You’ve already mastered the basics of pool — you’re no longer a beginner. You now know how to position yourself and place your hands. You’re not a semi-professional either, because you’ve also mastered the break, the 30-degree and 90-degree rules, side spin, and you already know how to play the rails and play defense.
To keep moving forward on your journey to becoming a great professional pool player, the next step is learning how to do jump shots correctly and how to do massé shots. And don’t forget to master cue ball control completely.
Beyond those three technical pillars, there’s a whole world of concepts that separate an advanced player from a truly professional one. Let’s go through them one by one.
Position Play: Thinking Two Shots Ahead
What separates an average player from a professional isn’t just pocketing balls — it’s where you leave the cue ball after you do. This is known as position play, and it’s arguably the single skill that decides more matches than any other at competitive level.
The core idea is simple to explain and hard to execute: before you shoot, don’t just think about the ball you’re about to pocket — think about where you need the cue ball to end up for your next shot, and the one after that. Professional players plan out entire sequences before they even touch the first ball, the same way a chess player thinks several moves ahead.
To build this skill, these drills are standard in the training routine of any serious player:
- 5 in a Line: place 5 balls in a straight line starting from a short rail. The goal is to pocket them all, one after another, always leaving the cue ball in position for the next shot — no hand-placement allowed, you can only shoot from wherever the cue ball stopped after the previous shot.
- 15 Balls: spread 15 balls across the whole table and pocket each one in any pocket, in no particular order, while constantly controlling where the cue ball ends up to minimize risk on the next shot.
- The Cross: arrange the balls in a cross pattern that divides the table into four quadrants, and practice pocketing using only the side pockets (no center pockets) — great for working on medium and long-distance shots while keeping position control.
Kick Shots vs. Bank Shots: They’re Not the Same Thing
These two terms get mixed up all the time, so it’s worth clearing up before moving on:
- Bank shot: you hit the cue ball into the object ball, and it’s the object ball that bounces off one or more rails before dropping into the pocket.
- Kick shot: it’s the reverse — the cue ball hits the rail (or rails) first, and only then makes contact with the object ball.
Both are tools every professional-level player needs to have, because there will be situations where you don’t have a direct shot and you need to use the rails — either to attack yourself or to leave your opponent an impossible shot. Practicing them separately, with simple drills (cue ball behind the object ball for bank shots, and hitting the rail before the ball for kick shots) is the fastest way to internalize them.
An Introduction to the Diamond System
If you’ve ever seen a carom or pool player staring intently at the markings on the rail of the table before shooting, they were probably using the diamond system. These are marks placed at regular intervals along the table’s frame — most competition tables have 20 markings, dividing the perimeter into 24 equal parts — which let you mathematically calculate the angle needed for the ball to reach a specific point after bouncing off one or more rails.
The principle behind this isn’t new: back in 1835, mathematician Gustave Coriolis published an entire book analyzing pool trajectories from a purely mathematical standpoint, and that foundation still underlies the modern systems used today. The general logic runs on three values — the starting point, the aiming point, and the arrival point — where starting point minus aiming point gives you the exact arrival point after the bounce.
This is a topic that deserves an entire course on its own (and probably its own dedicated article down the line), but here’s what matters at this level: professional players don’t calculate angles “by eye” indefinitely — at some point in your development, learning at least the basic diamond system will give you a consistency that intuition alone can’t match, especially on rail shots where the margin for error is razor-thin.
Optimizing Your Break at a Professional Level
At this level, breaking isn’t just about hitting hard. Professional players work on three variables of the break independently:
- Where you hit the cue ball inside the rack — it’s not always dead center.
- How much power you use — more power doesn’t always mean better ball spread.
- Where the cue ball ends up after the break — a good player knows in advance, with fairly high precision, what part of the table the cue ball will land in after their break, which determines whether they’ll have a comfortable follow-up shot or not.
This only gets mastered through constant repetition: practice your break from different positions and power levels, keeping a mental (or written) log of which combination gives you the most consistent results.
Mental Preparation: The Part Nobody Sees
Pool is a synthesis of mind and body. The mind forms the idea of the shot, and the body executes it. The main enemies of that pairing are emotions — insecurity, fear, doubt, anger, or even excessive excitement — all of which interfere negatively with how the shot ultimately plays out.
Something that sets high-level players apart is that they have a fixed pre-shot routine, always the same, repeated almost automatically: they read the table, decide on the shot, do their practice strokes at a steady rhythm, and once they get down into their shooting stance, they don’t change their mind — if doubt creeps in at that point, they stop completely and restart the whole process from scratch, instead of shooting through the uncertainty.
This kind of fixed routine serves a very specific purpose: over time it gives you your own rhythm, which leads to optimal concentration and blocks out negative thoughts during the shot. It’s not superstition — it’s a mental-control tool you can train just like any other technical skill.
The Routine of a Professional Player
Becoming a professional doesn’t come down to talent alone. High-performance players tend to structure their preparation across several fronts at once:
- Daily technical training: alignment drills, cue ball control work, and combination practice — generally several hours a day split between technical practice and tactical analysis.
- Physical conditioning: hand-eye coordination, stretching, and core stability — pool is a precision sport, and the body is trained too, to sustain that precision through long matches.
- Video analysis: recording your own practice sessions to review repeated mistakes and decision-making patterns is an increasingly common practice, not just among elite professionals.
- Equipment care as part of the routine: the cue is an extension of your body, and maintaining it (tip, ferrule, straightness) is part of the preparation ritual, not a separate chore.
Tournaments and Sponsorships
You’ve probably already been thinking that, now that you’re at this level, it’s time to enter more serious tournaments and start landing sponsors. I’ll be building out dedicated articles on these topics soon — it’s a big enough world (tournament categories, how rankings work, what brands look for in a sponsored player) to deserve the depth it’s owed.
Next Step
Once you’ve read and mastered every article, the next step is to do the professional pool drill plan — that’s where all this theory turns into habit.