Lessons in Pool

By BCA Advanced Certified Instructor: Roger Long

Lesson 2: "A Bridge Too Far"

     Are you in the habit of placing your bridge hand too far away from the cue ball?  Let me back up for a second and explain what "too far" is.  Most instructors and instructional books recommend an average bridge length (distance from the base of the bridge hand to the edge of the cue ball) of 6 - 8.  Why then are we seeing many of today?s players using 10 -12 bridge lengths.  I'll tell you what I think brought this practice about.  The long bridge seems to have become popular along with the increase in popularity of the game of Nine Ball.  Nine Ball is a game that requires a lot of cue ball movement, which in turn means you have to use a longer stroke to execute the shots. But a longer stroke doesn't mean you should use a longer bridge - it simply means you should use a longer follow-through.  But why do I and other instructors stick to our recommendation of 6 -8 bridge lengths when several contemporary champions use extremely long bridges, and still manage to play great.  That's easy enough to answer, those players have extremely accurate strokes.  They can take chances and get away with things that you and I can't.  Let me explain.  The goal in a good stroke is to contact the cue ball in the exact spot intended in the set up.  You see if you've practiced enough, you know the exact line of aim, the exact amount of English, and the exact deflection compensation required on every shot.  In short, you know the exact spot you want to hit.  But if you bridge too far from the cue ball, you will lessen your chance of hitting that exact spot.  To support this claim, let's look at it this way.  Your bridge hand acts as a pivot point.  Now considering that the standard cue is 58" long, you could place a pivot point at 29" (the mid-point of the cue) and then move one end of the cue 1" laterally in either direction, and the other end of the cue would move 1" in the opposite direction.  Or put another way, the cue would pivot at a one-to-one ratio. This further means that for every inch you moved the pivot point closer to one end of the cue, you would decrease the amount of movement on the shorter end by one twenty-ninth of that on the longer end, or .03448, so long as the lateral movement on the longer end is exactly 1".  Now let's look at what this bit of mathematical information can mean to your game.  When stroking shots, simple errors like slightly turned wrists or misplaced feet can easily cause a misalignment of ½" at the butt end of the cue.   And a misalignment of ½" will cause a miss-hit on the cue ball of approximately 1/64" for every inch of bridge length you use.  Just think about that for a minute. That means if you are using a 10" bridge length instead of a 7" bridge length, you could end up hitting the cue ball 3/64 of an inch from where you intended.  Perhaps that doesn't sound very significant, but in reality it could put enough squirt on the cue ball to cause you to miss every shot over three feet in length!   My stroke isn't accurate enough to take the unnecessary risk of using a long bridge.  Is yours?