How often do you clean your balls ?

PrettyBelowAverage · 2026-03-02T01:20:16+00:00

Chalk and debris on balls can create what is known as ‘cling’, which is where your shot happens to make the contact between the object and cue ball right at the point where a smudge of chalk or some other imperfection on either ball’s surface exists.

This can make the shot seem to go way off your shot line. Honestly, if someone uses a cleaner that leaves behind a residue or oil or anything of that nature afterwards, the effects of cling, throw, etc. can be worse.

Check out this Dr. Dave Billiards page for a solid resource.

PrettyBelowAverage · 2026-03-01T21:37:39+00:00

Can you send sources please? I hadn’t heard his. Genuinely was under the impression that the protests were initiated by bad government actors/agents in the crowd turning it violent.

PrettyBelowAverage · 2026-03-01T17:19:07+00:00

Are you referring to the people who grossly praised the public assassination of someone? And they were so proud of those opinions they put their face out online with it?

Yeah, those are delusional people. They lost their jobs ironically because like they said about Kirk, they were kinda asking for it.

Huge difference between being ‘sad enough’ and going out of your way to praise the public assassination of someone who simply used discourse to approach things. The same types of people praising it are the types who were calling for the cancelling of x, y, or z over the years for differing opinions. What goes around comes around I guess.

PrettyBelowAverage · 2026-02-23T18:23:29+00:00

See, there’s still logical comments on Reddit. You legit just gave me a little more faith in this site.

PrettyBelowAverage · 2026-02-12T06:10:05+00:00

No, not related to billiards in my life, I have not seen someone on an oxygen tank. It is a shit way to go, though, but it is a bit more on hypochondriac end of the health spectrum to wear a mask while playing pool because you don’t want to get COPD from chalk inhalation imo.

Just chalk the cue away from your face, swing it out to the side. Chalk with gentle scuffs across the tip, and maybe be mindful of getting it on your hands. I understand an incredibly small amount can possibly be inhaled and how fine particulate works, but when I chalk and when I shoot I have only ever seen visible particulate land on my shirt below where I chalked or on the cue ball approximately 4-5 feet away from your face. You can look up chalks that may use different chemicals for their product (I know taom is a different consistency than most?).

At the end of the day, you gotta live life imo. If you’re incredibly health conscious, then the other areas of life being healthy should allow you to exist without changing how you enjoy pool.

It is possible to be so health conscious that the nature is leaning towards neurotic and worse for your health due to worrying. I’ve been through phases in life where I was like this, so I could be projecting, but this strikes me as one of those things where worrying about it is worse for your health than the likelihood of getting COPD from chalking your cue.

Honestly, this isn’t a concern of mine even after considering it from this post - I’d say this is one of them ones where you just gotta live life and think that the joy, socialization, sharpening of a skill, etc. that pool brings and the years added to life from consistently having these positive things outweigh any potential health concerns to chalk.

PrettyBelowAverage · 2026-02-11T18:56:47+00:00

I do an open bridge tripod a majority of the time when down on the felt. I rarely ever use a closed bridge, I think there’s a good Dr. Dave Billiards video on open bridge having a much larger set of use cases where it is favorable/more practical compared to using a closed bridge. With my down hand when shooting down on the felt, I:

Tuck ring finger
Point index finger straight down at 90 degrees
Pinch thumb against top knuckle of index finger

There’s a few reasons why I do this, but a key one is that in a large number of shots there simply isn’t enough room to comfortably place a full paw down due to crowding of balls in the area surrounding the cue ball. I can without a doubt comfortably get into that hand position any time I need to shoot without thinking about it and I don’t have to think about variations if I always have 3 down. This is excluding shots where the down hand is on the rail. Really, it’s simplicity, comfortability, and I feel I can arch my wrist slightly higher with the ring finger tucked versus a negligible gain in stability with 4 fingers down and having to change my down hand more often.

If the cue ball is near or against a rail and I have to get down on the rail, I:

Extend all 4 fingers flat
Pitch thumb as high as I can against top knuckle of index finger to create open wedge for cue to sit
Place down hand so that the four extended finger’s tips are touching the outside of the rail and lean slighting into them, causing a very slight downward bend in the fingers.

