My book entitled "The Practical Science of Billiards" is written in the hope that it will benefit the game, as knowledge which implies truth can scarcely fail to do. But I sincerely trust that professionals and skilled players will not think that, in stating certain facts as a new knowledge I am casting any slur on their skill.
On the contrary I am, and always have been, lost in admiration of it, and the more I know the more I recognise it.
But there are some thing's no skill can achieve. Science and actual measurements are necessary. To take one out of the numberless examples from outside sources that offer themselves as somewhat similar cases. What success would be achieved, and what progress made in rifle shooting if the target left no trace of where the bullet had struck? But that is the condition under which billiard players have suffered up to the present. The target (the object ball) leaves no trace of where it was struck, except its direction, and hitherto there has been no means of translating this direction into the point at which the object ball was struck, which consequently remains unknown.
This the "Pointer" does, and when this is possible the object ball becomes the most ideal automatic marker it is possible to imagine, because it tells, on an enormously magnified scale, the exact point that has been struck, to not metaphorically but actually, a hair's breadth.
But until this is possible, which is what has been the case up to the present, billiard players have laboured under this very serious difficulty. The marvel is, not that there have been errors in the deduction and estimation of what happens, but that these have not been much greater. But even slight errors become of considerable importance, when upon them is based the whole training and practice by which success and skill are to be secured.
In the penultimate sentence of my book I state that in no previous book on billiards is given one single instance of the correct direction in which the object ball should travel, when struck a true half-ball. It now gives me great pleasure to state and to testify that there is one such case. When my book went to press, and certainly when I wrote it, I do not think Gray's book on "Red Ball Play" had been published, and in any case I had not read it. Nevertheless, therein in the stroke on diagram C (which I do not further define, as I have no wish to poach on other's preserves, and those who wish to learn the stroke should go to his book) is given an example of a correct position. Whether this was found by eye or measurement or chance I am unable to say, but if the first it reflects great credit on the discoverer, as it is quite correct, and is the only example I have hitherto been able to discover. This is one of the strokes to which he states he devoted months of practice, and one which when a player can do with any degree of certainty, Gray says he is ready for making a hundred break off the red, and he attributes much of his success to his steady practice thereat. If I may be permitted to give an opinion, I would add than the fact that the position was a correct one instead of a wrong one, and that consequently he learnt from the beginning to hit the point aimed at instead of some other one, was a considerable factor in that success. (En passant, it may interest him and others to learn that his cue half-ball angle for that stroke was about 35½ deg., and that if he was playing with crystalate balls, his strength was probably about 1½. With 2 strength and crystalate balls the cue ball would just miss the pocket.) This example is, however, the only published correct position that I am aware of, and in another case in the same book a wrong position is given, which shows that even to a "Gray" eye measurement on scientific and correct lines is necessary. The whole of the above remarks refer only to the elementary, though extremely important, point of being able to discover whether aim has been taken correctly. But it is sufficient to illustrate the thesis that I desire to make good, viz., that use must be made of science, in billiards as in everything else.
Professionals may with impunity challenge scientists to do as well as themselves, and say that they will then listen to them, but that does not alter the fact that the professionals also might achieve still greater effects, if they would take advantage of what science offers them, and it should interest every player, skilful or otherwise, to understand the reason for what he does, or tries to do, and the reason for and manner in which he fails.
One more point. In no game is the difference in skill and results, between professionals and amateurs, so great as at billiards. At any other game or pastime there is often little to choose, and in most of them exceptional amateurs appear who equal the professionals! Not so in billiards. I think the reason to be that it is the only game in which neither professionals nor amateurs know when they do right or when they do wrong, or, to state the fact more concretely, when they aim straight, or when they do not. Professionals eventually overcome the difficulty by immense practice.
Amateurs make little, or no, advance. Aiming straight may be a very elementary matter, but the result of every stroke is entirely dependent on it.
I invite all readers, professional and others, to take any of the positions given in my book as correct object half-ball positions (the magic spot alone supplies six), or the Gray's position mentioned above, and to test for themselves if they can aim correctly at even the half-ball stroke, the test being that the object ball goes in the direction specified, without any regard to the cue ball, which may be struck in any manner, or with any strength, and be of any composition or ivory. If unable to do so with tolerable regularity, they have not learnt to aim consistently straight, and they have the reason, staring them in the face, why they are not able to improve more rapidly in their play.