Natural tempo is an important part of pool and playing in it is synonymous with being in dead stroke—you can’t have one without the other. Your natural tempo is also unique. You can’t learn it from someone else or fake it or make it up. All you can really do is discover it and empower it.
Everyone plays great on a practice table. It’s easy to get into stroke when there’s no opponent trying to stop you. It’s easy to get the ball rolling when no one is watching and judging your performance. It’s easy to run multiple racks when it doesn’t really count. But it’s harder to do in a competitive match.
Your natural tempo doesn’t require force or perspiration. It doesn’t require a lot of management or control. It does, however, require a certain level of comfort with yourself and your game. You have to be able to allow yourself to move at the speed that lets your body and mind thrive. You have to let go of the obstacles that are in the way. You have to be able to ignore the distractions that come from your opponent and surroundings and the ones inherent in the game itself.
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When you are in a match, getting your tempo established and your stroke out is basically a function of confidence. Your stroke is not under the control of your conscious mind. It comes from a deeper place. Anything that forces your consciousness into a reflective, questioning, or “thinking” mode, at least for that moment, steals a bit of your confidence and knocks you out of your natural tempo.
When you don’t know what to do, it can go two ways. You can take a momentary pause as you figure it out, see it almost immediately, and move right back into action. Or you can stand there dumbfounded. You’ve never been in this situation before, and you’d don’t see a decent option. The longer you look, the more everything can get bogged down.
There are two ways to prepare to successfully handle this kind of scenario. Obviously, if you understood every possible situation, you wouldn’t ever confront one where you didn’t know what to do. This is impossible, of course, but it does underscore the importance of practice, study, and experience. Secondly, you could create a routine to guide you through these inevitable moments. Here are some suggestions:
1. Don’t let the physical action come to a complete stop while you figure out what to do. Keep something moving, but don’t get stuck on just one thing. Chalk the cue, walk around the table, etc.
2. Stay focused on the table situation and take your time. If it’s a critical juncture of the match, and you’ve gone through your pre-determined moves more than twice, consider taking a break if you have one available.
3. If you still don’t know what to do, do something simple.
Rushing is also associated with not knowing what to do. You stand there looking at the table without seeing anything promising. You open up your mind for ideas and either get flooded with mental pictures or nothing at all. The longer you stand there, the more the physical action winds down. You can sense the momentum slipping away. Suddenly a clear shot option pops into your mind, and you are so relieved that you jump right down and shoot it without further consideration.
If you were in the comfort of your own home and asked to come up with the best shot for the same situation, you wouldn’t have acted so hastily. You wouldn’t have chopped your decision-making routine short. You would have looked at the shot, imagined it getting played out on the table, and made a judgment call. If you liked the way it looked, you would have committed yourself and moved into your shot process. If you didn’t, you would have discarded it and asked your calm and silent mind for another. When you’re playing inside of your natural tempo, that’s exactly what you do.
Good luck & good shootin’!
“Killer instinct” is a term tossed around fairly regularly in pool room conversations. It is applied to some players and found absent in others. “He’s got the killer instinct…she doesn’t have a killer instinct,” etc. What, exactly does this term mean? How do you know if you have it or not? Is it a good thing to have, or is it a dinosaur left over from the smoke-filled, trouble-in-River-City poolrooms of the hustlers’ era?
For sure, pool is a one-on-one sport. Two players go into a match, and only one comes out a winner. Only one player gets to move forward on the tournament chart. You could say that the other player, in terms of a pool match, gets killed off, and that points to the essential aspect of competition. Everybody can’t win. If your opponent really wants to win and you really want to win, one of you has to be denied. And that denial, no matter how many mistakes you make, is ultimately delivered by the hand of your opponent. In that respect, pool requires the winner to land a killing blow. He has to squash the other player’s intention and kill off his hope.
There are people who appreciate the beauty and camaraderie of pool and cringe at killer allegory. They would prefer to pretty it up. No killers here, thank you. To them, the outcome of any particular match is just a matter of the best player winning. If one player plays a better game, then he wins; if the other player plays better, then he wins. It’s not a personal thing, for goodness’ sake.
