Play It Straight
 

It sounds like a paradox. But its not. This is the secret behind the famous Kick-n-Stick safety shot. A player can shoot the cue ball into the rail first, causing the cue ball to stop or “stick” upon striking an object ball. The Kick-n-Stick is a must have for your safety arsenal, especially rotation games like nineball and 10-ball. The catch is the object ball can’t be too far from the rail. If the cue ball is rotating in the direction of travel before it strike the cushion,

Over the years I have developed a detailed shot routine. The basic routine has four primary parts. Each part ends with a "Moment of Stillness" (see video link below). Each part has 3 or 4 steps to be performed in order, making a 14 step shot routine. My expanded shot routine (not shown here) has at least 33 points. As you can imagine, it can take years to fully explore and adjust every single point of the complete shot routine to your style. But the 14 steps are identical for

Gave two lessons this week and always, when teaching you learn. I was explaining the slow backstroke and smooth follow-through which reminded myself how that's been lacking in my play recently. Couple with the fact I am working on my next video which is about staying down on the shot. Bringing those things back to my practice table...all of a sudden my cue ball control (or confidence) is better. And reviewing the video showed how much slower I was playing. How deliberate is y

You don't improve your play by learning to pocket more and more difficult shots. No, you improve by improving the QUALITY of every aspect of your shot routine,

Once I started deliberatly executing the steps in my program, my game started to come back and feel better. For me, that mostly means staying down through the shot.