The Sport of Pool Billiards 1. Ralph Eckert

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      Chapter 1

      The most important thing to remember is that to achieve maximum stability your legs should be slightly apart and in a staggered position. If your legs are parallel, you will tend to sway backwards or forwards.

      If your legs are one in front of another you will tend to sway to the right or left. So it‘s best to stand with your legs apart as shown in the photo.

      Furthermore, the rear leg should be stiff and not bent at the knee. If you do not heed this advice you will tend to move your leg, but except for the playing arm nothing should move, if at all possible. You could also say that bending the knee introduces an additional variable into the equation which increases the susceptibility to mistakes. Such small mistakes make themselves felt almost exclusively in situations of stress. Where the front leg is concerned you can handle the situation according to comfort and depending on your size: it can be bent or stretched.

      Andreas Huber, German national coach

      One of the most common mistakes made by the sportsmen I train is in the area of stance and distribution of weight. Now that so much snooker is shown on TV and trainers say (quite rightly) that the rear leg should be straight, players now tend to put all the weight onto this leg. But this can (unknowingly) lead to all kinds of mistakes: Snooker players make sure they put some of the weight on their front leg (by turning the front knee slightly inwards).

      If the center of gravity is shifted too much to the back, the player literally „falls“ onto his shot when following through and involuntarily applies side spin to the ball. Simply tensing the thigh muscles slightly, or consciously trying to feel the floor with your front foot is enough to eliminate this source of error.

      12

      before the first shot

      Upper Body and Head

      Bend your head and upper body down over the cue, holding the cue as horizontally as possible. It is virtually impossible, and not even necessary, to hold the cue completely horizontally. Your head should be directly above the cue, i.e., looked at from above, the cue should move in a straight line directly below your chin and nose or between your eyes. Make sure you do not bend down too far so that your chin is almost touching the cue (a hand‘s breadth or four fingers is ideal), because in this case (depending on your size) you will not have enough room to move the cue correctly with your playing arm. As long as you have enough room to play, you can bend as far as you want over the cue. The older you get, the more difficult you will find it to bend down, in any case.

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      Chapter 1

      Andreas Huber, German national coach:

      As Ralph has already said, the player should rely on his own feeling when trying to find the right stance – especially when it comes to head and cue alignment. Nearly everyone has a dominant eye and the cue will generally be slightly off-center biased towards this eye so that the player can accurately recognize a straight shot when he has played one. Ralph will go into this in more detail later, as this is the second „little mistake with enormous consequences“, along with wrong weight distribution in the stance. A lot of top players improved their game enormously in the past just by correcting this „little mistake.“

      Cue Handling

      With very few exceptions (e.g. the break), the bridge arm (front arm) should be stretched out almost to the full. If you bend it too much, or even rest your forearm on the table, there is a danger that you will be leaning forward too far with your whole body when you shoot. In this case the bent arm would act like a spring and could lead to more mistakes. I will describe the hand bridge through which we guide the cue in a later chapter. There are several points to be remembered when it comes to the shooting arm (back arm):

       In a good cue grip your hand should cradle the cue be-tween your thumb and four fingers, with the middle, ring and little finger slightly looser so that they give a little on the backswing but still remain on the cue, helping to guide it. If the cue grip is too tight there will be too much movement in the upper arm when you swing, making it virtually impossi-ble to cue in a straight line. The upper arm will automatically move slightly, but for a straight cue movement this should be kept to a minimum.

      14

      before the first shot

      Your wrist should not move at all if possible.

      The starting position for the forearm is, as I said before, more or less vertical and the cue grip should be approxi-mately on a level with the rear leg.

      The upper arm should initially be perpendicular to the forearm.

      When shooting, the upper arm automatically follows through. There is nothing wrong with this because other-wise you would tense your muscles in order to bring the shot to a halt and a tense shot is the last thing we want.

      The elbow, seen from above, is directly above the cue,.

      Depending on your stature, it may not be easy for you to observe all these points at once. Don‘t be afraid to ask someone more experienced for advice (your club trainer, for example). Just imagine what the league or national coach would think if you were to start playing in their team with a bad cue grip?

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      Chapter 1

      16

      before the first shot

      Hand Bridge

      Before I start bombarding you with details here are a few photos and brief explanations on the subject of hand bridges:

      Low

      The middle finger is pushed down onto the table slightly.

      Middle

      This is the standard bridge where the middle, ring and little finer are well spread out to maximize sta-bility.

      High

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