Minnesota Fats had custon chalk make. What did he have added to it to allow him to draw a cue ball 3 or 4 rail

Question

He had a substance put in his chalk to give it a great grip on the Cue..anyone know what it was. I played him in 1969 and he showed me and gave me one piece of chalk. Is it legal? I don't know..but he told very few people about it and he hustled alot.

In truth he was a loud mouthed rude guy. But watching the cue draw 3 rails sort of made you forget the nature of the shooter. And he could do it time after time......

Answer 1

His stroke.

Joking aside, i have never heard of this. Are you sure he wasn't pulling your leg? Not saying that he didn't have some special chalk, but with his personality, he might have told you the reason he could draw the ball so well was his chalk just so he could laugh about it later

Answer 2

Diamond dust is the correct answer

Answer 3

dont know but i like your pic. : )

Answer 4

I luv pool but I don't get a chance to play that much. When I was younger I used to play a lot for money. I was never a good hustler because it was hard for me to pretend that I could not play well.

Now I was good at getting my opponent to giving me a spot. To those who don't know what that means an example when playing 9 ball your opponent would allow you to win on the 8 or 9 ball.

To Quark and others let us revive pool yahoo answers suite. Let us make it more active.

Answer 5

Not.A.Clue.

I know that some people spray silicone on the cue ball to increase action.  Here's an article from Bob Jewett on the subject,

http://www.sfbilliards.com/articles/2001...

Chalk is generally silicate based.  So, that really doesn't help.

Interestingly enough though, I found an article talking about the creation of silicate-based chalk,

http://www.toaster.org/hoskins_tragic.ht...

It seems that better chalk was once made with volcanic ash.

A little more searching shows that volcanic ash is a natural composition of "mostly silicon, aluminum, magnesium, iron and much smaller amounts of potassium, sodium and calcium."  But, the exact composition depends on the source.

It's a pretty interesting subject.  Unfortunately, I don't have a definite answer.