The One Stroke Drill was shown to me by a friend of mine who had uncanny sight in shotmaking — he had a very still head, focused, unblinking eyes, and was very adept at precision shots such as the extremely thin cut.

The drill can be used with any game, or as I recommend, just throw out five or ten balls and shoot any ball in any pocket. On each shot, take no practice strokes at all. Keep your stick completely still, with the tip pointed at your desired contact, until you are ready to execute the shot.


Take each shot with only one full stroke, back, then forth, with a steady, but loose wrist. As always, try to hold yourself still on the follow through, but with this drill stay down longer and focus on keeping your head in one spot.

The value of this drill is that it isolates all of your problems into one motion — if you can do this one motion correctly, you can be confident in doing it at the end of your stroke routine. Pocketing balls this way is difficult – a very good player might not do very well trying to play this way — but once you get it right — you know exactly what it feels like to stroke the cue ball to near perfection.

To take this drill to a more advanced level, set up the object ball on the spot, and put your cue ball in one of the corner pockets. Use only one stroke with high english to shoot the nine ball into the opposite corner pocket, trying to follow the cue ball in for a scratch. Once you have accomplished this, try to use just one stroke with low english to draw the cue ball straight back for a scratch. This is VERY difficult, but it sure shows you what kind of stroke you, or somebody else, has.

An additional value to this drill is that it helps to improve focus at the moment of execution. In this drill, there is but one moment where all of you must be in harmony. Since there is so little room for error — even the slightest imperfection in form or execution will result in an unsuccessful shot — developing the necessity to be at full focus on the final stroke.

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