Patience in One Pocket by Mark Finklestein One of the key skills in playing one pocket is the ability to wait. Having the patience to wait long enough for your opponent to make a mistake is one of the hallmarks of a strong one pocket player. However, I’d like to put my opponent into positions that make it more likely that they will make an error. Take a look at this situation.
My opponent left me this with my pocket being the lower left corner pocket. I don’t have any shots, but the cue ball is off the rail. As much as possible, we want to leave our opponent on the rail. Before I show you how I would play this, let’s look at how we determine which shot we will take. First we could use the black cue ball to hit the left side of the 11 and then carom into the 5 making it in our pocket. That is a really risky shot, and it pushes balls towards my opponents pocket. Not a good choice at all. Our next choice is to bank the one ball into the stack, pushing balls towards my pocket and swinging the cue ball three rails to get up near my opponents pocket. Here is what these two options would look like.
Your opponent has to jack up to hit the cue ball, only has the top part of the cue ball to hit, and is most likely limited in the shots they can take. That sort of pressure over time will likely lead to your opponent making a mistake and giving you a shot. - Here is what this option looks like.
This is the least aggressive of our options, but it does some good things for us. We put the one in a place that will block banking lanes to our opponents pocket, we protect the 5 ball from our opponent, any ball that our opponent hits up table will most likely push balls towards my side of the table, and most importantly, we force our opponent to take a shot with little to shoot at and jacked up. All of these things make it much harder for our opponent to shoot a good shot. The mental gymnastics that we do for every one pocket shot is to come up with at least two options. Never shoot a shot unless you have thought of two options and then picked the best one. Let’s review some of the key ideas so far. First we want to be patient and wait for our opponent to make a mistake. Next we want to always try to leave the cue ball either frozen on the rail or frozen to the stack, and finally, we want to find two shots or more and then pick the best one. You will be amazed at how often you will struggle to find a second shot, but once you do, you will realize that it is a better option. Let’s take a look at another situation to see what options we can find. Again our opponent left the cue ball off the rail, and we like that. Let’s see what choices we have here.
So far we have a highly risky option and a middle of the road option. There is a third choice, and it is the one I like the best. I like going thin off the left side of the one and freezing the cue ball on the 12 and 13. The idea of freezing the cue ball on the stack is a key concept in the early parts of a one pocket rack.
53
Sneaky Pete Mafia Magazine - February 2014
