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.

Today we’re going to discuss the always exciting topic of “How to draw the ball when breaking out of a shot.” In this hypothetical situation, we’ll say that you’re stripes and you need to shoot your ball in but you’ll also to break the two balls out on the rail.

Often times I’ll see inexperienced players come across this shot and they’ll see the angle and figure out where their cue ball is going to go but they don’t consider that draw means “coming back” and high means “going forward”. As a result they’ll make their ball just fine, but the cue wont continue on in the right direction to break up those two balls on the rail.

So, if we want the cue ball to go to the middle of the rail, I need to gauge where that 90 degree angle is, where the cue ball is going to naturally go and then gauge how strong my draw needs to be to come back. In this particular example, I’m going to need to have my cue ball come back about a whole diamond further. So now I know that I want to move my cue ball one full diamond, I’ll be able to figure out how much draw to put on my ball. In this particular case, my draw doesn’t need to be that much stronger than it would be normally. I’ll be able to make my ball and still break up those two balls, thus allowing me to complete my (hopefully successful) run.

I’m going to show you a few basic safeties that happen a lot in a game. In the first situation, we have a few balls close to the short rail, and a few balls scattered around the table. There are two choices in this scenario. I can shoot my ball in and break the 11 ball out. The other way to do this is to play defensively and shoot your ball in nice and easily. Strike the balls softly and you can force the cue up against another ball which will force your opponent to double hit the ball.

Taking the opposite point of view, if your opponent puts you in a situation where you have no shot, it may be better to simply fowl the ball as opposed to trying a kick-shot to make the other ball. In this situation, the balls are frozen so I’m going to double hit it. I don’t need to waste time trying to jack up. Now my opponent has ball in hand and he can’t do anything with it.

Another basic safety is when your opponent’s ball is in pocket and you have no shot. What I want to do in this situation is bank my ball toward his ball which will block it completely and hook him. He’ll have to kick at his ball and he won’t have clean shot. Now he has no shot and it took very little force on my end.

We’ve all been in the situation in a game where the your balls are frozen up against the rail. Wait, that doesn’t sound too good out of context. Let me start again. Occasionally, when playing a game of pool your object ball and cue ball may end up being pressed up all the way to the rail. When a ball comes to rest against part of the rail, that’s called being frozen. When one or more balls become frozen against the rail, you have a bit of a tricky shot on your hands. Luckily for you, I’ve got a great technique for making shots when balls are frozen against the rail.

When your balls are frozen against the rail, your first instinct will probably be to try to shoot the balls “straight out”. This will usually cause your balls to come off the rail because your shot was not perfectly accurate. What you should do instead is hit the ball with inside English. Again, make sure you use English that is inside, relative to the rail.

In the above video, I’m using left-hand English because the ball is on the the left rail (relative to my position). I’m also sure to aim directly straight and keep my cue perfectly parallel. This keeps the pressure going forward and doesn’t allow the ball to come into the rail. This keeps the balls trajectory much straighter. The reason it stays on the rail so well is because of the English you put on the ball.

Check back next week and we’ll go over how to shoot the balls off the rail while also getting good shape with your cue ball after pocketing the object ball.