A Few Cue Tips

• When sending your ivory red ball to be re-dyed it is as well to send the set to be adjusted, if necessary, to the same size.
• In making a double baulk don't be content with merely getting the balls behind the line. It is just as easy to treat the contact with the red as a cushion pot in pyramids and direct it to a given (and safe or scorable) point.
• Don't be afraid to look fixedly at the object ball in striking from fear that you will lose your original aim. Your cue, it you keep it gentry going once or twice, will adjust itself to the line of aim if the bridge has been made right.
• If your opponent, being ahead of you and feeling comfortable, employs his time while you are playing in talking to someone, take no notice of him and continue scoring. He will stop talking if you put another aspect on the game.
• Very slow (but not timid) near screws cannot be too much practised; for these the cue ball must be struck as low as necessary and the contact must be rather less full. The minimum disturbance then takes place and better control can be exercised over the ball or balls.
• To show how little strength is needed to send an object ball a yard, put the red on the billiard spot and the cue ball a foot behind it—in the line of the corner pocket. Now play to leave the cue ball only three inches beyond the spot with a central stroke, holding the cue very lightly, and pocket the red.
• When you have nothing better to do take an object lesson in free ball rotation by raising the butts of two cues and allowing a ball to run down and between them and on to the table. The tips should be just so far apart as to permit the ball to take the cloth smoothly. Note the beautifully free way in which such a ball strikes and propels another.
• If you do not feel comfortable and unconstrained when addressing the ball be sure that something is wrong. Perhaps your cue hand is tucked in or pushed out, or you are holding the cue too short or too long, or you are twisting your body away from the cue instead of leaning over it. At any rate you must feel perfectly easy if you are to strike successfully.
• All-round cannons, disturbing or scoring from double baulk, are not the difficult shots that they often appear to be. Aim taken at a given point of a given cushion on the same table and played in the same way always brings the cue ball to the same spot in baulk, and from a few such known points all the other positions in baulk can be provided for.
• Invaluable potting practice at short range may be obtained as follows:—Mark two dots on the cloth twelve inches and twenty-four above the middle spot in baulk and four other dots three inches apart to the left or right of the farther dot at right angles. Now place the red ball on the nearer spot, the cue ball on the baulk spot and pot with such contact as will direct the red ball over the four extra dots or midway between them. Then, in actual play, take your first glance to the pocket at a point twelve inches beyond the object ball and play for the same contact that the practice has shown you to be the right one.