On behalf of TVLesson.com, this is Roy Pastor. I’m a BCA accredited advanced level instructor with BilliardAcademy.com.
In this clip on beginner’s billiards, I’m going to show you how to maintain and chalk the tip of your pool cue.
If you’ve been in a pool hall or around with those people, you would have heard this. It’s generally a very bad thing. The chalk is an abrasive. The tips of your leather cue have little fibers, kind of like the fibers on your sweater or your shirt. It’s the fibers that hold the chalk on the tip of your cue. Once you take this abrasive, it basically polishes off the fibers and won’t hold. You will see that the tips are nice and shiny, it won’t hold the chalk anymore. When that happens, you have to take something like one of these. These are commercially sold products that I use to scuff or break the skin on the tip on the top of your pool cue and you need to break it out to bring up the fibers again once they’ve been polished off.
The other thing that you should consider is that you want to make sure that your tip has a proper curvature. Your tip should have the curvature of about a nickel. You should be able to put a nickel behind the tip and you should have the same curvature that ensures a proper contact with the curvature of the cue ball.
Once you’ve done those things, you have to learn how to chalk so you don’t take off the fibers and you maintain a proper tip. What you should do is brush the chalk on lightly from the center out. There was a famous pool player by the name of Rudolph Wanderon and you may know him as Minnesota Fats from TV fame. Minnesota Fats was famous for his saying, “A player should put chalk on the tip of the cue like a woman puts on lipstick. You brush it on gently.” And that’s how you chalk your cue.
On behalf of TVLesson.com, this is Roy Pastor. Thank you for watching.
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