Mushroom Pool School - Your Playing Pool Coach

Most amateur players don’t know the shot I made on the 5-ball 🎱

Here’s the secret:
We can not only roll the cue ball on rail first shots, but also stun or even draw it 🤓

Be careful to adjust the aiming point on the rail, as the rebound angle will change at every speed and spin you choose!

Also, follow me and watch the pros play to learn new shots.
You can’t do something you don’t know about 🤷‍♂️

Keep shootin’ 🍄🎱

Longoni cues
Taom Billiards

A simple hack to win more racks:
Solve. Your. Problems. First 🎱

How many times did you run 5-6 balls just to get in trouble and lose?
Most of the time, not dealing with the problem balls until the end of the rack won't do us any good.

This was the rack for the match.
I knew I had to break out the 2 ball to run out, so I found a way to do it after the second shot already.
When I did it, I already knew I was going to win 😎 as the rest was basically hanging in the pockets.

Spotting potential trouble and solving it early is what wins us racks and matches.

Keep shootin' 🍄🎱

Longoni cues
Taom Billiards

A great pool player’s skill is quickly embracing the consequences of our decisions 🎱

Here’s an example.
In high level 8-ball, a safety battle is a rare thing.
Most of the time, it’s run out or go home 😅
So if something goes wrong, we have to get creative and grab our chances to score.

Looking at this layout now, I should have gone into the 12 from the 13 or even the 9. I had a nice natural angle and more cue ball power to make something good happen.
Instead… just look at what I did 😅

The key is to treat every shot as a blank slate.
What happened in the past doesn’t matter - we have another task at hand right now.
Forget and move on to the next shot.

Keep shootin’ 🍄🎱

Longoni cues
Taom Billiards

David came to visit me from the other side of Poland just before I left to Prague 🎱

As always with new students, we started with checking the fundamentals.
David has good sighting and a solid stroke motion for just 1,5 years of self-taught play, but still we found a couple of big improvements for his stance and shooting hand position.
We went through a wide range of shots with various speed and spin, and started talking about deliberate cue ball control.

He’s highly motivated and diligent in his training and plays tournaments almost every week.
I think nothing stands in his way to become one of the best regional players within a year or two 💪

Nice to meet you, David!
Keep shootin’ 🍄🎱

Here’s why 10-ball by World Pool-Billiard Association rules is a favourite pool game for many pros 🎱

In 9-ball, this rack would have ended in 1 shot by making the combo.
Here, I didn’t just have to run out the table after that - the repositioned 10 was glued to the 8, so I had to break them out 😅

Difficulty level x10, almost none luck factor.
That’s the point 🤓

Keep shootin’ 🍄🎱

Longoni cues
Taom Billiards

Each player goes through 3 stages of cue ball control 🎱

1️⃣ Basic movement: stop, follow, draw
We can discover these even in our first months of learning the game. Getting the cue ball travel over a longer distance is often limited by technique, though.

2️⃣ Stun shots
A year or so in, we discover the whole array of stun shots. They feel great and allow us to play almost every shot with medium-ish speed and decent accuracy, so we fall in love with them very fast.
This is a needed step, but also a huge limitation to developing stroke efficiency required to do power spin shots. When everything is a stun, we can’t properly apply rotation - this is why most amateurs struggle with the long draw so hard.
The cue ball moves around the table mostly by applying speed, which makes us miss a lot more balls that we’d like to.

3️⃣ Spin shots
This is when we finally get to the true mastery.
Understanding pool physics deeply makes every shot a soft touch. Now, the cue ball travels around the table with the help of spin, so most shots can be done with pocket speed (up to 2x lower than stun).
The stroke becomes relaxed and effortless, so we get to make more balls and run out more often.

In this example, a soft stop shot with maximum low spin can help us slow down the cue ball after the contact even when we have a slight angle.
With a harder stun shot, the cue ball will travel a lot further, so we’ll lose position most of the time.

This is why I recommend practicing such shots this way from the very beginning.

Keep shootin’ 🍄🎱