When you practice trick shots, you do the same exact shot over and over. When you play regular pool games, however, you rarely encounter the same exact billiard ball configuration twice. In this sense, practicing trick shots really gives you an opportunity to perfect your technique. Oftentimes, people have said that practicing trick shots actually helps improve their regular pool game! In any case, blind repetition of the same trick shot without understanding how the shot works leaves your odds of success up to chance. To learn how to do trick shots effectively, you need to commit time, patience, and diligence.

There are several variables that can be adjusted for each shot. This article will focus on the setup of the shot. Positioning of both the object balls and the cue ball are important. There are a lot of different ways to help keep track of the alignment the balls, especially when they are all clustered together. Generally, the easiest cues are the center-to-center lines of two balls or the tangent line between two balls. Point these to reference points on the table, usually a diamond or the edge of a pocket. Be precise; minuscule changes in the alignment can be the difference between a make and a miss.

If the cue ball is not part of the cluster, there are a couple ways to keep track of its position. The easiest way is to put it on a diamond intersection, either centered on a diamond or aligning the leading or trailing edge of the cue ball to one of the diamond lines. You can also use ½ diamond increments if you can eyeball them well enough. Otherwise, use ball spacings to help make smaller adjustments, such as placing the cue ball one ball width to the left of the second diamond.

To help make sure you can find your setup points again, tap the balls gently in to place. This will create a small divot in the cloth that you can find later, even up to a few days. The balls will settle in to these divots to show where the balls were set up last time. Tapping in the balls also helps ensure that the balls are frozen (touching) or at the exact spacing that they need to be.

When you miss a shot, you need to find out how you missed. In a setup shot where all the balls are supposed to go in, it's easy to see which balls are left on the table, but you need to know if it missed the pocket to the left or the right so you can make the proper adjustment the opposite way. If you don't catch it the first time, you can shoot the shot again and force yourself to watch the ball you missed the first time. It can get tricky if you miss multiple balls. You can try to fix one at a time, or to help speed up the process, you can videotape your shot so you can replay it and see how all of the balls missed at once.

In summary, remember to take care when setting up clusters of balls. If you can't set it up more than once in the same way, then your chances of repeating the shot are infinitesimally small. Tapping balls in helps make sure you can find their position again. Finally, don't be discouraged when you miss. Learn from it so you can make the adjustment and make the shot the next time.