Recently, I started playing pool a lot more and realized that I was at a plateau. I could shoot okay, but I was not getting any better with practice. I decided to take some lessons with a pool teacher.
Luckily, there is a very good pool teacher in New Hampshire. Ken Tewksbury has been a pool instructor for many years (trivia note: His son Bob spent many years as a Major League pitcher), and I went to him for three lessons this past Spring. While some of the things he tried to teach me did not take (the aiming system he teaches for shots messed me up for a while until I remembered that aiming shots was not really my problem to begin with), his tips on position play - once I internalized them and figured them out a bit - helped a lot.
One of the tips Ken gave me was something that I never would have figured out on my own. I am a tall person (about 6'6", or 2 meters), and I have two normal-sized pool cues. One of my cues has a nylon (or maybe linen - not really sure) "wrap" around the area where a player's back hand would grip the back of the cue. All my (pool-playing) life I have used the wrap location as a guide for where I should place my hand...and it turns out that, for me, the wrap is in the wrong place!
There are two corrections for this issue. One is to get a longer cue, which they do make - I never knew that either - but the more reasonable correction is to place my back hand in back of the wrapped area on the cue. Basically, the place to put the back hand is where, when the cue hits the cue ball, the arm (from the elbow to the hand on the cue) points straight down at the floor. Obviously on some shots this cannot happen, but on most shots where you can stand the way that you want to, you should put the hand in that location.
By gripping the cue where I HAD been gripping it, I was elevating my cue as it moved forward to hit the cue ball. This drastically increased the error involved in the shot itself, as I was not really hitting the cue ball where I was aiming.
Of course, with practice you can compensate for almost any bad habit. When I was really in practice, in Chicago, I was able to shoot well despite this flaw, but getting rid of it is bound to help me. It does mean, though, that I have to train my body once again to execute a shot correctly, and I spent quite a while on the "one step back" before I started taking the "two steps forward". I have even started using my older cue more often, because it has the wrap on it and it is easier to figure out where to place my hand - right behind the wrap. My newer cue, which I had been using pretty exclusively for years, does not have a wrap on it.
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