If we were talking about boxing, this issue would be easy to resolve. After all, somebody is likely to get knocked out, maybe even hospitalized. Having a clear and focused killer instinct in a boxing match is clearly a genuine advantage. Only a fool would be there without one. But is boxing so different from pool? Pool players can’t physically touch each other, but aren’t they up to the same thing?
The truth probably leans toward the killer instinct, even though some will not admit it. To such a player, resistance to the phrase killer instinct comes from associating it with undesirable traits such as hatefulness, evil, and disrespect. That player wants to see himself as a good person, intent on pursuing his own goals and not someone who is focused on actively killing off another person’s hopes and dreams. But that perspective denies the real truth of competition. You have to eliminate the other player to claim victory.
There is nothing wrong with having a killer instinct, expressing it in competition, or talking about it in a mature fashion. It’s not something bad. Having a killer instinct doesn’t mean you have to hate your opponent or be mean and surly, and it certainly doesn’t necessitate poor sportsmanship. In fact, the greatest killers in competitive pool are often the most jovial, friendly people you will ever meet. The killer instinct is not demonstrated and revealed by mannerisms but by the underlying intention of the player.
You can like or dislike a particular player, but if you want to play well against them, it’s essential to respect them. Allison Fisher once said it was the most important thing. It’s also natural to feel love and camaraderie for people like yourself who have found a passion for playing pool. None of this, however, needs to interfere with the killer instinct coming to the surface once your match is called. It’s what competition is about, and if you didn’t have it in you, you would not be playing competitively.
All competitive players, in other words, possess a killer instinct, even if they can’t express it powerfully. One has to acknowledge and accept it to express it effectively. Think about yourself as a competitive player and look for it inside. Don’t worry, pool isn’t an existential activity. No one is really going to die. Even if your opponent tells you he needs to win to feed his family, that’s just a bunch of baloney. It’s still your responsibility as a competitor to kill him off as soon as you can. You’re not taking anything away from him, because if he’s not qualified to win, he doesn’t deserve it. He can get a job just like anyone else.
Good luck & good shootin’!
Sometimes playing pool is like cruising down an interstate. You’ve got your machine in overdrive, and that’s all you need. The hills and turns are gradual and banked, and you don’t need to shift or brake or even slow down. You can engage the cruise control, put a great CD in the player, and lean back in your cushy padded seat and steer.
It would be great if pool were always like that, but it’s not. Pool is more like a country road. Sometimes you hit two-lane blacktop, but a lot of the time you are on gravel or even mud. Sometimes you hit unexpected curves and hills, and sometimes the bridge is washed out and you have to come to a dead stop. Sometimes you have to drive right through the center of town, jogging left and right as the route threads its way through congestion, stopping and starting again and again.
Lucky for you, your car has a transmission so you wouldn’t blow out the engine by overstressing or overheating it. If you have an automatic, it puts you into a low gear at a full stop and shifts you into higher gears after you get going. If you hit a sudden load, like a hill, it downshifts and takes the strain off of the engine.
No matter what gear you are in, however, the motor still works exactly the same. The spark plugs fire and the valves go up and down. Outside the engine compartment, the drive shaft and the wheels continue to turn round and round. The mechanical actions remain the same. Only the gearing in the transmission is different. Oh, but what a different result this change makes in the overall performance.
We’ve been talking about consistency in our examination of the shot process, and I hope I have convinced you of its incredible value. Truly, you cannot play masterful pool unless you have developed the ability to do the same thing over and over. But now that you have that down pat, let’s talk about adapting it to meet the constant and ever-changing flow of challenges at the table.
Forgetting the jump, break, and other specialty shots for now, I suggest you develop three different gears for general play. First gear is for the shots that are difficult to pocket and difficult to control. Think of long shots where you have to get into a small cueball position or jacked-up shots where you have to stop the cueball. I’m talking about shots that already have two strikes against them. In other words, there are two significant things to be concerned about. (If there are three or more significant concerns, forget about it! Do something else!)
Second gear is where most pool is played. Here you have only one significant concern. Either the shot needs precision and the position is easy or it’s the other way around.
Third gear is for the open road. You use it a lot at the end of the game when you’re in stroke and cruising to the finish line. Shift to third gear when it’s easy to pocket the object ball AND get position. This does not mean relaxing your focus or hurrying your physical routine at all. It does not mean getting sloppy.
