How to Get Better at Pool: A Coach's Honest Guide

Most players trying to get better at pool are working hard on the wrong thing.

They practise more. More hours, more racks, more drills off the internet. And they stay roughly where they are, year after year, and start to think maybe this is just their level.

It usually isn't. The problem is almost never how much you practise. It's that you're practising the wrong thing, because you've never found out what's actually holding you back.

This is the guide I'd give a player who walked into the club and asked me, straight, how do I get past this. It won't make you better on its own. But it'll tell you where to look, which is the part nobody explains.

Why practising more hasn't worked

Here's the hard truth about practice. You can practise a fault for a thousand hours and all you get is a very well-grooved fault.

If your stance shifts on every shot, drilling long pots just grooves the shifting. If your cue comes across the line, hitting a hundred balls a night teaches your arm to come across the line a hundred times more confidently. Volume doesn't fix a fault. Volume reinforces whatever you already do, good or bad.

That's why the plateau feels so unfair. You're doing the work. You're just doing it on top of a problem you can't see, so the work has nowhere good to go.

Such players come to me often. They have worked a lot and practise by themselves. But they are really in shock when we do only one session and I can pinpoint that their issues are aspects of the game they never though of. Then we go to the hard part - re-learning.

The four things every pool game is built on

Every player's game stands on four pillars. Getting better means finding which one is weak and working that, instead of guessing.

Technique. Your stance, your bridge, your grip, your alignment. This is the foundation, and everything else sits on top of it. If your base is different every time you get down, nothing built on it can be consistent, no matter how good your eye is.

Cue delivery. How cleanly and straight you send the cue through the ball. Your stroke, your follow-through, your timing. This is where most mystery misses come from. The aim was fine. The cue just didn't go where you pointed it.

Ball control. What the cue ball does after you hit it. Stop, follow, draw, and the speed to put it where you want. A lot of what looks like bad potting is actually bad position: you make the ball but land wrong, so the next shot is hard, so you miss that one.

Game intelligence. The thinking and the nerves. Reading the table, choosing the right shot, playing safe when you should, and holding your stroke together when it's for the frame. The same player makes a ball in practice and misses it under pressure, and that's this pillar, not the others.

Your weakness lives in one of these, mostly. Not evenly across all four. One of them is doing most of the damage.

Stop guessing which one is weak

Here's the mistake nearly every player makes. They decide what their weakness is, usually "my aim" or "my potting," and they pour their practice into it. And they're usually wrong, because the obvious symptom and the real cause are rarely the same thing.

A player who misses thinks it's aim. The cause is often delivery. A player who can't get position blames their position play. The cause is often that their stroke isn't straight, so the cue ball never goes the distance they intended. Work the symptom and nothing moves, because the symptom was never the problem.

And you can't reliably find your own real fault, for one simple reason: you're inside it. You can't stand behind yourself and watch the pattern repeat. That outside read is the single most valuable thing a coach gives you, and it's the thing the assessment is built to do.

A sane way to practise

Once you know your real weakness, practice gets simple.

Work one thing at a time, the biggest fault first. Don't try to fix everything at once. You'll spread yourself thin and feel like you're failing at all of it. Fix the one thing that's costing you the most, give it a few weeks, then move to the next.

Structure beats volume. A focused hour on the right fault beats a sprawling three hours of hitting balls. And track it, so you actually know whether it's working instead of guessing. A number you can compare week to week tells you the truth.

Where to start

Find the real weakness before you do anything else. Then work it, one fault at a time, and re-check your game every couple of months to see what's moved.

Since it is not easy to pinpoint your area of weakness, I always give a simple tip. Begin writing down the shots/patterns you had a problem with. Get a basic pen and paper and while you play take the time to mark down the shots you had issues with. Then during our session, we go one by one, and diagnose the real problem behind it. For beginners it is mostly connected to techinque and delivery, but for initermediates it is (almost) always game intellgence.

Talent gets you to your local club. Knowing your own game gets you past it. The difference between a good club player and a regional one is almost never their technique. It's that one of them actually knows what he's doing wrong.

← Back to the Journal