Today I’m going to show you a quick way to clean your pool cue shaft when you’re out at a pool hall. This technique is very effective at cleaning a dirty pool cue and you’ll probably to get it about 75% as clean as a professional pool cue repair shop will be able to do. Obviously, to get it fully clean, you’ll want to take it into one of those pool cue repair shops because they’ll have the tools to get it 100% clean.

What we need for this is: A paper towel (the natural, brown colored ones work best) and some water. You’ll want to wet the paper towel just a bit. A few capfulls of water is all your need. You don’t want the paper towel to get soaked, just nice and damp. After that, you’ll wrap the paper towel around the cue and you’ll want to move it quickly up and down the shaft to create heat. That heat and friction is what is going to force the dirt to come off. After about 30 seconds of this, you’ll notice that the cue is already quite a bit cleaner. If you continue to do this technique, you’ll start to see the cue become much cleaner.

Imagine you’re at a pool hall and you get a dent in your shaft. You don’t have your local cue repairshop nearby to fix it for you, so what do you do? Well, it’s actually quite an easy fix when you have the right tool. The right tool in this instance is the “Billiards and Darts Direct $2 Dent Buffer.” Yes, that’s right, it’s just an average, everyday beer bottle. That’s all you need and luckily, you should have plenty nearby if you’re at an average pool hall.

If you do this technique properly, you can take the dent out of your cue almost perfectly. Of course, this fix is not quite as good as what an actual cue repair shop will be able to offer, but it’s pretty close!

The science behind this is like this: Glass is extremely hard and the wood is very soft. The dent is like a crater and we’re essentially going to push it back to it’s original form using this beer bottle. Take the cue in one hand and the bottle in the other and begin to rub the bare glass of the beer bottle on your cue right at the spot where it’s dented. Do this for 20 to 30 seconds, until you begin to notice that the dent has vanished. You’ll want to apply a decent amount of pressure (but obviously, not so much pressure that the cue snaps in half).

If you do it right, the cue will look like new and the dent will be history!

I’m going to show you an easier way to get shape using your tangent lines; not going across them but rather going with them.

In the video above, you can see we’ve got a five ball on one end of the table and after I make that shot I want to get good shape. If I shoot the ball going across the tangent line, the shape isn’t that great. I have a hard cut or I have a cut in the side. Neither option is ideal.

After I hit the ball, I ended up going across the tangent line, which is that imaginary line that’s drawn from the other ball I want to make and the pocket I want to make it into. Now, lets try shooting it again while getting shape for the other pocket. This method makes the cue ball go away from the ball and then towards the ball. Once that happens, the cue ball is in a much better place and I have a huge amount of room for error.

In a way, this shot is the difference between an experienced player and an inexperienced player. You’ll often see the inexperienced players shooting for that narrow shooting space, while the more experienced players will try to get their shot to end up in a much larger shooting space.

Lots of people ask me “What is a Safety?”. Well, I’m going to explain that now. As an added bonus, I’ll show you a simple safety that you can do yourself and really mess up your opponent’s game.

A Safety is basically one player blocking their opponent’s shot with another ball that’s opposite to their ball type. In the video above you’ll see that I’ve got a shot setup where I’m stripes and my opponent is solids. I don’t want to do a bank shot or any other type of shot so I’m going to play a safety. I want to try to get my stripe ball between the solid and the cue ball so that my opponent can’t make their shot.

A beginner is likely to screw this up is by hitting the ball way too thin. Even though they hit it soft, they hit it thin. As a result they leave their opponent a clear shot.

The best way to do it would be to hit the ball much more full; almost straight-on with just a little bit of an angle. As you can see when I hit the edge of the ball, the cue ball generates way too much speed even though I’m hitting it soft. This causes it to take off after it hits the rail. When I hit it full and soft, the safety has been perfectly executed and my opponent can’t possibly make their shot.

In an earlier video post, I discussed a technique for shooting the ball down the rail. A few YouTube subscribers like @MrSubhash1418 had some questions about the exact method for doing this technique, so I’m following that video up with this one.

A lot of the confusion likely comes from the amount of deflection your cue has. You need to test your cue to see how much it’s going to curve off. For example, if I put the cue ball dead on, edge-to-edge and I aim for that, I’m going to miss it. You can see that if give it the English and I aim perfectly dead-on, it deflects and misses the ball completely.

I have to compensate for that deflection. Unfortunately, everybody’s cue deflects differently so I can’t tell you how much to compensate by. For me, I’m aiming more into the object ball because I know my cue will deflect by that certain amount. I’m spinning it with inside English, towards the ball. You absolutely need to know how much your particular cue deflects or else the earlier technique will be completely guess-work instead of an actual proven strategy for success.

