Bank shots are harder than you think...
... but thankfully, they're not as important as you think.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is." We could fight over who said that: some say Yogi Berra, some say Albert Einstein. But it might as well have been Wayman McCreery, the inventor of the 3-cushion game. Personally, I can't think of a place where the two arch rivals, theory and practice, clash more often than on the green or blue cloth.
Bank shots, or rail-first shots, whichever you prefer, are just a small part of our game. You can often get through a 40-point match having played only two or three. Okay, sometimes five. But that aspect of 3-cushion receives disproportionate attention. Nobody writes books about the choice between a three- and a five-railer, or about avoiding kisses in twice-arounds. But systems books can fill shelves.
Here's the theory: you are an experienced player, you've studied the systems and you know how to make all those small adjustments that are required by the table conditions. You've been there, done that, you know new cloth, old cloth, nothing can scare you anymore. You do the calculus, fine tune and adjust, and make the point, nine times out of ten. Right? Isn't that how it should be?
Here's the reality: you may be among the best in the world, you may have studied the systems and you are an excellent judge of table conditions. Very few people are better equipped than you are, to make bank shots. And yet, you miss more often than you score.
For a long time, I have been curious about the scoring percentage of good players, when playing rail-first. Some months ago, I decided to start keeping track. Whenever I watched 3-cushion online, provided the players were world class, I kept score of attempted and scored bank shots. Took quite a while, because as mentioned above, some matches have only a few. You may be surprised by my stats.
I saw 284 attempts in the past months, and 127 scored points, rail-first. That's 44.7 %.
Is this definite proof of anything? No. This is not exact science. But I think the sample size and the 44.7 % are a strong indicator that even the top 50 players in the world miss more often than they make, rail-first. Yes, some are better at it than others. Maybe a few will score over 50 %, I don't know. But that would mean others (who are also world class) can't reach 40 %. Mention every famous name you can think of, he's probably there somewhere in those 284 attempts.
Some things you need to know:
- A few of the matches included were from the Duke Challenge, where the clock was on 30 seconds with no time-outs. Players may have missed a few extra times there, under pressure. But these matches combined are not even 10 % of the total sample.
- A handful of the matches included were from PBA events, where rail-first scores double points. PBA players are sometimes tempted to go for the bank shot, for that reason. I don't think that factor had more than a miniscule effect on the end result, though.
- Certainly 90 % of the players that I kept score for, were top-50 on the UMB world ranking or top-16 in the PBA. The few others were all 1.200 or better.
Another thing I was curious about, was the percentage of "ticky shots". It turned out to be more than a third, about 36 %, of all rail-first solutions. Some ticky shots are unmissable, but they also come in medium difficulty and high difficulty. Still, If I would have disregarded all ticky shots, the grand total for scoring would have been close to (just) 40 %, possibly below it. The toughest and lowest scoring bank shots are umbrella-type (two rails first, then the second ball, then the third rail, then the third ball), but they are so few and far between that they have little impact on the total. In this survey of 284, I didn't see even see half a dozen.
Let me leave you with this hypothetical scenario to consider:
We assume you are an 0.800 player who has 20 league and 20 individual matches in a season, all to 40 points. Your opponents are your equals, but you are used to winning about 60 % of your matches anyway, making about 30 points on average in the matches you lose. That gives you 1440 points in 1800 innings for the season. You will most likely have played around 175 rail-first shots that season. You are obviously not as good as the top-50 guys in my survey, so no 44.7 % for you. Let's (generously) give you a scoring percentage of 37: you've made 65, missed 110.
But now you buy the books and take the lessons! You are determined to improve your knowledge and skill, and you don't mess around. You do the hard work, and your rail-first scoring improves enormously. You are now almost as good as the professionals: 41 % successful (which would be amazing for an 0.800 player!). Congratulations: you can expect to make 72 now (up from 65), and of course a compounding handful of points to FOLLOW the made banks. Your new season average could be as high as 0.808.
It's a fun way to spend time and money, I don't object to it in the least. But it's not a good way to become a better player.
I can't say this often enough: if you really want to up your average, there is one major job to do: improve your choice of shot.