Teaching myself pool has been treacherous. 

I mean billiards pool, not swim pool or investment pool. It’s kind of a dumb, impractically niche thing to practice, but there’s a beat-up old table in my New Haven apartment building, so whatever. These past three months have been a hard lesson in the hazards of sports and self-education.

I call pool/billiards a sport in the sideways sense that speed Rubik’s cube solving is a sport too. It’s a trainable physical skill with a ruleset, prescribed equipment, etiquette, lingo, and even a professional circuit. Despite pool’s namesake, I’m not interested in the gambling aspect nor its reputation as a bar game. Rather, it’s the practical application of physics and geometry — spheres rolling upon a two-dimensional enclosed plane interacting through nearly elastic collisions — that has drawn me to pool tables since childhood. Whenever near a table, my brothers and I would just smack balls around without worrying about, y’know, being good. Who needs to be good at pool, anyway?

Well… being obsessive, living away from Katie, and wanting a pastime that isn’t round-the-clock neuroradiology, I fell straight into that hole (pocket).

In my profession, we neuroradiologists engage in the time-honored tradition of apprenticeships. Repeatedly performing the crux of the task with the supervision and real-time feedback from a master is the best form of learning. The downside is that it has taken ten costly years of hyper-specialized training in rarefied academic medical institutions.

In contrast, YouTube tutorials are accessible and free, but they’re also generic, impersonal, occasionally click-baity, and often just pros flexing. Nonetheless, doesn’t it feel like that’s how everyone learns anything these days? The denizens of YouTube have taught me myriad skills such as bike chain maintenance, bow tie tying, cookie baking, and the pronunciation of the Welsh town name Llanfairpwllgwyngyll… amongst other skills. It works great for little tasks or specific use cases of an established skill. 

Pool is poorly suited to YouTube University. It’s moderately complex and foreign to someone like me who lacks foundation in sports outside speedcubing. It went badly. I knew delivering a ball straight and reliably was the foundational skill, but finding a reliable stance and stroke cost two long months of doing almost nothing but attempting to hit a ball straight on into a pocket, during which I self-inflicted four moderate injuries, nearly quit pool, and got a $100 stick.

All I knew was that when I struck a ball, it never was on target, and it was off target differently every time. Inaccurate AND imprecise. When you learn a racquet sport, your coach will teach footwork, flowing force through the kinetic chain, and feeling the reaction of the racquet, and he or she will literally manipulate your body into desired motions and correct mistakes. I knew none of this and had no coach. For two months, I experimented with factors that I gradually realized were affecting my shot, but in dangerous fashion and plagued by repetitive strain injuries. At first, my bridge hand placement was far too close to the cue ball, necessitating a mega-hyperextended left shoulder, causing a brachial plexopathy and fourth and fifth fingers tingling for a week (1). While trying to imitate a prototypical billiard stance with locked knees, I caused a lingering left hamstring strain (2). An adjustment with bad foot angulation caused torque injury to my left knee lateral collateral ligament complex (3). For a while, I tried a very loose fingertip grip, but when increasing the force of the stroke I strained the ulnar stabilizing ligaments of my right middle finger proximal interphalangeal joint (4).

Next came a hard lesson in the limitations of bad equipment. The table here is a beat up, dirty Spencer Marston 7-foot table with slow pockmarked cloth and balls grimy from a decade of abuse. The slate is uneven with a central sag that causes a noticeable curve in trajectories near rails (so I’m half playing golf). Worst: the five house cues are in obscene disrepair. Two have serious water damage causing 3-5 degrees of shaft deflection, and the other three aren’t straight either. All have cracked ferrules, one so badly a piece broke off. The composite tips are all flat, convex, tilted, or completely shorn off. Three rubber butt protectors are missing, one has an unwinding linen wrap. One completely snapped at the joint and was haphazardly glued together. Eventually I settled on practicing on what feels like a heavy 21-oz stick hybridized with the least bent shaft. It had a shallow crack in the ferrule that I used for visual alignment, including cue stick axial rotation so that the bend arched down to align with gravity. I even got pretty consistent with it!

For my birthday, Katie gifted me a starter McDermott cue. It’s purple. I like it. And, unfortunately, while playing on the high-quality tables at a pool hall, I found that, with my own precious cue, I was awful again. Every single ball went veering off to the right. I felt despondent, like six weeks of effort were for naught. See, bad equipment begets bad habits. Specifically, a shoddy flat tip reacts similarly when striking anywhere on the 12 mm diameter surface, whereas a properly shaped convex tip enables spin but demands even further precision. 

I spent two more weeks breaking down my stroke, exploring foot placement, knee bend, hip rotation, pelvic angle, torso twist, anteroposterior back arch, neck angle, head tilt, one- or two-eye alignment, left shoulder extension, right scapular retraction and elevation, elbow angle and drop, wrist ulnar deviation and extension, proximal finger segment versus fingertip grip, and a plethora combinations thereof. Visual alignment was key, and finally I found decent accuracy. 

Two months and probably one hundred or more hours of almost exclusively straight shots. Can you believe it? I’d barely practiced cut shots, i.e. hitting a ball off center to send it off at an angle, i.e. basically every pool shot. Well, at least I’m there now.

I’m still using an elementary implementation of the “ghost ball” concept, but I’m working on envisioning the shot line without physically marking the ghost ball spot like a newbie. I’ve learned the basics of aiming elevated cue shots. Simultaneously, I’m calibrating my speed control in conjunction for stun, follow, and draw shots (I use the red striped 11 ball as my cue ball since I don’t have a spotted “measles” cue ball). Notably, I haven’t experimented with sidespin/English, bank and cut shots, strategies like safety shots, or silly things like jump shots. 

My goal is to run a rack and not feel surprised about it. Let’s see how I fare learning intermediate level skills.