Wednesday, February 22, 2006
::: Pool: Slicing:::
Welcome to the 2nd lecture on Pool.
Please settle down and take out your paper to copy these down. These notes will be useful for the coming test.
Slicing.
An important skill in pool which you must acquire. As you play pool, there will be occassions where you are forced to shoot a ball which is adjacent to the centre pocket, but your cue ball is in a awkward position. Let's say I have a cue ball which is 2 cm away from the cushion, and the object ball is next to the hole but also along the same cushion. If I shoot it straight, the object ball will end up hitting the edge of the pocket and move away from the pocket, and you will scratch the cue ball instead. In this case, you have to slice the object ball, allowing the edge of the cue ball to gently touch the edge of the object ball. This will push the object ball into the hole, without scratching your cue ball or hitting the object ball away from the pocket.
When I aim for a slice, I usually imagine a line perpendicular to the direction my cue ball will travel, and where the line coincides indicates the maximum angle you can aim. If the ball needs to travel a substantial amount of distance, you have to use a lot of strength because the amount of KE transferred to the object ball is very little. For me, I hardly use slicing now because it is quite unreliable as there is a chance that the cue ball will totally miss the object ball, and you end up giving a foul to your opponent.
This concludes today's lecture on Slicing.
blerf at 10:43:00 PM
