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.