63.—"What is the best style of play for a decent player to adopt against a slogging and fluking opponent, who rarely leaves anything on and yet keeps scoring himself?"
As a rule the best tactics to adopt are gentle play, leading up to position, with an aggressive adversary, and free and confident play with an extremely cautious opponent. This sometimes induces the opponent to change his style with, to him, disastrous results.
The great thing is to make breaks, or, at any rate, plenty of double figures, and it is good policy to ignore the forcing and kindred certainties leading to nothing definite and to try by gentle cushion work, or carefully-aimed fine strokes, to engineer a position. There is also much more personal satisfaction accruing from this class of enterprise.
64.—"In a nomination game does the player simply say 'cannon,' or, if he intended to make it off a cushion, does he say 'cushion cannon'?"
It does not seem to us to matter greatly, because, except in the case of all-round cannons, the nature of the shot must usually be obvious. In the case of all-round cannons we think the score should count, even though the player be not sure beforehand as to whether a cushion or cushions will help him or not. On the smaller American table the exact cushions have to be nominated, as the game is purely a cannon game, but on the pocket table the main nomination idea is that an actual fluke, such as an in-off instead of a cannon or pot, or vice-versa, should not count. In this connection it has often occurred to us that a very interesting 100-up might be played on the flukeless principle, but without nomination. The idea would be for a player to stop immediately he had made anything by chance, even to the extent of making a six where only three had been intended or desired. Nothing would be more likely to encourage careful position play than this, and it would present a very healthful antithesis to the "strike hard and trust in providence" school of players.
65.—"Amateurs are often heard to say that they can judge angles better with cannons than with in-offs or vice-versa, or that they can judge angles from a distance, but not near to—and so on. What is the best remedy for this uncertainty?"
Varied and systematic practice. A half-ball angle is always a half-ball angle, whether from ball to ball or from ball to pocket, and the best method of familiarizing the eye with this natural angle under all conditions is to practise strokes with the positions reversed, by which is meant the playing of a stroke with a given objective and then with the cue ball placed at the objective point.
Here are a few illustrative half-ball positionings:—(a) Object ball 24 inches from central baulk spot and cue ball alternately on baulk end spot and at the middle pocket, with cannon ball on the baulk end spot; (b) object ball on middle spot and cue ball alternately four inches inside baulk end spot and on the top corner pocket, with cannon ball four inches from baulk end spot; (c) object ball on pyramid spot and cue ball alternately on baulk end spot and at the top corner pocket, with cannon ball on baulk end spot; (d) object ball on billiard spot and cue ball alternately at the top corner and opposite middle pockets. Sometimes it will be found in developing this idea that the object ball is quite near to the cue ball and that the stroke looks like a fine one, rather than a half-ball. But if the cue be held very lightly and the cue ball struck high up the half-ball stroke may still be made, even though the cue ball may have a long way to travel afterwards.
66.—"You do not often give diagrams showing how to make certain strokes, such as all-round cannons, etc. Is not this a mistake? It is surely clearer and simpler to print a diagram than to give a detailed explanation."
The usual diagrams illustrating various ordinary positionings are not given in The Billiard Monthly, because such diagrams may be multiplied indefinitely and will yet be found, on examination and analysis, to be merely illustrative, with often-times tedious iteration, of a few fixed principles. Furthermore, such diagrams are frequently misleading, as both cushions and balls vary and the exact measurements which usually accompany the drawings might apply to one table and not to another. What the student chiefly needs to realize at the outset is that every stroke that is made on a billiard table is the result of a given contact between a cue ball, rotating in a certain way and travelling at a certain speed, with another ball or balls. It may be that in order to make the intended subsequent positioning more sure the cue ball, whether rotating on a horizontal, perpendicular, or diagonal axis, may have to be directed against a cushion or cushions before it strikes a second ball or enters a pocket, or it may have to be directed against a cushion before it strikes the object ball at all, but precisely the same principles govern ordinary ball-to-ball cannons and cannons all round the table. The different angles must be got "into the eye," and when this is done the disturbance of a ball in baulk by a player whose ball is in hand will be essayed with as much confidence as though the object ball were in the middle of the table.
67.—" Is it essential to strike the cue ball on its vertical centre in order to make it travel in the direction in which the cue is pointing?"
By no means, otherwise side strokes would be an impossibility. Wherever the cue ball is struck it takes the course along which the cue points, but allowance has to be made, in slow strokes, for nap deviation when playing with side and for swerve deviation when the butt of the cue is raised. The two really important things to ensure are: (1) that the cue is, in its alignment, on, or parallel with, the intended line of travel of the ball, and (2) that the cue ball is struck exactly where it is intended to be struck, and which should be in the dead centre, or, so far as the edge of the cue tip is concerned, half-an-inch from the centre, at one or other of what may be termed the. eight points of the compass. Thus it is that professional players are to be seen addressing the cue ball with intensity of painstaking minuteness whenever a critical shot has to be essayed. They know full well that the stroke is not to be trifled with, and that upon its almost microscopical exactness depends the continuance or termination of the break.