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Nick Prinsloo has been playing pool for a total of 21 years, 15 years competitively. Originally a pro-level snooker player and instructor, Nick discovered 9-ball and came to the US in 1998, where he has been playing on regional tours ever since.
Lately, Nick writes more about the game than he actually plays. Nick was the Guide for Billiards at About.com for almost four years. Nick's column archive is located here. |
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Lesson 2: Learning To Play Pool
When teaching yourself or somebody else to play pool we are, in fact, teaching the mind, as you might have guessed after reading the previous paragraphs. It is no lie that pool, like other cue sports, is a game of memory, as other manuals have suggested. But that statement should reach much further than the memorizing of angles. Teach the mind from the start that if you stand this way, hold the cue like that, aim there, etc., you will pocket the ball successfully, and keep teaching it until it is ingrained in the banks of the mind, and it will command the body to do so automatically, i.e. without consciously thinking about it. And so it will do every time thereafter, unless, of course, you start getting lazy and inadvertently get into bad habits, which will then reduce the success rate and put you back to square one. This is the hard part: once you have established a working technique which gives you a high success rate, you have to maintain it; let failure into your routine and it will surely breed more failure.
To all intents and purposes of this manual, the mind computes as follows: X technique = x result = success, or Z technique = z result = failure. I will attempt to teach you the correct technique, which will have the desired result, namely successful pool. It is up to you to
maintain that correct technique, and consequently a consistent success rate. Next Lesson > Overcoming The Physical Barriers
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