Review of “The Illustrated Principles of Pool & Billiards” by David (Dr Dave) Alciatore, PhD
David (Dr Dave) G. Alciatore’s book The Illustrated Principles of Pool and Billiards explains what happens on the pool table from a scientific or engineering perspective. By explaining the underlying forces, the cause and effect of where balls go and why, Dr Dave will enable you to understand pool at a fundamental level.
Hopefully that didn’t scare you off, because this book is written for ordinary people in plain and clear language. I wish there were such lucid explanations for everything else in the world.
The book is jam packed with excellent photos, clear and useful illustrations and enumerated principles in the form of bullet lists. These do a fine job of supporting the text and enhancing understanding.
Starting out, the coverage of fundamentals is easy to grasp and covers the topic well. It’s difficult to make this stuff interesting but Dave’s done what he could.
Basic shot making comes in for a detailed treatment. There are 45 pages covering everything you need to learn how to aim and successfully make pool shots. Using his website at Colorado State as an additional resource, Dr Dave has included links to view videos of every point he discusses. Where appropriate he even has ultra-slow motion video of things that happen so fast you can’t ordinarily see them. Though you don’t have to buy the book to see these videos on-line, the book provides the context to get the most out of them. I encourage you to buy this book and support Dr Dave’s gifts to the pool community.
I wish there were such lucid explanations for everything else in the world.
Warranting special mention here as an example of the way this book explains fundamental principles, the 90° rule (tangent rule) comes in for a lot of explanation. How it can easily be used to help you understand exactly what draw and follow do to the resulting path of the cue ball. It can turn on the lights to let you see the pool world in a totally new and extremely useful light. His addition of the 30° rule to the basic set of principles has helped many to play much better pool.
I have one small nit to pick, though, where in principle 3.7 Dave advises “always use as little speed as possible to execute a shot”. Though well intentioned because so many people, especially beginners, tend to hit the balls much too hard, shooting too slow is also a bad idea. Tables aren’t perfectly flat and level, and they sometimes have tiny pieces of chalk in the cloth or there are wear marks in the fabric, etc. I is very annoying indeed to watch your ball roll directly toward the hole and then veer slightly off course and miss. By shooting with a little more speed these imperfections will have a much smaller effect on the path of the ball and the misses will be all yours. When you watch the pros play, and you should, you’ll see that they only rarely hit the ball softly. They only rarely hit it hard either, so Dr Dave is clearly right on that part.
Spin and English come in for the treatment next. With clarity and precision, Dr Dave elucidates the underlying and seemingly mysterious principles that add the next level of complexity to the game. Remember when you were in school and every year you’d learn that what you learned last year was only mostly correct, and needed a little additional info to make it correct. Well, this chapter is what does that to the basics of pool. This is critical information, and without really getting it parts of the game will always be a mystery. The explanations here are as good as they get. Study this chapter, because after a good stroke knowledge of these subtleties is the most valuable thing you can do to improve your pool game.
The rest of the book is dedicated to using the fundamentals to explain how to play pool well. There’s coverage of how to get position, how to make banks and kicks, advanced techniques, etc.
This book is highly recommended and is one of my favorites. The detailed approach to the underlying mechanical principles isn’t unique to this book, but it’s done extremely well here, and the 250+ color graphics and illustrations do a good job in aiding understanding. I give this book a 9 out of 10.
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4 Responses to “Review of “The Illustrated Principles of Pool & Billiards” by David (Dr Dave) Alciatore, PhD”
Olechka-persik
- December 9th, 2008
Thanks for post. Nice to see such good ideas.
Pages tagged "english billiards" - January 2nd, 2009
[...] bookmarks tagged english billiards Review of “The Illustrated Principles of Pool &a… saved by 2 others RichBoySellingDope bookmarked on 01/02/09 | [...]
tablebilliard
- October 26th, 2009
Nice to see your blog, Your diagrammatic explanation is so good .your thoughts are more innovative.
John Morgan
- December 4th, 2009
I ordered and reviewed Dr. Daves new DVD with Tom Ross on
pool instruction. This is really good material based on all
the material I have. Dave and Tom really pack in the information, so you constantly have to rewind to get it all, but it’s done in a very logical, thought out way with some humor thrown in. For new students of pool and us guys who’ve been at it for a while, you’ll enjoy the DVD and learn something new.
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