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 I’m going to show you how to properly break a game of 8 Ball. There’s definitely a technique to doing it correctly, so here’s my general routine when I play 8 Ball. So, it’s your break so you can put your cue ball anywhere you want on the table. Pick a place you’re comfortable with. It’s mostly going to come down to the force of your body and not so much the placement of your ball. Note that you’ll still want to hit the 1 ball full-on with maximum force.

We’ll starting with your body stance; you shouldn’t be too wide with your feet, just a regular stance is enough. Lean your body weight back. The reason for this is so that when you lean forward, you have room to move without suddenly hitting the pool table. When you strike the cue ball, bring your body forward which will add extra force to your shot. Now, since you’re going to be moving your mass forward this will mean that your cue stick will rise. To compensate for this, aim low on the cue ball that way, when you take your shot, the cue stick will naturally rise and hit the ball center.

It’s very important to lean forward so that the shaft goes through with your body weight. Finally, a benefit to putting on those few extra pounds! After you take your shot, you should notice a fairly even disbursement of balls around the table (if you did the break correctly). If you’re lucky, you probably even got a few balls in.

Today is the day of my first blog post. I’ve been experimenting on Facebook and Twitter for the past month or so and it’s been fun connecting with so many other pool players. Many of my new friends live in San Diego but even more are from other parts of the country and around the world. I decided that now would be a good time to start a blog. This will be a place for me to offer my knowledge as an APA Ranked Pool Player.

My favorite part of running Billiards and Darts Direct has been talking to others about playing pool. With this blog, I’ll be able to reach a much wider audience and hopefully inspire some new pool players to take the game up. My first real post will be next week. For now, here is a brief commercial that I shot with my iPhone.