Best Trick Shots In 8 Ball Pool & How To Do Them

Trick shots are something really impressive and sometimes even needed. In 8 Ball Pool you often see a situation where you simply can’t play your next move straight and you need to get a little bit creative – that’s what trick shots are.

You see, trick shots are more than just showing off in front of your opponent and in this tutorial I want to show you the most common trickshots and how you can actually do them yourself.

Best Trickshots

Let’s just jump into the most-common trick shots.

Bank Shots

Those are probably the most-used trick shots that you will need in many, if not almost every match in 8 Ball Pool, when there’s no clear path to pocket one of your balls.

As you can see here, the only way to actually get the orange solid into the pocket will be using a bank shot.

They are actually super easy to calculate because you have the dots on the sides of the pool table that help you find the perfect spot where you should aim your bank shot to.

Another common situation is when you want to hit a ball in the opposite side pocket and you need to play it really flat next to the side, like that:

I admit those aren’t the most impressive trick shots in 8 Ball Pool, but if you can use them effectively your game will improve a lot and you will win a lot more matches.

I have also written a whole detailed guide about bank shots and how to do them the right way here.

Spin Trick Shots

If you need to do shots like kiss shots or want to screw up in the last moments of a match (e.g. pocketing the white ball), you need to use spin.

Now, in actual pool games, if you add spin, the direction of the white ball will change and you need to adapt – in 8 Ball Pool it will only impact the direction the white ball takes after first impact!

This is extremely great to plan ahead and prevent that you accidentally pocket the white ball – you can use it for several things:

Backspin

The most common situation is when you have a ball close to the pocket and you would normally pocket the white ball along with that ball. To prevent that you just add backspin and the white ball will roll back

Sidespin

This is the same like backspin where you want to prevent to pocket the white ball, but often times when you hit a ball that more distant to the pocket but the line will show you that you will pocket the white ball in another pocket.

In this situation you will add sidespin so the ball will go a different direction after hitting and you don’t risk making a foul and giving your opponent an advantage.

Another big advantage is that you can also place the white ball in a section that your opponent will not like. I normally do that kind of trick shots when I’m not 100% sure that I will pocket and if that happens I will at least not give my opponent a crazy advantage – especially when there are only a few balls left on the 8 Ball Pool table this can save you the victory.

Topspin

This is a really helpful trickshot when you need to give the ball some additional power, especially when your cue doesn#t have that much power, a perfect situation is one like this here:

The angle is so steep that the red ball won’t get much speed and might not even make it to the pocket, so add a lot of topspin and you will pocket that ball for sure.

Important! If you add spin you will always to it the same way – this means if you add backspin you will always set the spin to the below setup, no matter at what position you play and where your ball is, it’s not relative to your position it’s alway fixed 🙂