Help me out, please, with my Nine Ball break. My thing is I'm having trouble breaking the rack wide open. I can run out many of the tables I see the pros running on TV. If I could break as strong as they do, I'd get out about as often in 9-Ball and other games.
What can I do?"
Now, here's a question I've heard sporadically through the years, how if people could simply blast the Nine Ball break to pieces like they do on TV, and thus have an "easy out" remaining on the table, they could be running racks too, just like me and the pros.
I put this fallacy in terms for myself often. Say it loud-it's always good for a laughs from the audience. "My grandma can run the rest of this table! The problem is, though, that grandma isn't here. I am." Variations i like include "A five-year-old can finish this table and I wish I was five again..." and "My dog can run the rest of this out, but Rover..." and etc.
The question is failing to address two points, one of them less obvious than the other.
First, TV is often edited down to show the best of the action from the top players of the tournament and their best breaks. Pros encounter a significant obstacle to a break-and-run every other table or so, even when a ball is sunk on the break. And the tightly set racks and clean tables of pro tournaments make it an added challenge to break balls in to begin the rack.
I'm knocking in the 9-Ball every third break or so at a particular (sucker) table in a room I frequent, which has increased my dread factor significantly among the locals, but as I've explained, pro tables are different though the 9-ball flies when you move the cue ball.
Second, the same factors that help top shooters to stroke the balls so accurately help the break immensely. I routinely sink two or three balls off a nine ball rack, not because I am a 3rd Dan Black Belt in Karate who flies his body through the air above the table, but because I hit the head ball squarely with a long, level stroke. (Although you can watch me devastate a Nine Ball break online and crush an 8-Ball rack also. Un-retouched photos, dude!
In other words, that glorious pro stroke that runs all those tables is the marvelous stroking motion that shatters that rack. Very few people have one without the other.
But here are some break helps for you, and we have classic stroke helps all across this GuideSide, too:
