Yesterday, armed with a heavy pool cue that a friend got for me as a Christmas present a couple of years ago, I had runs of 32, 25, 25, and 22 consecutive balls pocketed. Not too bad. Today's high was 35.
The odd thing about pool is that it is BOTH geometric and not geometric. You never get a precise angle of "reflection" from the banks, because there's some give in them. The way you strike the ball brings into play several factors that aren't easy to describe in mathematical form: a little hop, spin in one direction or another, a halt in place assisted by the friction of the table, the spin of one ball imparting an extra little force to another ball to "throw" it, and the timing of a ball's path -- whether you can get the cue ball out of the way of the ball you are trying to bank, etc. All these things you learn by many repetitions, and by a sort of touch.
Now, your brains come into it, too. Today I showed my friend a neat little shot that should be impossible to make, if you went by Level 1 Billiards geometry. The cue ball is touching the ball you want to go in. They are lined up perpendicular to the bank, about four or five inches away from a line that would intersect both side pockets. You want to make the ball in a side pocket, but it is pointed straight at the bank, so that it will just bounce back in the same line, and still be that four or five inches off line.
So what do you do? The ball is going to hit THE SAME spot, no matter how you aim the cue ball, because it and the cue are touching. What you want is that the ball will hit that spot and NOT bounce straight back, but bounce at an angle. So you do something counterintuitive. You hit the cue ball at a severe angle to the ball, in the direction of the side pockets (which is the opposite of the angle you'd use if there were a decent space between the balls), so that the object ball will have enough spin on it to throw it about five degrees after it hits the bank. You don't want the true bounce; you want a bounce that is "off" by that five degrees. And sure enough, it works...
As I said, it's a pointless diversion. But after all, I think we'd be a lot better off if there were more pool halls and bowling alleys than there are now. Where's a kid going to learn anything?
