Chalk it up to sound advice

The Pool Bible
by Nick Metcalfe
New Holland, $29.99
In the foreword to this self-help book for pool players, three-time world eight ball champ Gareth Potts says players of any level will find this book useful - and he's right.
After first picking up a pool cue in the late 1970s and considering myself a half-decent player, I now realise that I've been doing almost everything wrong.
At least I've now got an excuse. I'd been thinking for all those years that maybe the game's subtleties - and me becoming a pool legend - were beyond me.
But now I know that I just haven't been putting enough effort into the basics, haven't been maintaining my cue, I'm not bridging as well as I should and, well, I just haven't been putting in the hard yards.
I've been playing for the past six or seven years in the Whangarei Mini Pool Association's winter Wednesday night competition for the Parua Bay Finz. And though the team has won the A-grade championship four or five times over the past decade, there's always room for improvement.
And after reading then rereading this Bible, I'm pretty confident the team captain will see some improvement in my game this year.
Pool, in its many forms, is a game that you don't need to be rich or athletic to play, with a pool table in almost every pub, bar and club in the world.
I started playing when my local hangout, The Melba Bar, got a pool table in about 1978.
The Melba Bar - it was a coffee shop, really - had the best jukebox in town and was packed with pinball machines, air hockey, table football and a host of other indoors stuff that a young lad enjoyed. It had to have some attractions because the tea and coffee were dreadful.
Then we regulars heard it was going to get a snooker table in. Snooker was huge in the UK at the time, but you could play it only in the clubs here, which wouldn't let me and my adolescent mates in.
It was such a monumental occasion that we all took the day off school and waited patiently to find out where they were going to put the 12-foot table in such a small place.
It was, disappointingly, a smaller pool table - the first any of us had seen - though we ended up thrashing it over the coming years regardless.
I've enjoyed pool ever since and have played in many countries, although as Metcalfe points out, it's pretty frustrating that there are no "global" rules of the game.
He explores some of the variations, explains how the game came about, gives tips on how to improve and shows some pretty neat trick shots that will astound most players.
But put all that aside, rack up the balls and just give 'em a bash. Now where did I put my chalk?