I’ve had some questions from the Billiards and Darts Direct channel subscribers. They want to know how to do a long shot, like I showed in an earlier video. Well, you ask for it, you got it. Here’s a how-to on shooting Long Shots.

Since the term “Long Shot” can mean many thing to many players, I’ve set up a situation that I feel best exemplifies the term. Basically, you have two balls, far apart from each other with the cue ball near the rail and the object ball all the way at the end, with a cut-shot.

You’ll want to shoot the ball in just like any other shot but there is one very important thing you can do to improve your chances of making the ball. Hold the cue with your back two fingers (your Ring Finger and your Pinky). This will make the cue go much straighter because you will have fewer imperfections in your stroke.

Of course, if you have to hit the ball in really hard to get crucial shape then you may not be able to do this quite as easily. If you just want to shoot the ball in, nice and easy, then this technique will give you a definite advantage. Go ahead and take your shot at normally and you’ll make your ball.

Today I’m going to show you a shot that is very common. Higher still level players have no problem making this shot. For the beginner players, this is a shot that scares them. Here’s a simple way so that it will never be scary again.

Imagine you’re playing a game of 8 Ball. You have the 8 ball in the jaws of the pocket and the cue ball has a little bit of distance behind it. Most players would just shoot the ball in and stop it, or draw it back or put the cue ball wherever they want. But what if you don’t know how to draw the ball back that far?

The best, simplest way to get this shot is to aim for the crack; the gap between the rail and the 8 ball. Don’t try to aim for the rail just before the ball or else you’ll miss it because the ball is too deep in the pocket.

You will never, ever miss this shot if you aim for the cracks between the ball and the pocket. You’ll make your ball and it’s virtually impossible to scratch. The best part about this technique is that it works even if the gaps are small or the gaps are large. You’ll make it every time.

I’d like to share with you a rule that I have that I like to say. That rule is: “You can’t do Low Slow”. It’s not a standard rule by any means, rather it’s just something I like to say as a general guideline. As with any rule, you’ll likely find an occassion where “low and slow” does indeed work. For the most part though, this rule will hold true for most players.

When you’re using Low on the cue ball, you always have to do it firm. You’ll notice that higher skill level players don’t have an issue with this, but beginners usually do have a problem. They have a shot setup like in the video above and they use low to hit it but they don’t hit low quite hard enough and, as a result, they scratch.

As you can see, when you don’t hit hard enough, your cue ball started to spin backwards but by the time it got to the object ball, it had already started to spin forward. That’s why you can’t use Low Slow.

The other reason why you can’t use Low Slow is if your stoke is not dead-straight, the cue ball will veer off and the shot will not be effective. So that’s another reason why “You Can’t Use Low Slow”.

Today we’re going to learn how to do Kill Shots. The Kill Shot is for when you’re shooting close to the rail and you want to keep your shape down close to it.

You can see in the video that when I shoot the ball softly with no English, the cue ball takes off after making contact with the object ball. That’s not to say that the resulting shot is “unmakeable” but it’s certainly harder when the cue ball gets that far away.

The way to do it better is to use low English and to use the English with cue ball going away from my object ball. In this particular shot, I’d be using Right English so that the cue ball goes away from my next ball to-be-sunk. The low English should be hit with the right speed so that it dies by the time it hits the rail.

As you can see, shooting with this low, right English, the cue ball dies shortly after making contact with the object ball. This gives me much a better position to shoot my next shot from. That low English makes the ball spin backwards which will stop the cue ball.

Let’s learn how to shoot a Masse’ shot. (Pronounced like “Mass-Ay”) For those who don’t know what a Masse’ shot is, it’s basically a curved shot. Imagine that you want to make a ball into the pocket but there’s another ball in your way. You can’t shoot straight through it so you’ll need to curve around it. That’s exactly what the Masse’ shot it. A curved shot. It’s almost like that cool bullet curving technique in Wanted.

In the video example above, I’ve got a ball that I want to make into the corner pocket. Unfortunately, there is another ball in the way and that makes it impossible to make my shot straight-in. By using Masse’ I can curve the cue ball around that obstructing ball and make my object ball in the pocket.

What you first want to do is to elevate the butt of your cue. By doing that, I’m going to make the cue ball deflects. I’m going to hit the cue ball on the right hand side because I want it to curve to the right. It’s going to deflect to the left but it’s going to curve to the right. So, ideally the english will grab and take it around to my object ball. Take your shot and watch the magic happen.