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How to Jump a Pool Ball

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Dart Technique

Hello again! Today we're going to look at jump shots starting with the overhand technique also known as the dart technique, for jumping short distances over a blocker ball. Let's have a look. Now before we get started, I just want to over a couple of things. First and foremost, particularly if you're jumping on your table at home, make sure that you use a cloth. It can be just a cut of pool table cloth as a pad to minimize the amount of burn that you're going to get from jumping the cue ball off of the table. Second, it's most advisable to use a jump cue for shooting jump shots. You can use your regular cue, but the difficulty is significantly more using that than using a jump cue. A jump cue will have a much harder tip, it's lighter weight, like this one can actually break down even further which is great in the case of what we're doing here with the overhand or dart technique jumps. So we've got our jump pad, our jump cue, we're at the table, we're ready to practice. Now the first thing I would recommend is to not just throw balls out there and try and jump entire balls, particularly if you've never done this before, far better way you've got to walk before you run. Take a cube of chalk, set it up in front of the ball as your obstacle. This is roughly the height of half a ball and in many cases in playing situations half ball may be all you need to get past the obstacle. The dart stroke is pretty simple. Notice what moves when doing it. Also notice what doesn't move. It's simply this, just a hand wrist motion; you want to eliminate anything extra as far as shoulder, elbow, any of that. It's really just this to start. I recommend setting the ball up close to the rail. I'm going to bridge up on top of the rail which gives me the additional bridge distance to generate the momentum in order to properly elevate this ball and jump it into the side pocket. So as I'm shooting these, I'm seeing that I'm getting consistent clearance over the chalk. Now it's time to graduate up to jumping over a full ball. Simply place the cue ball in front object ball behind. Same distance, same technique. Again, just a flick of the wrist. So we talked about the dart technique for short distance jumps many times you're going to need to jump much further down the length of the table. In those cases the dart technique will get you airborne over your blocker most of the time, but it's very difficult to be accurate. When you've got that kind of distance to travel it's better to use the more traditional pool stroke or underhanded stroke. I'm going to add the extension back on to the third piece back onto the jump cue for the extra weight and leverage. For the long distance shots, the more traditional pool stroke is in order this except for you're going to elevate anywhere from about 25 up to about 45 degrees the angle of elevation. This will affect the angle of the flight of the ball that you jump, so I'm going to jump this 15 ball into the corner pocket. I have the cue ball here as my blocker, elevate my bridge. I'm up on my fingertips and I want to create enough distance to generate the momentum to get this ball airborne.