How to hit a draw shot without miscuing

The full narration of the video.

Tick. The cue tip skids off the bottom of the cue ball. It wobbles away, and the target ball never moves. That's called a miscue. It happens most when you try a draw shot. A draw shot means hitting the cue ball below center, so after it hits the target ball, it comes back on its own.

Plenty of people think: for more draw, aim as low as you can, then lift the back of the cue and stab down. Both of those are traps. First, why does the cue ball come back at all?

Hit it below center, and the ball slides forward while spinning backward. Like a car in reverse gear that gets shoved forward: the car rolls ahead, the wheels turn backward. All the way, the cloth acts like the road, wearing that backspin down.

When it hits the target ball, almost all its forward push goes into the other ball. The cue ball stops. The leftover backspin is like reverse wheels gripping the road, pulling it back. Here's where the comparison breaks: a car has an engine that keeps pushing. The ball only gets one tap from the cue, and its spin only shrinks.

So the farther it travels, the less it comes back. So why does hitting too low cause a miscue? The tip can only spin the ball if it grips it, just like a tire gripping the road.

Near the center, the tip pushes straight in, and the grip holds. The lower you go, the more the ball's surface slopes away from the tip, like driving onto a steeper and steeper icy hill. Past a certain point, the tire can't hold: the tip slips. Tick. Miscue.

Where's that line? About half the ball's radius below center. A standard pool ball is fifty-seven millimeters across. Half its radius is about one point four centimeters, roughly the width of a cue tip. An American professor who studies pool worked it out: on longer shots, hitting at eighty percent of that line, just over a centimeter low, leaves the most backspin when the ball arrives.

Go lower, and you arrive with less spin, not more, one step from a miscue. Chalk is the grit you throw on that icy hill. With a badly chalked tip, you'll slip even on flat ground. Before a draw shot, chalk the whole tip, all the way around.

Now, lifting the back of the cue. Stabbing down at an angle drives the ball into the table. It presses into the cloth and bounces up: that's a jumping cue ball. And the bounce rubs off some backspin too.

For a straight-back draw, lifting the cue gains you nothing. Keep it as level as you can, and push through smoothly. Next time at the pool hall, use a striped ball as your cue ball, stripe turned sideways. On most striped balls, the stripe is about one radius wide. Its bottom edge sits right on that line.

Chalk up, keep the cue level, and aim just inside the stripe's bottom edge. Then come back and tell me: how many ball-lengths did it come back?