Bank shot pool: how to hit one that goes in
A bank shot is when you send a ball into a cushion and it comes back out into a pocket. You use one when the straight line to the pocket isn’t there.
Most people learn the trick for it in about a minute, miss for a year, and never find out why. The trick is right. It’s just not the whole thing.
Bank or kick? They aren’t the same
Two words get mixed up constantly, so get them straight first.
- Bank shot — the ball you are potting hits a cushion. You strike it normally, and it comes off the rail into a pocket.
- Kick shot — the white hits a cushion first, then goes on to hit your ball. You kick when something is in the way and you can’t reach your ball directly.
Same geometry, different ball doing the bouncing. Everything below works for both.
The mirror trick
Here it is, and it really is this simple.
Imagine the pocket reflected through the cushion. Pretend the rail is a mirror, and there’s a second table behind it with a second pocket in it. Aim your ball at that pocket. It hits the rail on the way, comes back out, and drops.
That’s it. Angle in equals angle out, so a shot that would reach the mirror pocket in a straight line reaches the real one after one bounce.
Two things make this easier to actually do at the table:
- Find the halfway point. Look at where your ball is and where the mirror pocket is, then find the spot on the cushion exactly between them side to side. That is the point you’re aiming your ball at. Now forget the mirror and just pot the ball at that spot.
- Use the diamonds. The dots along the rail on most tables are evenly spaced, so you can count with them instead of eyeballing it. Two diamonds out, two diamonds back.
Why the mirror lies
Now the part nobody tells you, and the reason your banks keep coming up short.
A cushion is not a mirror. Rubber squashes, grips and lets go. Three things happen every time:
- Speed shortens the angle. Hit a bank hard and the ball digs into the rubber and comes off narrower than the mirror says — closer to straight back at you. Hit it gently and it comes off wider. This is the big one, and it’s why the same shot at two speeds needs two aims.
- Spin bends it. If the ball is spinning sideways when it arrives, the rail grabs that spin and throws the ball off at a different angle. One side comes off shallower, the other kicks wider.
- The cushion eats speed. A ball is noticeably slower after a rail, so a long bank needs more power than the same distance in a straight line.
None of this makes the mirror useless. It makes it a starting point. Aim with the mirror, then learn your own correction by hitting the same bank twenty times.
The practical version: pick a medium speed and always bank at that speed. One speed means one correction to remember instead of a different one for every shot.
A drill that actually teaches it
Put one ball on the middle of the table. Bank it into a corner pocket. Do it ten times from ten different places.
You’re not trying to pot ten out of ten. You’re trying to notice, every single time, whether the ball came off the rail shorter or wider than you expected. After about thirty of these, your eye starts doing the correction on its own and you stop thinking about mirrors at all.
Then make it harder: put a ball in the way, so the straight line is genuinely gone and the bank is the only shot. That’s the real situation, and it feels completely different from banking by choice.
Three times a bank is the right choice
- Your ball is buried. Something is parked between it and every pocket. Around, not through.
- A pocket is guarded. You can reach it, but the white will follow the ball in and you’ll scratch. Banking sends the ball at the pocket from a different direction, and the white ends up somewhere else entirely.
- You’ve got nothing anyway. A bank you half-believe in beats a hopeful swat. Even if it misses, the ball ends up in a different part of the table, which is often an improvement.
Where to practise banks for free
You need a lot of goes, and you need to see the line.
Chalkwick is free pool in your browser — no download, no account. Three things about it are useful for banking specifically:
- A guide line that shows the bounce, up to three cushions ahead. It’s the fastest way to see what a rail really does, and you can turn it down as you get better.
- A practice mode with no turns and no fouls, so you can set a bank up and take it fifty times.
- Real cushions. The rails take speed off the ball and grip the spin on it, so banks come off short exactly like they do on a real table. The mirror doesn’t quite work here either.
And when you’re confident, there’s a round room — a table whose rail is one continuous circle with no corners at all. The mirror trick doesn’t just get slightly wrong there. It stops meaning anything, because there’s no flat surface to mirror through. Every bounce heads back toward the middle. One of its challenges won’t let you pot a ball unless it touches that curved rail first.
It is the best test there is of whether you understood banking or just memorised a diagram.
Next
- Pool trick shots: seven you can actually learn — the bank is number two on that list, with six more worth your time.
- How to play pool — the rules, if you’re starting from the beginning.