Houlian Roulette? Hardly!

Roulette wheels and aiming with two spheres on a pool table have been around for at least a couple of centuries. It was never supposed to be and is still not supposed to be that a player at a roulette wheel can know which one of 37 shots referred to as “pockets” will become the resting place of the pill. It’s totally random; a wheel with 37 pockets and one pill…gambling at its best.

Now consider this: it was never supposed to be that a pool player, when aiming with 2 spheres, could accurately see and describe the alignment of center cue ball to the exact contact point on the object ball with the exception of a couple of objectively-defined shots—center-to-center and center-to-edge. Enter one of the greatest pool thinkers of all time: Hal Houle.

Hal Houle, during his research with aiming came to understand that the spheres we use for playing pool have 360 ticks on their circumferences. Therefore a cue ball has 360 ticks and an object ball has 360 ticks at their respective circumferences. There are literally a zillion possible shots on a 5,000 square inch playing surface.

As a result of parallax viewing Houle uncovered a natural gearing phenomenon that occurs between a cue ball and an object ball which results in precision aiming that reduces the possible one zillion shots on a pool table to just three aim lines. Mind boggling! Houle could look at any random cue ball-object ball relationship and objectively define its aim line by saying, “This single cue ball edge (1 of 360 ticks) aligned to this single object ball tick (1 of 360 ticks) solves the aim to a particular pocket. Houle could go on and on naming the aim lines for thousands and thousands of cue ball-object ball relationships.

An aiming phenomenon does exist.

And you can get every single detail about the three-line aiming phenomenon in Center Pocket Music: Using CTE PR ONE to Improve Your Pool Game.