Gold Crown IV

Gold Crown IV
FastMikie's Fun House, Del Mar, California

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Piling Rocks

This is one practice exercise
that I have been doing since
before I knew what it was called:

Randomly throw the 15 object balls across the table,
and then pocket them in no particular order,
and repeat, repeat, repeat, ad nauseum.

Pool instructor Tim
"The Monk" Miller
calls this exercise "Piling Rocks".
It is a Zen type meditation
which leads to shooting "in the zone".

Before I started reading the various books on pool,
and learned some of the drills and exercises,
this "piling rocks" thing was what I did.
That was maybe three years ago,
and I couldn't clear the table without missing,
so I never really kept track of how many balls I ran.
Usually I was lucky to run 5 or 8 in a row.

It was about a year ago
that "Cherry Bomb" Samm Diep
mentioned in her blog that she ran 105 balls
while "piling rocks" and that got me thinking
that I should occasionally try this exercise
and start to keep score.

This afternoon I didn't beat her score
but I did get to 62 before I missed,
and that is a record for me.
It is excellent FOCUS practice.

But better than that, I felt good doing it,
and I know that I can do a lot better.

Samm does other variants of this exercise,
including running the balls
without touching any ball except the object ball,
and/or without touching a rail with the cue ball.
These more advanced variants
seem lots more challenging
but definitely excellent practice.

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