OK, this is where I explain the common methods of hitting the ball. I drew some lovely illustrations and took some nice pictures to illustrate.

This is the pool ball in flight when you hit it normally. The ball is circled in red, and the yellow arrow shows the direction of rotation. For this hit, you come from behind the ball with a sidearm motion. You smack the ball dead center (horizontally) and slightly below center (vertically). This gives you a fast shot with a fair bit of arc on it. The spin direction (shown by the yellow arrow) is from the bottom upwards. You could hit the ball slightly above center (vertically) and get a top spin. If you have much success with getting top spin, please let us know. We can't make it work worth a damn.

This is the shot that made pool ball. It's the preferred shot, and is used about 80 or 90 percent of the time. Click here for a picture of Ben setting up for this shot.

This shot looks (from the side) something like this. Ball is in red, the black line denotes the path your hand follows, and the green shows the direction the ball goes in if you do it right.

There are other shots. There is the pop-up shot, where you come from underneath the ball and 'pop' it in the direction you want it to go in. This is good for passing to a teammate or getting over an opponent's head. It looks something like this:

A shot that has come into vogue recently is the sidearm shot. You hit the ball dead center vertically but well off to the side of the ball that you're hitting from. You then let the ball roll off your fingertips, giving it a wicked spin sideways. This makes the ball fly very fast low over the water. The spin makes it do all of its curving in the horizontal plane, instead of the vertical plane. This shot is hard to defend against, but is also very difficult to control. Accuracy is very very low. In flight it looks like this, and the schematic looks like this (looking down on the ball):