A Hierarchy for Advanced Pool Skills Acquisition
Pool is a game of nearly endless depth and richness. For beginners this may not be readily apparent, but as one learns more of what’s possible it becomes more and more obvious. Which ball to play next, which route to take to get there (there’s more than one?), playing position not just for the next ball but the ball after that, etc. These are just the first eye openers on how many levels there are to truly understand the fullness of this game.
I’ve written about practice more than a few times, but one thing that I keep coming back to is the value of learning things in the right order. There’s only so much time to spend on practice, so it behooves you to work on the things that will make the largest improvement in your game.
There’s only so much time to spend on practice, so it behooves you to work on the things that will make the largest improvement in your game.
Improving your ability to bank by double will only help you out maybe once a game, but improving your ability to get position on your next ball will help you every shot. Practicing your break sounds important because every time you watch 9 Ball on TV the expert commentator will remind you that it’s the most important shot in pool. Well, only after you’ve already mastered all the things you need to know to be able to run the rack once you’ve made a ball. If you can’t do that with any degree of reliability, it doesn’t help you. And if it doesn’t help you, don’t practice it.
Many players, beginners especially but intermediate players as well, want to do the cool things in pool. Making an eye-opening shot, one your opponent can’t make, has a power to excite that is more intense than the feeling you get from just winning the game. Any practice regimen that eliminates these shots takes too much of the enjoyment out of the game.
Thinking about this, I tried to put together an easy way to determine when a player should start to practice some of the more advanced parts of the game. It’s very rough, and far from ironclad. It needs contribution by others to be refined and enhanced into something that would work for most everyone.
Making an eye-opening shot, one your opponent can’t make, has a power to excite that is more intense than the feeling you get from just winning the game.
I use playing the ghost as the measure of overall playing ability. It’s simple and easily graduated into many levels. To make sure we’re all on the same page, let me explain what I mean by playing the ghost.
The ghost is your imaginary, omnipotent opponent. You get to shoot first, and if you run out you win. If not, since we imagine that your opponent is perfect, he’ll always run out and hand you a quick loss. To make playing the ghost a reasonable way to spend your time, we adjust the level of difficulty so that you have a chance to win. We do that by limiting the number of balls on the table. At the low-end we also limit the location of the object balls to half the table.
Let’s say you want to play the 5 Ball ghost. Throw 7 balls out onto the table in a random fashion. When they come to rest, take the 2 balls closest to any pocket off the table. Now take ball in hand and run the balls in sequence, lowest ball first. Play a race, preferably to 11, but at least to 7. If you win, move up a ball to play the 6 Ball ghost next time. If you lose, subtract a ball and play the 4 Ball ghost next time. For the half table variants, just make sure the balls are all either above or below the side pockets.
Pool is a game of nearly endless depth and richness.
I associated an advanced skill with each of 10 levels of playing the ghost. The idea is that you not try to learn these skills until you have reached the level of mastery against the ghost that they are associated with. For example, until you can beat the 6 Ball ghost, you should not spend any time trying to learn about caroms and billiards. You aren’t ready, and the time would be spent much more productively on more fundamental things.
I know that saying “you aren’t ready” raises a lot of hackles, and I don’t mean that you aren’t yet capable of learning that skill, only that you will benefit much more from learning other, more fundamental skills, or getting better at them.
So, here’s my list of levels and their associated advanced skills. I’ve added a couple of sentences about each one to explain my logic. Requirements vary based on the game being played, so 8 Ballers might warrant a slightly different order than 9 Ball players, but at this stage of this idea, I tried to keep it simple and make just one list. I’d love to hear from you, especially if you disagree with me, on what you think of this idea, and of my rankings.
01 3 Ball Half Table Safeties
Safeties are an important part of everyone’s game. They can be a valuable play when the offensive shots available to you are too tough. They can be even more valuable when you fit them strategically into your plan. Since many are easy, and many people need to be encouraged to use them more often, I’m making them the first, most important of the specialty shots.
02 4 Ball Half Table Kicking
Sometimes your opponent will leave you with no clear shot to make a legal hit. This happens often enough (and even more often when you add in the times you do it to yourself), and the penalty for missing (ball in hand) is severe enough, that you’ll need to learn this skill early in your career. Plus, if your opponent knows you can’t kick, you see lots of them.
