Immediately before last night's practice I asked practice assistant Dave to clean the balls, including the cue ball. It's so easy to keep them clean because I have a BallStar 2000 machine.
I never gave it another thought until I started the practice routine and on the first drill (lag shots) I did worse than ever. It seemed that the foot rail was dead. And yet, it also seemed that I was using the right stroke, same as always.
It was only much later that I got to reflecting on it, and what I came up with was that the cue ball was so clean and slippery that it skidded on hitting the foot rail thereby taking off some of the speed and effectively acting like a dead rail.
Maybe it's just my imagination, but other shots behaved poorly too, especially english off the rails.
The only bright spot to the night was that I went a perfect 20 out of 20 spot shots, 10 from each side. The slippery ball didn't have any negative effect
on spot shots!
I never gave it another thought until I started the practice routine and on the first drill (lag shots) I did worse than ever. It seemed that the foot rail was dead. And yet, it also seemed that I was using the right stroke, same as always.
It was only much later that I got to reflecting on it, and what I came up with was that the cue ball was so clean and slippery that it skidded on hitting the foot rail thereby taking off some of the speed and effectively acting like a dead rail.
Maybe it's just my imagination, but other shots behaved poorly too, especially english off the rails.
The only bright spot to the night was that I went a perfect 20 out of 20 spot shots, 10 from each side. The slippery ball didn't have any negative effect
on spot shots!
1 comment:
Nice. I think a dirty cue ball has a little more cling on the end rail, which helps it change direction a bit easier. A clean ball will tend to still remain spinning a bit more the "wrong way" after hitting the rail, causing more table friction, slowing it down.
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