Cue sports, equipment and the betting line
Drills, aiming systems and rail geometry — practice you can run alone on your own table.
Practice is the part of the game with the least written about it and the most folklore attached. Play Better collects the methods that can be described precisely enough to be repeated: a solo drill that produces a number, an aiming system with a stated failure mode, and the rail geometry that explains why a bank that should work sometimes does not.
Rack the balls. Break. Take ball in hand anywhere on the table. Run the rack without missing, or lose the game to an opponent who never shoots back.
The three pieces are deliberately different in kind. The ghost is a practice format — a way of turning an hour alone at a table into a score that can be compared with last week’s. Ghost ball and fractional aiming are two competing ways of describing the same cut shot, and the useful part is knowing which one breaks down where. The mirror method is geometry, and the piece on it spends as much space on where the mirror lies to you as on how to use it.
What the section deliberately does not contain is a training programme with numbers attached to it. Anything of that sort would be invented, and the Journal does not print figures it cannot attribute. The drills here are described so that a reader can run them and generate their own numbers, which is the only kind of practice data worth keeping.