A Few Cue Tips

• Where caution has made its thousands at billiards, confidence has made its tens of thousands.
• "When I miss a shot it is generally through a fault in stance, bridge, or delivery." George Gray.
• If you cannot strike a ball accurately up and down the centre of the table, try it along the baulk line.
• The maximum amount of side rebound is obtained when the cue ball is played squarely upon a cushion.
• The best way to win a game, if you are a decent player, is to feel quite sure, whatever happens, that you are going to win it.
• When the object ball has to be screwed off from hand for a middle pocket loser, the squarer the cue ball is spotted the better will be the resulting position of the object ball.
• A good test of accurate striking without side is from midway between centre and end baulk spots over the spot in the middle of the table. The ball should enter a bottom pocket.
• In judging the half-ball contact off an object ball against a cushion remember that the kiss has to be taken into account. It varies up to 90 degrees according to the position of the cue ball.
• The way to mis-cue in screwing is to keep in mind the fact that it is a screw. Having once got the aim and intended low cue contact, the best thing is to regard and treat it as a follow stroke.
• A common error in screwing is to use side unnecessarily. Side in screwing has only a twofold-use—in enlarging a pocket and in regulating the line or mode of departure of the cue ball from a cushion.
• Excellent results are occasionally to be gained from using running side instead of check side. This applies both to a ricochet cannon along a cushion, to avoid a middle pocket and to a run-through in-off to avoid a kiss.
• The reasons the middle pocket losers and the long losers from hand are played with top are that the increased rotation neutralises the throw-off effect of the short travel in the one case and of the forcing strength in the other.
• When the object balls are fairly near together in the centre of the table near to the top and at equal distances, from the top cushion, a fine cushion cannon between them is very risky. The thick screw bringing the white in and out of baulk and leaving the red near a top corner pocket is much better.
• To follow up your opponent's double baulk with a cannon if one of the balls is left near the middle of the bottom cushion, aim from a baulk end spot a little below the further top pocket with running side. This should always bring your ball to the centre of the bottom cushion, and by shifting the cue ball along the line other points on the bottom cushion will be reached.