Position Play Drill

Here is a good way to practice making a shot with position, and quite randomly.

Rack up 15 balls, completely random order in the rack. Break.

Remove all the balls from the table except the three lowest numbered balls. Hopefully we have achieved a fairly random positioning of three balls.

Replace the lowest numbered ball with the cue ball.

Place reinforcement rings under all three balls. Remove the highest numbered ball from the table. We will be resetting the remaining two balls many times to practice. If you don’t have reinforcement rings, you can mark the felt with chalk.

We are now left with a cue ball, object ball, and a target for the cue ball after the shot. What you will be working on is pocketing the object ball (or caroming off of it, whatever you want to work on), and landing the cue ball where the 3rd ball was. The important part of this drill is getting control of the cue ball. Try different cue ball paths you can think of to get position. Give yourself an area of 8-10 inches around the target. If you want, lay a piece of paper here and use that as your target area. As you get better, give yourself a smaller target. The ultimate test is to land the cueball exactly on the reinforcement ring. If you can do that, you are ready for the pro tour!

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