| No. 38, December, 1913 | Price 1/6 per annum to any part of the world. Single Copies 1d |
Things that Matter in Billiards
XXV.-THE IMPORTANCE OF A SOUND COMMENCEMENT
It is twice as difficult to overcome a bad style and method in billiard playing as it is to acquire a good style and system at the outset. Yet this point is but slightly recognized by beginners. The desire to run before the art of walking has been acquired is, perhaps, more conspicuously evident in billiards than in any other game. Given a table, a cue, and balls and the tyro is too apt to imagine that if he can at once make a few successive scores he will soon be able to make many more and go on progressing in the same proportion.
Nothing can well be more delusive, and a big share of tribulation rather than of success is being laid up for the future by the adoption of this course. The haphazard style of billiard play means a difficult, barren game, and the careful and systematic style means an easy and prolific one.
It is not enough, at the outset of one's billiard practice, to be able to make cannons freely or to score with equal apparent ease by means of pots or in-offs. To attain to any real proficiency later on it is necessary at the commencement to make the cannons "just so," both as regards strength and the amount of contact obtained on each ball; to pot with a view to leaving the cue ball nicely placed; and to make losing hazards with the primary (and not secondary) view of leaving the ball played upon where it can be immediately, or in due course, used again. So strongly is the importance of this realized by all decent players that it is scarcely too much to say that they would—at any rate from the point of view of personal satisfaction—almost prefer to miss a score than to gain it in a way differently from what they had intended.
In this connection perhaps one or two familiar examples may be given. The red is in the direct line to a near top pocket, and the cue ball in an equally direct line behind it.
It may be the easiest thing in the world to follow on here and make a six, but unless the other white ball can be profitably utilized from hand in due succession or a baulk left, the follow-in stroke would be simply suicidal, and a good player, who had been trying to keep the cue ball out of the pocket would be as annoyed to score the six as a haphazard player would be pleased with it. Or the white ball might be a few inches above and to one side of the centre spot, where a half-ball contact is practically certain to result in each white ball running into a corner top pocket. This time the good player would know that he had made a rank bad shot and even the haphazard player would feel that something must be wrong. But he would not know how easily the loss of the object white and of position could be prevented by a slightly fuller or finer contact than half-ball, because he had never "bothered his mind" with any such consideration. Or the balls may kiss badly for the simple reason that, with the first object ball sent in a certain direction as the result of a hastily-conceived contact, they could not do anything else. Here again, the trained billiard mind perceives the pitfall ahead and adjusts the stroke accordingly.
If we were asked to prescribe a course of preliminary and elementary practice for an earnest billiard student, we should say that the first thing to do would be to learn how to hold, align, and deliver the cue; the second, how to hit the cue ball at its dead centre; and the third, how to acquire an accurate appraisement of strength. And our suggestions under these three heads would be as follows:—
(1) Place the cue ball on the centre spot of baulk and lay the cue upon the spot in the rail behind with the cue lip almost touching the cue ball. Now place the bridge exactly under the aligned cue and some eight or nine inches from the ball. Next put the right hand at such distance from the butt end of the cue, that the forearm (when the body is bent) is perpendicular, and the rest of the arm horizontal.
If, now, the right foot is beneath the cue and slightly transverse to it, the left foot beneath the table edge and pointing towards the cue ball, and the face looking squarely up the table, a perfect body positioning will have been secured, and an easy swing of the cue with the butt still kept on the rail should result in the cue ball, when struck, keeping straight up and down the middle of the table.
(2) In making the foregoing stroke, especially at strength sufficient to drive the ball both up and down the table twice, it may easily happen that the exact centre of the table may sometimes be deviated from, and when that is the case the reason is either that the centre of the ball has not been struck or that the alignment of the cue is defective. In this connection the spot in the bottom rail will be found to be invaluable, and a player can nowhere pull himself better together as his practice proceeds than by coming back to this elementary position. Its influence will follow him to all parts of the table as, whether playing transversely, leaning over, or using the rest, he will remember that the cue simply must be exactly aligned with the intended course of the cueball, or that failure or uncertainty is being deliberately courted.
(3) Mitchell, in his book on billiards, gives six standard strengths, but we counsel the beginner at the outset to familiarize himself thoroughly with three. The first strength we should call a two length one (on a table on which four lengths can easily be obtained); the second, a three length one; and the third, a four length one. Having become familiar through repeated practice with these three strengths the student should carefully practice half-ball losing hazards into the top pockets from the upper shoulders of the middle and top pockets, with the red ball on the billiard spot, and from baulk with the red ball successively on the pyramid and centre spots; and these strokes should be rigidly practised with reference to the subsequent position of the red ball and in relation to one of the middle pockets. If the contact is an accurate half-ball and if the two-length stroke is used for the billiard spot, the three length for the pyramid spot, and the four length for the centre spot, a nice middle pocket opening to continue with should be left in either case.