Beginner’s Guide to Shooting Pool

Learning to shoot pool can be difficult for a beginner. Looking at the pool table and the cue sticks, it seems like it should be fairly simple to use the stick to hit the balls in the pockets. If you’ve ever attempted to do so, you soon realized that it is not as easy for a beginner to play pool as you first thought it would be. With the right knowledge, any beginner can learn to shoot pool. All it takes is practice and know-how.

As a beginner it is necessary to know that there are 16 balls in the game of pool. There are seven solid colored balls, seven striped balls, the eight ball, and the cue ball. A beginner might not realize that the eight ball is not considered to be a colored ball or a striped ball. Its use will be explained more later on. The cue ball is the solid white ball. The cue ball is used to hit other balls into the hole. When playing pool, whether you are a beginner or expert player, you must never hit any of the balls with the stick, except the cue ball.

It’s intuitive for a beginner to know that the cue stick is used to hit the cue ball in order to hit balls into the pockets during a pool game. What a beginner might not know is that the cue stick has three parts. The tip is the white piece at the end of the stick. The shaft is the narrow part of the stick between the middle of the stick and the tip. The butt is end part of the stick from the middle to the end.

The pool table has six holes that are called pockets. There are four corner pockets and two side pockets on the pool table. Near each end of the pool table is a white circle that is called the spot. As a beginner you probably don’t know that the spots are used to set up the table. The cue ball is set on the head spot and the front ball of the ball formation is set on the foot spot. The rack is the triangle that is used to put the balls in place.

In a standard game of pool, a coin is flipped to see who is going to go first. The beginner who goes first is the one to breaks. This means the beginner will hit the cue ball into the ball formation in order to force the balls to split up. Each beginner takes turns until someone hits a ball into a pocket. This is called sinking. The first beginner who sinks a ball then spends the rest of the game trying to sink the same type of ball. For example, if you are the first to sink a ball and it is a solid, then you will focus on hitting solids for the rest of the game. If you happen to sink one of each kind of ball, then you can pick which ball you want to be. You get another turn whenever you sink a ball into a pocket on the pool table. Avoid hitting the eight-ball into a pocket before you have had a chance to sink all of your balls. Doing so will cause you to lose the pool game.

Once any beginner knows the ins and outs of playing pool, all it takes is playing a few games to get the hang of it. The more you play, the less of a beginner you will be. Before long, you will be the expert teaching another beginner how to play pool.