Pool Shot Tips: Shot Timing, Rail Pots and Avoiding Scratches

Updated October 2026

Pool Shot is pool against the clock. You have ninety seconds, a cue ball, and a table that is refilled whenever it runs low, and every colored ball that drops is a point. There are no fouls, no turns and no opponent, so the only questions are how many good shots you can fit into the time and how often you can avoid losing the cue ball. This guide explains how aiming and power work, how long each shot really takes, how the pockets behave, and a shot-selection approach built around those rules.

How aiming and power work

You do not pull back like a real cue. Touch anywhere on the table, and the cue ball will travel toward the spot under your finger. Moving your finger updates the aim, and lifting it fires the shot. Distance sets the power: the further your fingertip is from the cue ball, the harder the shot, up to full power at 110 table units, about 110 pixels on a typical phone and somewhat less on small screens. A coloured ring around the cue ball shows the level, turning from green to yellow above half power and red above 85 percent.

Two details are worth knowing. A release very close to the cue ball, under 8 table units, is ignored, which is handy if you change your mind. But a simple tap anywhere else on the table fires a shot straight away, so be careful not to tap the cloth by accident while the balls are still. The dashed guide shows only the starting direction and power, not where the ball will bounce or what it will hit. You have to picture the contact yourself.

Every shot costs seconds

You cannot shoot again until every ball on the table has almost stopped. Rolling balls lose a fixed share of their speed every second, about 57 percent of whatever speed they have left, and a ball counts as stopped once it drops below a small threshold. That type of friction makes the last part of every roll a slow creep. In our simulation, a lone ball struck at full power took about 5.3 seconds to settle, and even at half power it took about 4.5 seconds. A very soft shot at a tenth of the power still needs nearly 3 seconds.

Put that against the 90-second clock and a run is roughly twenty shots, not fifty. A full-power shot is not much slower to settle than a medium one, but it sends more balls rolling, and every moving ball must stop before you can shoot. The real time cost of a wild shot is the scatter, not the speed. The clock itself runs in real time from the start of the run, keeps going while you line up your first shot, and turns red under ten seconds. When it reaches zero the game ends at once, and balls still rolling toward a pocket do not count.

How the pockets behave

There are six pockets: one in each corner and one in the middle of each long side. Corner pockets have a radius of 18 units and side pockets 16, while the balls have a radius of 10. A ball drops the moment its centre enters a pocket's circle. Around each pocket the cushion is switched off, so a ball that drifts close enough is never knocked back out; it simply falls.

That geometry produces a useful rule. A ball that is rolling while touching a cushion is close enough to the cushion line that it cannot pass a pocket on that side. A ball running along a long rail drops into the side pocket, and a ball running along any rail into a corner drops into the corner pocket. In our simulation, a ball pushed along a long rail did exactly that. Rail shots are therefore some of the most reliable pots on this table, for coloured balls and, unfortunately, for the cue ball too.

Cushions return 78 percent of a ball's speed on each bounce, so a rail kick still has plenty of energy, and ball-to-ball contacts are almost perfectly elastic. A full, straight hit stops the cue ball nearly dead and sends the object ball on with most of the speed. A thin hit sends the object ball off at an angle while the cue ball keeps most of its own speed.

Scratches and the cue ball

If the cue ball drops, you lose one point and it returns to its starting spot in the middle of the lower part of the table, on the faint line across the cloth, or to the nearest free point along that line if a coloured ball is resting there. The score never goes below zero, so a scratch before your first pot costs nothing on the scoreboard. It still costs time, because you lose the shot and your position.

Scratches grow with power. In our simulation, firing the lone cue ball in a random direction from its starting spot sent it into a pocket about 19 percent of the time at full power, 9 percent at half power, and about 2.5 percent at a fifth of full power. The faster the cue ball, the more cushions it visits, and the more chances it has to find a hole. Soft and medium shots are much safer.

The opening rack and the refills

A run begins with six balls in a tight triangle near the top of the table and the cue ball below. Breaking it hard is less rewarding than it looks. In our simulation, straight full-power breaks pocketed only about a quarter of a ball on average and took almost five seconds to settle. A better opening is a medium shot at one of the corner balls of the triangle, aimed to send it toward a pocket while spreading the others.

Whenever the balls have stopped and fewer than two coloured balls remain, the table is topped up to six. New balls appear at random spots in the upper half of the table, away from the pockets and the cue ball. They are placed loosely rather than in a rack, which often leaves easy pots right away. There is no reason to save a ball; clearing the table quickly just brings new targets sooner.

Choosing your shots

• Take the easy pot first. A ball within a short distance of a pocket, roughly in line with the cue ball, is worth more than any clever combination.
• Use rails on purpose. Send object balls along a cushion toward a pocket. Keep the cue ball off the rails when it is moving fast.
• Default to medium power. Enough to reach the pocket with some margin, but not so much that the cue ball runs around the table.
• Think one shot ahead. A full hit leaves the cue ball close to where the object ball was. A thin hit sends it on. Choose the one that leaves you near the next target.
• Watch the clock in the last ten seconds. A shot that will not finish rolling before zero cannot score. Use the last seconds for short, direct pots.

A practice plan

1. Play a run using only medium-power shots to learn how far a ball rolls.
2. Practise pots along the rails until they feel automatic.
3. Then focus on cue-ball position, trying to leave an easy next shot every time.
4. Finally, count your shots per run. If you are well under twenty, you are waiting on slow, scattered tables; tidier play gives you more attempts.

Your best score is stored on your device, and any run above zero can be saved to the Hall of Fame from the end card.