We are back with new videos for our pool instruction series with Master Instructor Anthony Beeler! In this video, Anthony shows you one thing you can change to improve your game immediately.

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Transcription

Hello, I’m Master Instructor Anthony Beeler and today I want to talk to you about some stroke techniques that are really gonna improve your pool game. To begin with, I want you to understand why different bridge lengths affect your pool game.

Most of the time, if you have a longer bridge, you’re gonna have a lot more power but a lot less accuracy. You know, if you’re playing on 4 – 4 1/2″ pockets, your game better be pretty accurate or you’re going to start missing a lot of balls. And so, the shorter your bridge distance is, the closer your bridge is up to the cue ball, the more accurate you are going to be. And you don’t wanna get too close because if you’re too close you’re going to be crowded up on that cue ball and you’re not going to be able to deliver a smooth stroke whenever that you’re trying to pocket a ball.

But, let’s examine first what the different stroke lengths or bridge differences do. So, if your stroke is a little bit longer or you’ve got a little bit longer bridge, then if there’s any stroke flaws in your grip hands… I’m gonna move it up here where you can see pretty good… this is a pretty long bridge here.

Now, if there’s any play in my back hand, if there’s any wobble at all, just a little wobble makes that tip really move a lot up there on that cue ball there. You can probably see that there.

Now, if I move my bridge closer, and I still have that play back there, I still have that wobble, look how little my tip moves now. So the closer that you are up there, the less wobble that there’s gonna be.

If you’re a straight-pool player, or an 8-ball player, then you’re gonna want to use a much shorter bridge-hand distance than if you’re playing a power game like 9-ball. And one pocket, it can be a variance of whatever; making bank shots you might have a little longer bridge, or if you’re playing safeties you’re gonna want to have more of a touch and you’ll have a shorter bridge-hand distance.

Another thing I want you to consider about stroke is, you know, we’ve talked a bit before about the parts of the stroke, the pause, finish, and freeze, but what we’ve not talked about is some other elements.

Let’s review what we’ve talked about in Instructional Lesson #5: Stroke. Whenever you come to your shot here, you take a couple of practice strokes and you come to a stop here. One, two, three. Go back to the bottom of the ferrule. One, two. [hits shot] One, two, three, four.

Now, as you do that, it’s important to have those stroke durations in there, but what I’m also gonna tell you is, one of the most important things you can do for yourself to really improve your pool game and make your stroke super smooth is after you build those stops in there, then the next thing you need to look at is making your stroke smoother.

What I mean by that is you’re gonna wanna have a slow back and a smooth forward. Slow back, smooth forward. And, you know, if you were to put a stop watch on that, from the time you exit from the set position into the pause and the finish/freeze, it should take you about, well, close to 2 seconds to transition from the set all the way to the finish/freeze. So, let’s look at it again.

Practice strokes… one, two, three and then it’s gonna be slow back… smooth forward. Practice these elements and I think it will really improve your pool game.

The post Anthony Beeler Instructional Lesson #10: Advanced Stroking Technique appeared first on McDermott Cue Blog.