It's the first bank shot that everyone learns, and it's wrong!
The ball actually hits the rail before the diamond location, sending the ball short of the pocket. A better system is to aim at the vanishing point.
The Parallel Shift, trusted and taught by many, is a faulty aiming strategy.
Sliding in a parallel way from a line of aim moves you OFF the correct line. Instead, learn to subtly curve like the hand of a clock in order to maintain alignment with the correct vanishing point.
Numbering the end rail by half diamonds is taught as fact in most billiards circles, but it is so easily proved wrong!
If you extend the side rail diamonds beyond the table, and then pivot a line from the theoretical 9th, 10th and 11th diamonds, they obviously do not line up on any fixed point on the end rail. Going by half diamonds adds unnecessary confusion, and I'm trying to turn the tide of history to go back to counting by full diamonds - but it might prove easier to adopt the metric system in the US!
It's not just that various bank and kick systems are hard to calculate, the rail numbering systems are torturously inconsistent.
Here I explore a 2 Rail Kick Plus system, the classic Corner 5 Kick system, and an End Rail Multiplication Kick system. If you're like me, I kind get them when I practice, but my head starts spinning in a match trying to sort through the different numbering patterns. My AIM WITH SPEED bank and kick system has one common rail numbering pattern for all 26 shots. This consistency frees up brain space to focus on the shot at hand.
Popularized by the 3 rail corner kick shot, Spot on the Wall is an inaccurate aiming system with a misleading name.
The concept that we can aim at one spot from various points on the table to make bank a shot is true. However, the spot's not on the wall! Let's start calling it what it actually is: a Vanishing Point. In this video, I demonstrate that the vanishing point actually fluctuates in distance for various shots patterns. Shown here are 3 Rails in the Corner, Cross Corner, and Long 2 in the Side.
“The bank shot’s dead,” said every pool coach ever.
A tale as old as time, but it’s not true!
The concept of a dead bank shot has a 2-part myth. First, simply hitting the “correct” location on the rail will not pocket the ball. It also has to be matched with the correct speed. Second, every object ball has a wide margin of dead bank shots possible when you learn to vary the speed of the shot.
Cross Side is just the Cross Corner pattern shifted over, right? Wrong!
The shape of the pockets are different, which makes the entry angle for each different as well. One pattern favors narrow angle shots, while the other favors wide angle shots. One pattern generally needs to be shot slightly longer than the other.