The engine of your machine is the execution phase of the shot. It always stays the same and keeps your stroke consistent, predictable, and natural. You may have to take off or add a little power from time to time, but it’s always in reference to your normal stroke.
The changes in gearing take place in the preparation of the shot—in the way you visualize and communicate with your body and nervous system and, in some respects, how you get down on the shot. I’m not going to get into specific details in this column, but I address it thoroughly in The Advanced Pro Book, which will be out this year. I have a couple of pointers, however, that should get you started in the right direction.
First of all, some shots require extensive preparation. They are tough and you owe it to your nervous system to give it the detail and time it needs to get ready. Once ready, though, you can proceed normally. Other shots are easy to see and easy to execute. They don’t require a demanding mental preparation.
If you try to force your mind through a rigorous routine when it isn’t required, it will rebel, and your confidence will be negatively impacted. It’s like trying to explain an action in detail to a child when he already knows how to do it. He doesn’t want to hear it. He doesn’t need or want your nagging interference.
Likewise, if you let your body move forward into the shot without proper preparation, you have also put yourself at risk. You have mismanaged the mind-body relationship and reduced your confidence again. You have asked your nervous system to produce something, but you never showed it exactly what you wanted. You never gave it the time to understand.
Getting back to the automobile metaphor, you asked your machine to climb a hill in third gear, and it couldn’t. If you had downshifted properly, you would have cruised right by the competition. Learn your gears! Keep one eye on the tachometer and learn to shift at the right time. Keep that power flowing smooth and easy. Good luck & good shootin’!
In music, individual notes express themselves powerfully when they are part of something larger, either chords or melodies. Even then, a power chord on an electric guitar normally commands more attention than a few individual notes on an acoustic. But if you have the wrong notes in the chord, or if they are in the wrong place, then the chord loses its effectiveness. You have to master the parts and the sequence before you can express it as a whole.
It’s the same with pool. The quality of your performance relates directly to the degree to which you have polished the essential routines. If your routines are consistent and dependable, they become habitual systems and take on a power and presence that is greater than their individual components. Instead of focusing on one small step at a time, you express yourself in terms of massive action. You make a statement.
This is especially true with the shot process. As the most important routine in pool, you want to express it as one powerful action, over and over, but to get to that point you have to master the parts and sequence first.
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In the last column, we broke it down into four major sections, the standing address, the transition, the set-up, and the delivery. Let’s use the rest of this column to examine the first section.
The standing address begins the moment you commit yourself to a shot and includes how you visualize the shot, how you focus your mind, and how you align your body to the shot line. It ends before you start to lower your body down on the shot. In other words, this entire section of the shot process happens while you are still standing. Your body is erect and you are viewing the situation from a standing perspective. At this stage you are not “in” the shot but are separate from it. You are in a planning and preparatory phase.
By definition, the standing address begins with a single committed shot in mind, so making that commitment is the last part of the shot selection routine, not the first part of the standing address. The whole purpose of the standing address is to visualize the committed shot, project how your body needs to be to execute, and adjust until it feels right. In other words, you are lining your body up with the shot line so you can come directly down on it.
Different shots might, however, require more comparisons and visualizations to get to a final standing alignment. If you KNOW the shot as a unit, you recognize it as a unit and immediately assume the correct posture. You don’t necessarily have to visualize the exact path of the cue ball as it comes off of each rail or even how you intend to cue it. It happens automatically. Using the guitar analogy, you don’t have to think about where to put each finger to make a “D” chord if you already KNOW it, you just grab the chord as a unit. If you didn’t KNOW it, you would have to place your fingers on each string individually.
Similarly, if you don’t know a shot as a complete unit, you need to mentally create, or extrapolate, a shot from what you do know. In this case, the standing address will take longer, because you have to put the pieces together in your mind before you assume a final standing alignment.
But the process is the same, and regardless of what you need to do to visualize the shot, or how fast that happens, you end up at the same place. Eventually you have to narrow your visual focus to the shot line, the line on which you plan to place the cue stick to make the shot. When you “see” the shot line on the surface of the table, you want your eyes already in the proper position, relative to that line, to shoot the shot. To guarantee this happens naturally, make sure you are looking directly down on the shot line and not from the side. Train yourself to always approach the shot line from this perspective.
