Most people who are new to the game think it’s cool to shoot the cue ball into their target ball as hard as humanly possible – on every single shot. They do this for two simple reasons: A) because shooting hard creates a lot of collateral action (think slop play) that may or may not end well for them and B) because they don’t know what they are doing. Fact of the matter is shooting too hard will greatly reduce accuracy and “make the pocket smaller”. This does...