Instructional: A Beginners Pool Workout

 By: Luca Bares

If you want to improve your pool game there’s only one sure way to do it: time on the table. Practicing is the best way to improve, but you should avoid blindly hit balls into pockets for hours on end. Even though you’re at the table, this kind of practice doesn’t work on developing your focus and it doesn’t improve your weaknesses. To do that you need to know what areas of your game are lacking and deliberately work on those areas to get better.

To make your life easier, we put together this set of drills you can use for your own practice routine. While you use this guide, mark down how well you do on each drill in a notebook or on your phone. Over time this personal practice journal will show the gradual improvements you’ve made which will be a big motivator as you become a better player.

Stroke Drill

Putting unwanted left or right english is one of the most common mistakes beginners make. A lot of the time they don’t know they’re hitting the cue ball off center so it's hard to figure out why they missed. As you may know, english adds a whole host of variables that can change a shot like throw, swerve, and deflection so it's something you should avoid doing unless you're adding english on purpose. To get rid of unwanted english on the cue ball you have to work on your stroke. Luckily with the drill below you can accomplish just that!

Place the cue ball on the spot and take aim directly down the table towards the center diamond on the short rail. If it's hard to see this precise spot while down on the shot, place a piece of chalk over the diamond on the rail so you can see it while you shoot. From here shoot the cue ball down to the end rail and back. If the cue ball comes back and touches the tip of your cue without you moving the stick, you hit this shot correctly and no extra english was added. If the cue ball didn’t come directly back to your stick then there was some accidental english on the cue ball altering its path.

If you notice that the cue ball tends to go in one direction off the rail more than another, for example you hit the cue ball and it goes left off the rail, this means you are accidentally putting on left english. If this happens try to adjust by moving your cue stick a hair to the right until it comes back to where it's supposed to during this drill.

Challenge: Once you’re able to execute this shot consistently, add a little variation into the drill by hitting the cue ball with top or bottom spin as well. You’ll notice this increases the difficulty drastically and it’ll show how accurate your stroke is using top or bottom spin.

No Scratching Drill

The shot below is a dreaded shot for many. The reason is that the cue ball always tends to go towards the corner pocket and scratch when you least want it to. However, with a little knowledge and practice you can avoid a scratch easily. The secret is to use draw or follow on the cue ball to change its path.

Set up this shot with the 8 ball on the spot and the cue ball in the center of the table. From here, try to make this shot without scratching. Put follow on the cue ball to make it hit the short rail and use draw to pull it over to the side rail. Knowing how and when to use each will be important when playing position for different shots.

Shotmaking Drill

Side pocket shots are some of the most frustrating shots for a pool player. Despite the fact that the actual pocket opening is larger than the corner pockets, once you start to change the angle you come a the pocket with the cue ball or the object ball those pockets shrink up drastically. So there’s only one thing to do to practice these shots for a game: practice them.

Put an object ball in the middle of the table and the cue ball over the side pocket. From here try to pocket the object ball from every position in the diagram below. You might find the first four positions to be fairly easy, but once you start moving down the line, it begins to get much more difficult.

Safety Drill

An often overlooked aspect of a novice’s game is their safety play. This is a real shame because a novice player who can play a lock up safety can shoot one or two levels above their game to a player who isn’t as proficient when it comes to defense. A common occurrence that comes up, especially in nine ball is when the object ball is in the middle of the rail leaving you with not shot.

An easy and fairly simple safety to play in this situation is to hit half of the 9 ball and leave the cue ball and the nine on opposite sides of the long rails which leaves your opponent nothing but a bank or a return safety. This can be the difference between risking a game and winning a game

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