Pool is a hand and eye sport, and the eyes must come first. As you prepare to come down on the shot, all other parts of your body must defer to and support the position of your eyes to the shot line. You build the foundation for your eyes just like a mason builds a brick wall, from the bottom up. For most people, the first part of the body to place is the back foot. If you are right-handed, for instance, your right foot “anchors” your eyes to the shot line and sets the entire right side of your body.
You set your body to the shot line while standing just like a guitar player forms the chord structure with his fingers before he actually presses them against the strings. At this point, the standing address is complete, and you are ready to move into the transition phase of the shot process. You are about to make a statement. Good luck & good shootin’!
In flying a Cessna 172, there’s one crucial split second where everything changes. At one moment, you are in the confines of a four-dimensional environment and subject to the laws of that universe. You can go to the left, to the right, and forward and even backwards. But you can’t go up or down unless you run it into a ditch or over a curb. In addition, you can use the brakes to control your speed, and if you decide to change your mind about flying, you can do so immediately.
On the other side of that split second, however, you enter a five-dimensional world, and things that didn’t matter a second before quickly become important. All of a sudden, the wind, for instance, takes on a whole different role. Instead of pushing against the airplane, with you adjusting surfaces to keep from blowing over, the wind is now carrying you along with it. No matter what else you do with the engine and the controls, you are simultaneously traveling with the wind. If you don’t compensate, you’re liable to run out of fuel over Lake Michigan instead of landing in Chicago. It’s that important.
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This transition is called rotation, the split second upon take-off when the wheels separate from the concrete. One second you’re accelerating down the strip at an awkward 62 miles per hour, pulling back on the yoke, and in the next second you’re flying like a graceful bird. Now you can go up and down at will, but backwards is completely out of the question. The brakes no longer work, and if you want to change your mind about flying, it’s too late.
There is a similar transition in the shot process. One moment, you are in the standing address, planning and visualizing your shot, seeing it from a standing perspective, and remaining physically separate from it. In the next moment, you are down on the table, physically engaged and seeing it from a completely different perspective.
This transition is also an extremely crucial moment. You are moving your body from a standing attitude to a lowered attitude, but you are also “passing the ball” of your intention from the mental to the physical. It’s an easy place to fumble or get distracted.
Think back to the last time you were sharked by a crafty opponent. When did the sharker raise his arm suddenly to draw on a cigarette? When did he or she suddenly squirm in the player’s chair or call out to a spectator? Didn’t they make their move just as you began to move down on the shot? Why? Because in this moment of transition, most players are vulnerable.
The reason for this vulnerability is a combination of ignorance, lack of training, and the natural curiosity of the mind. Most players have not trained themselves to concentrate during this section of the shot process because they don’t know where the focus is supposed to be, which leaves the mind undisciplined and vulnerable. When you are in stroke and everything is going smooth and natural, the process works fine, but when the “wind” of competition blows unexpectedly, it knocks you off course. The only solution is to discover how to compensate - to learn the crucial focus of the transition and train your mind to hold it.
We can demonstrate this by looking at another important aspect of flying. At some point, in every flight, you have to bring the aircraft back to earth. You have to land it. To accomplish this, every airport has a particular flight pattern around it, and the last leg of this pattern is called the final. The major focus during this phase is to keep the plane directly lined up with the runway. If you veer to the left or the right, you are in danger of losing the runway.
It’s the same in pool. You set your eyes and body to the shot line during the standing address, and you keep your attention during the transition on coming directly down that shot line. You don’t want your body, and particularly your eyes, moving all over as you come down. If you do, you are in danger of “losing” the shot. There is a huge advantage in “seeing” the shot from a standing perspective, but if you lose it on the way down, then you’re starting over after you’re already on the ground, so to speak, which might be too late.
Once you commit yourself to a specific alignment that seems congruent with your mental image of making the shot, you don’t want to change anything except to bring your body directly down on to the shot. Don’t change your head and eye alignment, and don’t change your mental image on the way down. Just touch down. Enjoy Chicago.
