Practice drills and the mental game.

How to practice

• Keep drills winnable. If you miss much more than half your attempts, the drill is too hard.
• Short and focused beats long and loose. Several short sessions often do more than one long, unfocused one.
• Add consequences. Tanner Pruess, quoted on Dr. Dave Alciatore's site, suggests penalties for misses so practice pressure feels real, and focusing on your routine on the money ball.
• Watch the whole result. Tom Ross warns against grabbing the cue ball the moment a miss looks likely and against rushing drills; watch the outcome to learn from it.

Stroke drills

• MoFUDAT. Dr. Dave's "Most Famous and Useful Drill of All Time" tests whether your stroke goes straight through the cue ball's vertical centerline. Shoot the cue ball straight up and down the table, ten times each with an above-center, center and below-center hit at medium speed. Score a shot when the stripe on the ball does not wobble and the ball returns near your tip.
• Straight-in line. Jennifer Barretta's drill: 15 balls in a line, ball in hand, every shot straight into a corner. Move farther back only after you make all 15 in a row. It targets a steering stroke.
• Bottle drill. Florian "Venom" Kohler strokes the cue into a bottle slightly wider than the tip without touching the sides.

The Mighty X

Long, straight shots along the table's two diagonals, using object balls as cue balls, practicing stop, follow and draw on each. Darren Appleton described it in Billiards Digest in November 2018, and it has been demonstrated by Niels Feijen. Billiards Digest's Keith Paradise credits Team USA captain Johan Ruysink with a version used to train a consistent stroke and shot definition, alongside drills called In-Out, Center Line and "Alexander the Great."

Drills that grade you

• Progressive practice. Developed by Bob Jewett, it adjusts each drill's difficulty to your level automatically and produces a rating you can track over time.
• 3-ball drill. Toss three balls on the table, take ball in hand, and run them in order. Track how many you complete out of 20; once you succeed 18 to 20 times, add a ball.
• Equal Offense. Tom Ross recommends it for straight pool: up to 20 balls per inning for 10 innings, so 200 is a perfect score. He also suggests practicing the end-of-rack sequence with a key ball and break ball, and learning about half a dozen common break shots.

The mental game

Dr. Dave sums up his approach with FERVID: Focus, Enjoy, Reset, Visualize, Inhale, Diagnose. Specific habits from his site:

• Give easy shots the same attention as hard ones.
• Stand up and restart your routine whenever doubt creeps in.
• Use positive, action-focused self-talk, such as "keep the elbow still," rather than naming what to avoid.
• Build pressure tolerance through real pressure: leagues, tournaments, sparring and punish-on-miss drills.

Tom Ross adds two more: do not dwell on errors, and treat an unexpected leave as a new position to play from rather than a disaster. Books referenced on Dr. Dave's site include Bob Fancher's Pleasures of Small Motions and Timothy Gallwey's The Inner Game of Tennis.