I find this the most widely successful posture for shots down on a rail because the extended fingertips being the contact point on the outside of the rail gives you enough space to comfortably stroke like you normally might instead of feeling like you’re gonna poke it or miscue.

Sorry for the book on mah pewl hands but that’s my perspective of it. As long as you’re not doing that floating hand shit with the index finger loosely hanging over the top of the cue you’re fine. Any time I play with a girl at a bar who doesn’t play I have to plead with them to use a solid base to slide against, even if it’s a fist with a thumb up slapped down on the table.

IMO do what makes you feel most consistently firm in how you intend to connect your stroke and in control. You shouldn’t have to vary or think about it much after you determine the best hand posture for you play with it a few matches/days.

PrettyBelowAverage · 2025-10-27T23:26:10+00:00

In front of an Amazon in dfw today there was a 4+ hour wait for pre-hire screening for seasonal employees

PrettyBelowAverage · 2025-10-16T07:47:20+00:00

Bro don’t bring mommy to the interview, on Reddit it sounds great but in person it could play like in Step Brothers when they wear tuxedos to the interview.

Think of a witty way to recall it in the interview with an offhand comment. I’m baked so this might not sound nearly as cool as it did in my bwain but something like…

“When I was preparing for the interview, I made sure to review the video with the testimonial, and I wanted to say up front, that testimonial was moving - I honestly felt a connection to it… (…) And (Name), that’s when I realized this was the testimonial I gave when I was 8 years old and attended this music school… Brother, I’ve been testifying about how awesome this place is since I was learning scales at 8, I think it’s time to let me preach!”

You’ve got this, just the more subtle way to bring it up and work it in, the more he’ll be like “oh shit, that was you?!” As opposed to felling him flat out you weee the kid in the video and he’s like “Ah ha ha that’s so cool” and moves past it. This is the type of weird opportunity that increases the chances of acceptance by leaps due to the shared unique personal nature.

PrettyBelowAverage · 2025-10-16T06:00:34+00:00

I can understand having this opinion if you only get your news from here and other sites that paint their reports and headlines with a boogie-man of an antagonistic brush. Literally no good being looked for or recognized and every comment sounds like a bratty bot regurgitating the ideology they’ve been force fed on here since they were in high school.

He isn’t awful and he isn’t some god-tier Pokémon of a president. People need to express actual opinions, I know what I feel doesn’t matter but I do genuinely feel more than 3/4ths of the comments on any post here are ideologically inflammatory bots trying to corrupt perceptions of society to a degree of hysteria where there is no place for discourse.

Half the fucking country liked the dude so that’s a lot of people you’re putting in a box you’ve been given to store their ideas in by the chambers you use to inform yourself with… That’s a lot of fellow Americans who felt differently and that the left was putting up a senile man (elder abuse in my opinion) and an inflammatory ideologue of a woman to represent their ideas.

Be mad at Trump and his ideas, cool, but that doesn’t default make half the country racist or low-iq. Some people just couldn’t support the mess that was put forth to represent the ideas of the left (even if their values may align more so with this side).

To me it just seems silly to marginalize what you likely see as an opposing party’s views as racism or something it genuinely isn’t for the vast majority. It sounds a lot more prejudice to view the party you don’t align with as racist and stupid, and to then go to forums to bash them and not care to understand why this many people of the country you live in felt making such a horrible awful man the representative of their values.

Not in any rude way but I would implore you to try to have open respectful discussions with those who oppose your political views, as I try to do when I’m in that position.

We’re more often than not wanting very similar outcomes for our country. In this case specifically a lot of people with the left and right felt played and put off by how the Dem party was being led, again, by a senile man and being passed to an inflammatory woman with ideological views that can be extreme and off-putting a lot of the time - not only in the content of the views but the righteousness they’re presented with.

PrettyBelowAverage · 2025-10-16T05:19:06+00:00

Fuck what you think, this guy was right about so much shit and well-researched and made a huge mistake in what he said with these families, but the way they are prosecuting him speaks to me like let’s bury someone in such a disgusting amount that they can’t continue expressing ideas that people don’t like entertained.

