Today we’re going to learn how to do a forced-follow shot breaking out the balls. As you can see below, we’re playing 8 ball and I have ball-in-hand so I can put the cue ball just about anywhere I want it. There are two more balls up against the rail though and I’ll need to break them up with my shot too. I need to make the 6 ball and I need to break these balls out so I can continue my run out. Is this an impossible shot? Hardly. The trick is to understand all the angles.

Frequent mistakes that players make in this situation is to give their shot too much angle, too much of a cut shot. When they do this, the cue ball always comes up way too wide and doesn’t go for their desired angle. What you want to do is instead just make your shot with a slight angle. It’s important also to hit high on the cue ball. With your combination of a slight angle and a high up hit to the cue ball, you’ll make your ball and it will deflect over to your other balls to break them out of being frozen against the rail.

Being precise with your English is an important thing to master as a pool player. Luckily, I’ve got a very easy to understand technique that will work wonders on improving your precision when using English.

First, you want to imagine that your cue ball is the same size as half of the pool table. There are 15 different spots to hit on this imaginary large cue ball. Why 15 spots? Because there are 15 different intersections between the diamonds on half of the pool table.

Imagine there are 15 different spots to hit, you want to think of the center of the ball as being like the center of the table. There are 5 spots in the center that can be hit. If you want to move the ball one diamond to the right, you go over one diamond/spot to the right on the ball. If you want to go over two diamonds, just go over two diamonds/spots on the ball.

Now, if you want to subtract the English, you want to use high. When you go high, it always subtracts half of one diamond. So, if I want to go to half of a diamond, I’ll start at the center of the ball and then go over one and up one. Conversely, low English adds a half. If I want to go over one and a half diamonds, I’ll go over one from the center and I want to add a half so I’ll go down one.

These same rules apply on the long side of the table as well, but you’re traveling twice the distance so things are halved. If i want to go over two diamonds (with the ball being on the spot), I would go over one diamond. One diamond on the long side equals two on the short end.

This technique seems complicated but it’s really just hard to explain. Once you begin using this technique, you’ll begin to understand how truly easy (and powerful) it is. If you need help and you’re in the San Diego area, be sure to stop into Billiards and Darts Direct because we offer personal training to help you learn things just like this.