As long as you are well balanced, the stance is not
as important in my view as it has often been made out
to be.
We
are human beings, not automatons. We are all built differently
and as in golf, everyone uses a slightly different stance.
Tiger Woods, David Duval and Colin Montgomery all address
the ball differently, but achieve the same objective
by hitting the ball in a straight line.
It is exactly the same in snooker.
I
don't believe any two players in the professional ranks
adopt the same stance, but they can achieve the same
objective, which is to cue straight and true. It is
not essential to put your back foot here and your front
foot there. You don't have to have your elbow behind
the shot and you don't have to grip your cue in a certain
manner.
With
regard to stance, I would go along with the official
line only as far as bracing your back leg, leaning forward
and bending the front leg in order to move into the
shot. A player's weight needs to be distributed so that
his body does not move as he swings his cue arm, but
other than that I forget about stance and concentrate
on getting the cue moving along a straight line.
Steve Davis makes the point that if anyone ever tried
to push him off balance, he would waver not to the left,
right or backwards, but only forwards.
What
you need to do is to put the cue on-line and then whichever
eye you are going
to use, right, left, or, if even-sighted both, adopt
a stance which is natural for either the left, right
or both eyes to drop naturally over the cue.
When
you get down to play, put your cue on a straight line
to your intended shot and place your body to the cue
rather than putting your body in place and then the
cue to the body. Even players who don't do this now
will find little difficulty in changing.
I would say that ninety-nine per cent of players operating
this method get down until their cue is just brushing
their body so they feel the cue is in a familiar place.
It is reassuring to feel that you are using the same
set-up every time. This is what we are after: consistency,
the hallmark of class.
Steve Davis, Stephen Hendry and John Parrott all face
along the line of the shot and ignore the official line
about the body and feet being in a certain position
at an angle to the target. This is where I am at variance
with the teachings in most instructional books.
John Spencer and Ray Reardon didn't twist the body round
so that their back foot is almost at right angles to
the shot, as recommended in many coaching circles. They
move slightly to the right, but not all the way round,
so they have also have edged away from Joe Davis's theory.
They again depart from Joe in that he had a straight
left arm, while John and Ray used to bend the arm and
have the entire forearm on the table.
Figure
One and Figure Two demonstrate two different positions
with the back foot.
This will not however make any difference to the cue
delivery, proving that the position of the feet is of
no great importance.
In Figure Three and Figure Four, a former professional
player demonstrates Steve Davis's stance. The first
picture is an alignment of the feet positioning that
he used to play with. Fig 4 demonstartes how he now
stands. He has won world titles with both, but his body
is always facing along the line of the shot.
It is also worth remembering that the further the cue
ball lies into the middle of the table, the more a player
has to lean over to reach it. This inevitably brings
the body face on to the line of the shot.
If
a player can play 'face on' when he is forced to, he
surely can when he has the choice when he does not have
to reach over.
Players should not be bound by principles generally
laid down in previous books. If need be, they should
experiment and find out if they can achieve their objectives
in other ways.
"What suits one player will not automatically suit another".
Discover
the stance that works best for you and do not copy others.
Try and focus on what is happening on top of the table
and not what is happening beneath.