Practice Advanced Shots & Shotmaking

This is a drill that I used to over come the fear of frozen balls and the use of english.

Hey, I have invented a game that helps out a person who has trouble making the bank shots in a game, or for someone who wants to impove. This game is dubbed 'Four Ball' because I found that at a basic level, 4 balls is enough for a good game, but you may ad as many as you like.

How would you pocket the 9-ball in this diagram?

This looks like a drill, but how do you pocket the 9-ball if both the cue ball and the 9-ball are frozen along the rail ? What kind of hit do you apply ? Is it soft, medium or hard?

Hit the frozen object ball on the rail in any order into any pocket. After a while you will notice that when you encountered this type of situation in the future, you'll have no problem making the shot.

Here is a practice drill to help my long distance rail shooting.

Potting balls frozen to the rail can present a challenge and drills get boring real fast. I made up a game to practice rail shots, its called rail ball. There are no BCA rules for it so if you have a what if question, make it up, its your game, your rules. Basically place all the balls as shown and start shooting. Position is fun on this game and almost natural, at least from the first shot, then its up to you. Its also fun to look at peoples expression at the pool hall when you set up the table since it looks like nothing they have ever seen before. I had not played it for a while and just did it recently due to a degradation in my rail shots and when I was done with a couple of games I was close to running the rack, rack of rail ball.

Seen this shot from Robert Byrne Power Pool Workout, what this shot teaches you is first, you can see immediately if there is something wrong with the way you're aiming on long shots. Only little room for errors, so you can easily see if you are over cutting or under cutting the balls. Second is to make you more familiar with frozen cue ball shots, a good clean stroke and follow through is required to make this shot. Be sure to chalk up properly on this kind of shot.