A Few Cue Tips

• Never strike while in two minds. Chalk your cue instead.
• Take care with the easy strokes and the difficult ones will be fewer in number.
• It is difficult to get to the top of the table and useless to be there unless you know the game—and the ropes.
• In playing with side, take aim along the opposite side of the cue, keeping the cue parallel with the intended run of the ball.
• Don't say that any cue will do for the sort of game that you play. Find out the weight and balance that really suit you and stick to those.
• Never attempt to model your style by that of somebody else. Be yourself, plus light and straight curing and an easy stance right behind the cue ball.
• Be on the look-out for in-offs rather than cannons, as this disturbs one ball only and can usually be manipulated without difficulty so as to leave another score.
• In playing from hand into a top pocket when the object ball is likely to strike the other ball, play very slowly, and good position, either for a cannon or another in-off, will usually be left.
• That little thick run-through into a pocket leaving the object ball still near for further half-ball play from hand into the same pocket can scarcely be played too slowly.
• Anything like free play at once ruins the position.
• When in doubt as to an angle when the cue ball has some distance to travel beyond the object ball, imagine a cannon off the same object ball on to another ball only a foot or two along the line towards the second objective. This will at once correct or reassure the eye.
• Other things being equal always arrange or choose losing hazards off the red in preference to one off the white or a cannon. Its scoring value is 50 per cent. higher and it can often be as easily engineered into position for the next stroke as the white.
• In potting take two imaginary lines of travel of the red into view at the same time—the one dead straight, the other towards the pocket, and both to a point about a foot beyond the ball. The exact divergence of the pocket line can be accurately noted in this way and provided for.
• One of the most useful and simple pieces of tactics in billiards is to make a stroke in such a way that the red ball is left quite near some pocket. All that is necessary is to take a line through the red towards the intended pocket and choose one of the contacts or compensations necessary for this purpose.
• If you find that you are constantly beaten by a specific shot give up all other practice until you have mastered it.
• In nine cases out of ten the reason for the failure will be found to lie in the fact that, at the moment of contact with the cue ball, the cue is unconsciously diverted from the intended line of travel of the cue ball.