How to Play a Hanging Ball in the Pocket

Hanging balls can sometimes seem like the pool gods gift to the game during the middle of a match, but although the ball might be easy to make not everything is as simple as it seems. A beginner pool player sees a ball hanging in the corner pocket and thinks it’s the easiest shot to make in the world, and sometimes they’re right. What can make these shots difficult is when you need to make the cue ball travel down to the other size of the table to get position on your next ball. Going from one end of the table to another has a lot of problems that you may notice is you’ve ever tried to get good position all the way on the other side of the table.

If the cue ball is far away from the object ball in the pocket it has the tendency to pick up top spin which makes it slow down off the rail as the topspin catches. Some players try to compensate for this by hitting the ball harder since they think that more speed will bring it down the table. In reality this puts on more topspin which can slow the cue ball down even further. One way to counteract this is by hitting the object ball thin so that the cue ball doesn’t react to the topspin off the rail as much. Hitting thin far away is difficult though and is not always easy.

If you hit the cue ball with draw and outside English you could swing the cue ball two rails down to the other end of the table to get position on the next ball. Again, this takes a decent amount of practice. This isn’t a bad option if you don’t have another alternative, but it’s not the only option at your disposal. With the cue ball traveling two rails it requires speed, accuracy, and outside English to get the right angle on your next ball.

Another option you may have considered is hitting the ball with draw. If you have a great stroke you can draw the cue ball back all the way to the other side of the table to get position. When it successful, no one can deny it looks really cool, but unfortunately looking cool doesn’t win games and small chance that you’ll get position successfully because of accuracy and spin needed to execute this shot.

The easiest way to get to the other side of the table is by hitting a rail first and then pocketing the ball in the pocket. This might sound risky, but in reality it’s a fairly safe and predicable shot. And if you hit the shot with running English the cue ball move quickly around the rails to the other side of the table with almost no effort. After practicing this shot a few times you should get a feel for the shot in terms of speed, and what’s most important when gauging that is how thick you hit the hanging ball. The reason the ball moves so quickly is because you’re only really hitting 5% of the ball when you hit rail first so the cue ball keeps 95% of its speed on the way to the next shot. Another variable to get a feel for is how much running English to use. This is will help determine how short or long you come up on position when swinging the cue ball around the angles.

Categorised in: Pool Shots, Strategy