Further Improvement

Made my first 40 break for a few years last evening so I think I've finally returned to the sort of level that I played at before which is a great feeling. It's taken a few months (since September I guess) but I've got there at last.

During the game yesterday I specifically concentrated on doing 3 things better:
1/ I sometimes have a tendency to push my right shoulder forward while getting down on the shot which has the effect of bunching up my cueing arm somewhat. This then shortens my follow through and affects how straight my follow through is too. So I played the entire afternoon making sure I did not do this.
2/ No micro adjustment. When I'm not feeling very confident I can often move the cue tip while down on the shot because I don't trust that I've lined it up correctly. I believe this to be a pretty bad thing to do (although I must confirm this with a coach). I think that all of the aiming should take place while getting into position for the shot and all that we should do once set up is to perform 'quality control' and a last minute check that everything is OK. If the angle is wrong, it's probably better to just get back up off the shot and start over. So yesterday I didn't micro adjust once.
3/ Watching the cue tip through delivery. I've seen it theorised that this is a good way to make sure that the cue is going through straight. After I had performed all my checks once down on the shot I would just watch the cue tip, bring it back and cue right through the shot until the follow through was complete before then looking up at the object ball. The reason I've started doing this is so that the very action of cuing is independent from the results. Sometimes I find my cue tip following the object ball before the end of follow through which is obviously a terrible thing. I also don't think I fully follow through sometimes and watching the cue tip makes sure that I do.

A combination of all of these things (plus a dose of confidence gained from finding that the changes were helping) allowed me to score pretty heavily (by my standard). Poor ol' Chris didn't really know what was happening (although I told him what I was concentrating on).

I spoke to Grant Conquest about getting some coaching time so hopefully I'll arrange that for the next month or two. He said we'd look at some technical stuff before getting set up with some practise routines. Then I'll just need to work hard and put individual time in.

As for the league, we're second now below the other Witney side but only by a point. I believe that they will win this league now (their best player is the best in the [correction] division by some distance) but that we have a good chance at coming second for promotion. If we don't get promoted this season I'm sure it will happen next year because we've all improved a great deal.

So I'm really enjoying the game, and who knows I could soon knock in a 50 break!