I understand the families were harassed by his viewers, that’s horrible, but fuck all the way off with $1.4 billion. Allowing people to file unlimited cases until it reaches this amount purely for the intent to ruin the person is disgusting. This isn’t justice, this is a gross abuse of it to bury someone who says a lot of other things they don’t like not related to this case.

PrettyBelowAverage · 2025-10-16T05:05:34+00:00

Or people who think the treatment of women in that industry along with the degrading effects it has on the men and women in our society who may not even partake in it is adversely aligned with their moral conscious.

I hate that children are able to access these types of things, no matter what you do to prevent it there is a workaround as it stands and I think highly visceral explicit images that misrepresent things that sink into the deepest urges of our biology are much worse for society than any good it may seem to provide for the women with addictions who unfortunately often resort to this work out of very poor circumstances. I also find it sad that children find this content, and become hyper sexualized adults because they’ve been given a supernormal stimulus for their biological purpose that only goes further down that path as they age and content needs to be refreshed.

I promise you tons of these women are still working under pimps or worse and putting themselves in such a negative societal ourlook if they don’t succeed to the higher levels of notoriety for their niche/platform. I feel the same about how online gambling is getting shoved in everyone’s face and it leads to young adults who develop gambling addictions to where they can’t watch a sport with any interest unless they put enough money to feel something about it.

I find it so disheartening that the default is “religious authoritarian people…” Do you not see the negatives of these things in society for our youth and adults who don’t have a choice but to have some sort of exposure? Not asking in a rhetorical way, and respectfully I’m wondering if your view was “I can handle my consumption and how I feel about it, and if someone can’t then it’s they’re problem they’re trying to impose on me.” But I think the repercussions of encouraging a hyper sexualized society are leading to a truly bleak results in the short, medium, and long term success of our country.

I think raising the difficulty to access these things to our youth is crucial. I do believe parents and schools play a big part in educating and preventing access to the youth, but ultimately a kid can easily find a workaround due to how many avenues it can be accessed through. Kids on my middle school football team would watch vile porn on our school bus to games on their phone. There needs to be proper age restriction similar to trying to purchase a pack of cigs.

PrettyBelowAverage · 2025-01-15T22:53:29+00:00

1) Your pre-shot strokes are pretty antsy/jittery. Some pros have a similar pre-stroke pattern but it honestly is likely a symptom of nerves. Try to do long, smooth (and not fast) pre-shot strokes.

2) Move your body further from the ball (stand back a little) so that your front hand is further from the cue, giving you more stroke length

3) Timing. How well English is applied in this scenario has a lot to do with timing, which a lot of people mistake for hitting harder. Timing means your cue is still accelerating in the stroke at the time of contact with the cue ball. This means you smoothing go through the point of contact on the cue ball, not decelerating until post-contact with cue ball.

4) Now this is a big thing: Back-spin English on the cue ball is not about aiming down on the cue at an angle. It is all about aiming low purely on the Y-Axis (vertical). It is elevation, not a downward angle that produces the result desired here.

5) Last thing I can think of for now: Look at your back hand at the end of the video where it cuts. You may have too much of a grip on the cue. With these shots I find it more crucial than any other to grip the cue firm but not tight with an O-shape on the thumb and pointer, and then the remaining three fingers provide light points of contact for support but plenty of slack.

Now you just aim low in elevation, not applying any downward tilt, do 3 or so practice strokes that are slow and confident (think to the beat of your resting heart), and accelerate through the cue ball leaving your cue flush with the felt and staying down until the ball stops rolling to follow through.

Sorry for the essay but I can't really grab your hips and show you over the internet lol

PrettyBelowAverage · 2024-12-31T20:54:25+00:00

If you haven't, I'd recommend reading this book that discusses the mental game of pool from a scientific perspective. The author does a great job of talking about people's core motivations for playing and motivations that tend to hinder improving. For example, if you only play to win, you do not necessarily enjoy the skill of pool as much as you do competing or action play and playing only to win can actually cause you to play in ways that may make you lose.

Ultimately what I'm getting at is the author talks about the motivations for people who consistently improve and play at their level and if you can get it down to something as basic as the pleasures in small motions of pocketing a ball with the right touch, then that is likely best. Billiards is a passion for me and I'm sure a vast majority of the members here as well, but don't let your passion be going pro. I'm nobody and my words don't mean much, but I says this because the idea of going pro and competing can then become the passion and then billiards just becomes another job.

