Billiards: Effects of Speed

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Joe, I'm in Breaktime Billiards in Wilmington, North Carolina. And today I'm going to tell you a little bit about the effects of speed on English and the object ball. Now, if I hit this ball hard, with right hand English, it will be traveling so fast that my English would not have enough time to cause this one ball to vary from its path. But if I shoot it with side English and this is my point of aim and I use right hand English and I hit that point of aim but I hit it very soft, it will throw the cue ball, I mean excuse me, throw the object ball to the left. So if I'm going to use right English or something of that nature I need to make an adjustment as to where I'm going to hit that one ball, so that when I do the English on it, it will allow for the throw and the ball will go into the pocket. All right now, what does speed do when the cue ball hits the rail? Well, if I hit the ball hard with the English, it will not take as much as if I hit the ball easy. So if I were to hit this ball hard with right English, it's going to come off about that angle. But now if I turn around and shoot that same shot but I shoot it with the same English but I shoot it easier, then what's going to happen is it's going to come off at more of an angle because the English has time to take before it's the force of the shot makes the cue ball go. So those are the two things that kind of happen when you use different speeds on the cue ball. If you're pocketing a ball, and you have English on it, you could accidentally throw the ball because you hit it too easy and did not allow for the throw. The other thing is that if you want the cue ball to come off the rail at a wider angle or a shorter angle depending on whether you use left English or right English, then you would want to shoot the ball at a softer speed which allows more time for the cue ball to take the English. And that's some of the effects of speed on the cue ball."