The Perfect Pool Stance

On Sunday, whilst playing pool with the lovely lovely Templeman family, I had the privilege of being given a lesson on how to play properly, by a gent who had grown up around family-owned pool halls. Free of the illusion of competence that I had laboured under for, well, my whole life, I found my ability to pot the balls greatly improved; my enjoyment of this rather blokey game therefore, improved significantly as I perfected the stance which I had just been taught.

The perfect pool stance, as demonstrated to me, is not the most ladylike of things. Having partaken in several glasses of the lovely that afternoon though, I wasn't going to let this inhibit my efforts, denim mini skirt or no. Let me describe it to you. Please withhold your disagreement on this description until you've seen where I've gone with it. Thankyou.

So, the perfect stance should not ordinarily involve one foot in front of the other. Rather, you should have your knees approximately shoulder width apart. As you set your beady eyes on your target of choice you should squat, bottom poking out as required, to reach the desired height. You place your left hand on the table (if you play pool right handed), splay your fingers and push them firmly onto the felt. You lean forward on this hand, distributing your weight evenly between your legs and the table. Importantly, you should be nice and steady in this position and your weight distributed such that if someone should try to knock you over, they quite simply could not.

But the real power, the genius of the proper pool stance, is in the hand that directs the cue: that pumps it toward the imaginary ball just beyond the white, guiding it toward the stripe or the dot, the line or the spot, the big or the small - into the ivory netted pocket of glory.

I swear I must spend half of my life in la-la land, because when reflecting on my new found pool sharkdom (this is a slight overstatement of my ability, but as usual, you'll have to forgive me the occasional embellishment) I realised that the unladylike squatting bottom out fingers splayed arm of glory pool stance is rather like a metaphor for how I'd like life to pan out. Yes indeedy.

The base unshakable is the requisite resoluteness. It is the creator of confidence and the thing from which great achievement can stem. A successful person, in my 8-ball view of life, has this kind of base; a hand on the table and their legs at shoulderwidth. Not easy to shake, not easy to knock over, and kinda scary when they look over their shoulder at you: their head craned back toward the arm of glory.

But once you have acquired, perfected, and cultivated this base and feel at ease with your bottom sticking slightly out, you need to practice that loose grip on the cue. Resisting the temptation to hold it too tightly, your right hand directs the cue but also commands its exponential power, stabbing at that little white ball and sending it rolling to brighter prizes. It took some nerve, I found, to loosen my grip on the pool cue. I was so accustomed to clutching it, and pushing it over my not-nearly-splayed-enough fingers in the blind hope of getting 'one in', that it took something of an ideological leap for me to believe that speed, power, and accuracy could be achieved with a little relaxation. For it is the case that the generator of the flair, the doer of the magic (I mean of course, the 'arm of glory') though functionless in the absence of the solid base, cannot reach its potential without a bit of a 'devil may cares' attitude. A little que sera sera perhaps? Though actually not really, for the cluey pool player knows that to loosen that grip actually sures up the outcome. Aaaaah, seeee....it isn't what ever will be will be. Disengenously perfect.

I mentioned earlier the shooting at the imaginary ball. Rather than aiming for the white itself, my able teacher explained that it is preferable (and I learned far more powerful) to aim for an imagined ball that sits just beyond the white. That's the ball you actually want to hit; the cheeky little invisible ball, the elusive guest at the table whom your opponent cannot see. That, dear friends, is about aiming a wee bit higher, and doing the unexpected. Don't go for the white ball, go for his imaginary friend, and the results are far better, far quicker and far more precise than you would expect. It is not only the perfect stance, it is the strategy with which one combines it that makes the pool shark someone to contend with.

Anyway, with that, you, and indeed I, should be wondering whether this writer has finally lost the plot. My life is a game of billiards. Oui. Dear me, I can talk a load of rubbish.

The promise of competence at the pool table: February 2- January 0.
The commencement of French lessons: February 3- January 0.