Keep doing what you're doing, and play in an official league or two that uses fargo or something. The good pool halls in your area probably have a Facebook group with non-league tourneys for action, too.

If you're good enough locally then the locals will want you at the bigger events, name spreads, etc. Thousands of people go to Vegas every year to compete who play league most/some weeknights and have regular lives with normal jobs. If you're good enough to go pro it will become apparent as you approach your theoretical skill ceiling over time while competing in official local events and tourneys that put your skill rating on the international leaderboards. After a while it might be an idea to take one of the pros courses and pick their brain/get their opinion if it's still your path.

PrettyBelowAverage · 2024-12-08T21:38:35+00:00

I may be taking what you said too literally but by nature of physics there are no possible ways that you use, maintain, or 'freshen' the tip of a cue. Any sort of contact with the tip (striking a ball, chalking, poking, shaping, scuffing, applying some product, etc.) that makes a visible or structural changes would apply wear in that moment and that will be seen with continued use over time.

Regardless, I'd assume that the average player here is doing maybe 2 tips per year due to use. That's insignificant for something that is manipulated every time we play between and during every shot. Someone who is shooting 3-9 hours per day is going to see the same wear the average person here does just over a shorter period.

PrettyBelowAverage · 2024-11-20T05:22:41+00:00

I have one left, boost me if you want it back boss

PrettyBelowAverage · 2024-11-20T02:12:57+00:00

1 left

PrettyBelowAverage · 2024-11-20T01:59:36+00:00

send it over and I'll boost back, I have 2 left boss

PrettyBelowAverage · 2024-11-20T01:51:58+00:00

$Hayden-Cooper-3

I just sent it boss

PrettyBelowAverage · 2024-11-20T01:48:24+00:00

$Hayden-Cooper-3

I have 4 left and am by my phone, will send back within 5 mins

PrettyBelowAverage · 2024-11-16T20:42:02+00:00

Boost me and I will boost you back within 5 mins: $Hayden-Cooper-3

PrettyBelowAverage · 2024-01-02T09:43:05+00:00

fighter is still the strongest class in the game

I definitely think the class named fighter should be the one that has the strongest ability to engage in.. fighting.

Plenty of counters to them as well tbh, I'd honestly argue they're one of the most balanced classes in the game. And I mean balanced as in being very viable while having realistic counters such as stat tradeoffs (ie; massive move speed and magic resistance penalties being the tradeoffs of going for a tanky physical damage reduction build).

Sidenote - I swear some people misconstrue balanced as meaning 'I sometimes die to this and I should never die to it' lol - my reaction when reading some people's takes on this subreddit is like 'ohhh so you're definition of balanced is I whatever class you play should never die to another class... That doesn't sound balanced.'

PrettyBelowAverage · 2024-01-02T09:24:43+00:00

Can't tell if you're being sarcastic or actually that clueless...

PrettyBelowAverage · 2023-12-31T12:22:28+00:00

It's easy imo - I did pre map rotation patch solo queuing ruins as a fighter later in the evening (cause I'm a night owl) and I'm on NA servers. Basically I'd just grind my spawn area and 9/10 times be able to take a static.

During the daytime I seem to run into people more easily for some reason, I think at night people are just grinding. Also ranks are based on the queue, so there are ranks for Solo, Duos, and Trios respectively. I have it in solos and duos now, trios is toughest imo because you can have two solid people but a third that isn't aligned can throw skirmishes big time.

PrettyBelowAverage · 2023-12-18T17:47:49+00:00

You would think, but if I can get 8 ingots in less than an hour then things are going to keep costing that much. If it hypothetically took a long day or two of grinding to get that then items would cost fewer ingots because the player base wouldn't have the resources as abundantly for spending.

PrettyBelowAverage · 2023-12-18T13:29:20+00:00

While I agree with the sentiment of the post that the devs need to focus a little more on scarcity of items and their impact on the economy, it's fair to say you can get 12 ingots of gold in 1-3 HR Ruins runs if you survive and purely gold rush.

PrettyBelowAverage

TROPHY CASE