What is a pool drill, and why do they work?
Most people who say they practise pool are actually just playing pool on their own. They break, they clear what they can, they rack again. It feels like practice because it takes an hour and involves a cue.
A drill is different in three specific ways: the setup is defined, the goal is defined, and the outcome is recorded. That is the whole distinction, and it is the reason drills improve your game faster than an evening of solo frames.
The three things that make a drill a drill
Miss any one of those and you are back to hitting balls. Setup without a goal is a puzzle. A goal without a record is a nice afternoon.
- A defined setup. The balls go in known positions. If you cannot set the same shot up again next week, you cannot tell whether you have improved.
- A defined goal. Pot all six. Get position on the black. Leave your opponent snookered. The goal has to be something you either achieved or did not.
- A recorded outcome. Pass or fail, written down. Memory is generous about practice — it remembers the one you got and forgets the four you missed.
Why the recording matters more than it sounds
The uncomfortable part of tracking outcomes is that it tells you the truth. Players routinely believe they pot long straight blacks at eighty percent and discover, after thirty attempts, that the real number is nearer forty.
That gap is the whole value. You cannot allocate practice time sensibly until you know which parts of your game are actually weak, as opposed to which parts feel weak because you missed one memorably last Tuesday.
Your first drill, in full
Here is a complete, honest starter drill. It takes ten minutes and it will tell you something real about your cue ball control.
- Place the black on its spot. Place the cue ball anywhere on the baulk line.
- Pot the black into either top corner.
- The goal is not just the pot — it is to bring the cue ball back below the middle pockets.
- Ten attempts. Write down how many times you potted and got the cue ball back.
How hard should a drill be?
Roughly a coin flip. If you are passing nine out of ten, the drill is a warm-up and you are rehearsing something you can already do. If you are passing one in ten, you are mostly practising failure and you will learn very little from the noise.
The band where you succeed about half the time is where you are working at the edge of your current ability, which is where skill actually moves. This is the single most useful thing to know about structuring practice, and it is why a rating system that deals you drills at your level beats a fixed list of exercises.
How many drills in a session?
Fewer than you think, with more variety than feels comfortable. Three or four different drills, cycled rather than completed one at a time, will outperform an hour spent grinding a single exercise — for reasons covered in the research on varied practice.
Forty-five minutes of genuinely varied drills is a hard session. If you finish feeling like it was easy, it probably was.
Common questions
- How often should I do pool drills?
- Two or three focused sessions a week beats one long one. Skill consolidates between sessions, not during them, so spacing matters more than total hours at the table.
- Are pool drills useful for beginners?
- Yes, and arguably more so. Beginners benefit most from defined setups because they have not yet built the judgement to know what they should be working on. A drill decides that for you.
- Do I need a full-size table to practise drills?
- No. Almost every drill scales to a 7ft pub table — the angles change but the skill does not. Note which table you used when recording results, because your numbers will not transfer between sizes.
Stop choosing your own drills
CueCards deals you a randomised drill at your level, tracks whether you made it, and moves your skill rating accordingly. Free to start, no ads.
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