03 3 Ball Full Table Banking
While it’s true that you should usually cut rather than bank, sometimes only a bank will do. Or, getting shape off a bank shot may be much easier than off a cut. It would be nice to think this was rare, but it isn’t, so banking skills will be required relatively early.
04 5 Ball Half Table English
Great pool requires getting excellent position on every ball. While most of the time you can do that with only stun, follow and draw, sometimes more is needed. With english you can adjust the trajectory of the cue ball off the rail, giving yourself extra flexibility in choosing a route for whitey. English can also add or reduce speed off the rail, opening up even more choices.
When you start using english aiming gets more difficult, because of all the additional factors you now need to compensate for. You’ll miss many more balls until you get the hang of it, and that won’t happen for a while. Be prepared to work hard on this one; it’s deceptively tough but you can only go so far without it.
05 4 Ball Full Table Throw
Knowledge of throw will help you make frozen balls that point slightly away from the pocket, as well as helping you control cue ball movement in tight situations. It can even help you make balls where a blocker is in the way just a little bit. Not dramatic, but not at all difficult.
06 5 Ball Full Table Rail First
This one is great for making balls near a pocket that are blocked by another ball. Especially useful in 8 Ball, but valuable in all games, this variation on the kick can really deflate your opponent who’s sure you can’t get out.
07 6 Ball Full Table Caroms & Billiards
Conceptually simple, these beautiful shots can be difficult for some players to get a feel for. Based on the tangent line and a stun shot, they can get you out of all kinds of jams, especially on crowded tables.
08 7 Ball Full Table Tickies
A combination of a rail first shot with a carom or billiard, knowing these will help you get blocked balls near a pocket that you couldn’t get to with a simple rail first shot. Easier than they sound, and more useful than you might guess at first, these will take some effort to get comfortable with.
09 8 Ball Full Table The Break
This one will probably generate the most criticism, since so many others are advocating breaking practice. When you can beat the 8 Ball Ghost, and you make a ball with a controlled break, you have a good chance to run out. Before now, you’ll mostly run out enough balls to make the run out easy for your opponent.
10 9 Ball Full Table Partial Massé
Another way to get around a blocker ball is a partial or half massé. These are difficult to control, requiring much practice, and not needed as often as other, simpler techniques.
You’ll probably notice that I have not including jumping in my advanced skills list. I won’t take anything away from the skill of jumping, I just don’t like jumping because it damages the cloth. Yes it’s legal and you can jump if you like, I just don’t encourage it.
So there you have it. Let me know if you think this idea has merit or is too dumb to consider. I look forward to your feedback.
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2 Responses to “A Hierarchy for Advanced Pool Skills Acquisition”
Pool Minnow
- June 27th, 2009
I like your list…of course it would be interesting to see the corresponding list of fundamental skills that goes with each ranking.
I do wonder if two-rail kicks belong somewhere on the list. I found it to be fairly natural to learn them as I started to play two rail shape on shots. I certainly use two rail kicks more than I use tickies, for example.
I think that perhaps as you get higher on the list, that there may be more than one advanced skill that is appropriate for each level.
John Biddle
- June 27th, 2009
Hey Pool Minnow, good to see you. As far as where the fundamentals stack up, they come before, during and after.
What I mean by that is that stance, stroke and aim are critical skills that precede everything. Grip and bridge also come very early but they’re usually very quick to learn. Getting the stance right lays the foundation for everything; get it wrong and you battle it until you fix it. Stroke, including the details of smoothness, follow through, acceleration through the ball and finishing completely every time are also easily taught but much harder to get consistent on. And of course, we mustn’t forget to stay still.
Fundamentals need to be worked hard in the beginning with a few good exercises and optionally with the coaching of a good instructor. You have to keep at these though, so as one starts to work on cue ball speed control and cue ball direction skills, he keeps working on stance, stroke and aim.
I didn’t separate out one vs two rail kicks, but you’re right that it could easily become another separate skill, harder to grasp initially, but very valuable, since knowing two rail paths really helps you get around the table. Having more than one advanced skill for some ability levels seems like a good approach. I might even cut the levels to only full table ghost matches, and put two on each one.
It takes long enough to move from one level to the next that there’s time to acquire a modicum of ability at two advanced skills. Then, as we progress, we have to keep all skills up to par with our overall ability, so they’ll slowly get better over time.
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