This is what’s puzzling me lately: set up a dead straight shot with white on the brown spot (or just behind so it’s not in the spot dimple), and a red on the pink spot (or just behind).
Now just play to hit the pink full on, if hit straight it should bounce back of the cushion and career into the white.
Whenever I try that I manage to get the second hit about half the time, 95% of these I hit the pink slightly to the right meaning it veers of slightly to the left and white to the right, meaning that when they collide, they collide edge on (half ball and less), instead of full in the face.
Now, if there were a pocket in the cushion the deviation would probably be so that about 50% of these would go in of the left jaw.
Meaning about 25% of these straight pots I would get. or less.
The other half I don’t get the second hit because I hit the pink too much on the right so they cross eachother instead of a second hit.
For short and mid range I seem to get away with this deviation, but this is really holding back my long game.
The surprising thing is that if I now take away the pink and just hit ‘down the spots’ the white bounces back and hits my cue tip about 50% of the time. (much, much better than say 6 months ago)
I was happy with this but couldn’t understand why my long potting didn’t improve. It was when I put a chalk on the rail behind the black I saw to my astonishment that I always hit the cushion a bit to the right of the centre of the chalk (somewhere between the middle and the edge of the chalk generally) BUT even then the white mostly comes back and lands straight on my cue tip.
So all the time I was thinking I must be cueing sweet and straight because White hits the tip on it’s way back, it turned out I still put some unintended left side on, hitting the cushion a bit on the right, and then the white bounces back, squares up and touches the tip. I could never have noticed that without the chalk on the rail.
The logical explanation would be the left hand side steering the white back to the left after the cushion, but even my low speed shots sometimes show this phenomenon and I don’t believe any left side would ‘survive’ the nearly 4 meters to the black cushion to send it back straight?