Watch a basketball player who’s got a high average on successful free-throws.  Watch the professional golfer who’s ahead of everyone else in a big tournament.  What do they have in common?  They have consistently repeated pre-shot routines.  ‘Winners’ tend to have obvious habits and a methodology to what they do, because they’ve learned – either through trial and error, or through a systematic approach to improve their performance – that leaving anything to chance is a gamble that often doesn’t pay off.

 

So what can you do, as a pool player, to improve your chances of success on every shot?

 

YOU need a METHOD, a system, a collection of routines that you adhere to.  If you sometimes have 2 practice strokes and sometimes have 12 practices strokes, how is your brain going to process that information?  If you sometimes step into the shot along the line of aim, after sizing things up from a vantage point that’s 2 to 3 feet from the table, and other times you just get down on the shot and start trying to compute your aim, speed and desired position without a thorough inspection of the entire table, do you think your success rate on all shots will improve?  Or will you become a WINNER if you have no repeateable system?  Likely NOT. 

Do you think you will do better if you pay attention to the same important things on every shot?  You WILL.

 

S-P-F (or S-P-F-f) stands for SET, PAUSE, FINISH and Freeze.  It is a simple acronym which, even without the fully detailed definition of each word or step in the method, could help you begin to raise your averages:  average balls sunk per game, average number of successful position plays, average successful safeties and average overall WINS.

 

Many pool players are looking for a ‘system’.    They want some magic procedure that makes success simple – because you know everything that’s worth having in this life should be easy, right?  (if you answered the preceding question ‘yes’, then you’ll want to stop right here and don’t waste any more of your time at this web site)

 

It takes time and effort to ingrain the new habits of a system into your brain.  It takes slow, repetitive training, to get your brain to sub-consciously recognize and remember what your body is doing and how it feels when you do it right.

 

Come back here from time to time, as I will continue to add more concepts that increase your chances of winning.