UFO or Pool Game Training Device?
What in the heck is that thing? At least that’s was my reaction the first time I saw this triangular U.F.O. looking thing sitting on the rail. I assumed we were moving on to Tazer/Shock therapy for missing shots. Turns out it’s not a tazer or an unidentified flying object; but actually a pretty easy to use stroke training device. It has 3 settings and can be set to: easy, medium, or hard. I would argue that there is nothing very easy about this thing but I did start on medium which gives you a target to hit roughly the size of a ¼ of an inch.
How this works is you set it up on the end rail in line with one of the diamonds( Denny has me using the center diamonds of the table that way we can tell if the ball bounces back funny and doesn’t come straight back to the center). You then aim for exactly the center lit up green light. If the cue ball hit’s the exact center the light right above the green dot (also a green dot) comes on. To quote Gordon Gecko:
Green is good!
However, if you miss left (like me) or right you hear a Beeeep… and see a yellow light. This will start to get to you after 100 attempts. Turns out I would be a complete natural at this if the idea was to hit just a hair left of center and make this thing beep an S.O.S message. It is possible to score a point with a tiny bit of less than center cue ball hit on this drill, but not likely.
I am no where near ready to move on to the hard setting which, get excited: is the thickness of a credit card! But I am looking forward to improving my stance, address, and stroke with this drill and working up to the hard setting. However, this is a great tool to help take your pool game and your fundamentals to the next level and I would strongly suggest investing in one of these. If you have the time to practice with it for 10 minutes or more a day you should see a great deal of improvement in your aiming and accuracy within days.
Who wants to hear In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida… in Morris Code? Thanks for Reading.
