How to Play Pool For Beginners

Table of Contents

This is a beginner series for new pool players.

So first of all lets define a beginner pool player for the purposes of this article:

A beginner pool player is someone who has very little or no prior experience playing pool. This person may have seen pool being played on television or in a bar, and may have even tried a game or two, but they lack the fundamental knowledge and skills required to play the game effectively.

They are not familiar with the rules, the techniques, or the strategies of pool. Essentially, a beginner pool player is someone who is just starting out on their journey to learn and master the game of pool.

What Do You Need to Know to Play Pool?

Decide
Alignment
Aim
Stance
Cue action/stroke
Delivery

General Introduction To Pool Stance

There are two schools of thought in pool coaching and coaching beginners in particular. Many coaches think that things have to be done in a certain way and other people think that you can do it anyhow you like, providing it gets the job done.

I’m not saying that I agree with either side completely but I think that a beginner needs a set of best practices things that will work but you can adapt them to your own way of doing things.

If this article was about a beginner’s guide to riding a horse, the essential pieces of information that I would give would be:

Climb on to the horse.
Sit in the saddle.
Face towards the horse’s head,
Put your feet in the stirrups.
Hold the reins in your hands.
Be very careful

These maneuvers are not going to make you the next Olympic show jumping champion. but they will put you in the right position with the correct fundamentals.
You would be using the best practices of riding a horse.

Pool Fundamentals

So how we going to do this how we going to approach the pool stance the stroke the alignment the aiming the eyes the head the elbows shoulders and all of that stuff surely there’s a good starting point.

Perhaps what we should do is reverse engineer the whole shot procedure in order to know what questions we would need to ask.
What is the reason for the stance?
Why do we bend down like that?
Do I have to hold the cue that way?
What is the reason that we don’t stand six foot behind the ball take two steps and throw the cue at the ball like a javelin?

It could work, if you hit the ball in the right place, at the right speed it will still pot the ball into the pocket!
So why don’t we do it like that?

What we need are consistent results results that can be predictably repeated over and over and over again, thousands and thousands of times until we get used to what’s going on.

So if you’re not going to stand a way back behind the ball and throw the cue what do you think we should do?
Well usually when you’re trying to do something like this the best thing to do is to look at the best players and see what it is that they do.

Professional pool and snooker players stand like this:

Image

They hold the cue like this:

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They address the ball like this:

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Everyone’s stroke and stands are different even the professionals but what we need to look at is one of the things that they all do what do they have in common when we look at these common traits these traits could be described as best practices.

For instance most players have their head down low on the queue they bend at the waist and their queue is kept almost parallel to the table most players have the elbow up with their cue held in the backhand and a bridge out in front.

The cue runs from the backhand to the front hand underneath the body

Pool Stance Best Practices

What I just described were the best practices best practices on the things that work the best for the best players playing in the toughest conditions over the last 100 years.

So we should be looking at something that looks like this not exactly like this but has all of the main points

[Show a diagram]

Decisions

Decide what you are going to do. This is part of your pre shot routine

Cue Alignment

The whole idea and reason for players assuming this stance and arm position is to get the cue on the selected aim/shot line.

Put your cue on the selected shot line.

Decide what you’re going to do with the balls, pick out the spot that you’re going to hit. Identify your aim line put your cue on your aim line and then build your stance and body position around the cue.

In other words place your queue on the aim line place your body onto your queue not the other way around I see a lot of people that get down into their position and then they pull the queue into their body it should be the other way around

Aiming

We won’t be going into aiming at this point because we don’t need to yet.

Everything we do from this point on is dependent on having your pool cue on or on about online it has to be near so that when you aim when you hit the white ball in a certain location it is aligned with the whole shot.