one ball. Now for this is a close shot, little short practice stroke.

Let's say I have a standard shot. You can see I naturally move my hand towards the middle of the cue, right there. And that's, again, because my regular stroke is going to be longer, I got more, I'm down on the cue ball, so this is done here. Now let's do a long shot.

You can see on the long shot I'm naturally, again, moving my right hand to the very back of the cue, and same thing it is to get to my impact point perfectly with my forearm.

Okay, now this is my solution, however, a few people do something a little different and Valerie actually does. So what she does is she keeps her hand at the exact same spot, but she moves her body, shift her body forward or backward.

Then we're going to go into the five ball, see how she does it. You can see her right hand stays at that exact same spot. However, she is still hitting the ball, right here that forearm is still 90 degrees whenever she hits the five. Now on the last ball, she will have to move no matter what a little bit, but she will probably not be as drastically as me towards the back of the cue.

Let's talk about bridges now. I know the lesson title is Advanced fundamentals, so bridges are pretty basic. But what we're going to try here is we're going to try to give you some pointers of how to improve your bridge. So let's start up with open bridge. So one of the common thing I see when I teach people is a lot of people just keep their hand like this and after a while, it starts to really hurt here, sort of like a burn simply because they're using too much of the meat of the hand.

Meanwhile, if all you have to do is just turn this hand a little bit, you got a little less contact and this makes it a lot easier and it hurts a lot less. On the long run, you really can practice a little better.

Now, again, on the open bridge, we're going to keep going, when you're trying to raise, so this is what I do. I usually like it, pretty solid. But however, a lot of people, a lot of pool players will get those fingers right back there, also really solid.

And this is going to help you, again. Solidness in the bridge is really what's most important. Let's keep going on the closed bridge here. So Valerie has probably one of the best closed bridges I've ever seen. So she's going to demonstrate right now. And as you can see whenever she does it, so all those three fingers are together. They're touching at a spot and there's really no gap in between the fingers there. Also she's able to bend her finger, which is exactly why it makes it a really strong bridge.

3a8082e126