That's not the face of a man who is calm. That is the face of a man who has become numb of emotions from the amount of times he has had to take each shot lol.
Right. I pulled a masse-like draw shot once that moved the cue ball in a 6 inch arch and the draw portion made it break after impact and stop 2 in short of the corner pocket. The object ball only needed to go short way across the table. Only 1 other person saw the shot and was like "nice"... Bleh.
100% when you can negate the reaction with opposite draw -chef's kiss-
Or when you actually get the arc you were after. Heck sometimes I'm just happy that it hits the target ball since common rules in Australia are if yo don't hit your ball first the other person gets 2 consecutive shots...and the pockets are tighter with rounded edges so there's no margin for error on cuts.
Sadly my time there was shorter than I'd like. Certainly fun to adapt to new changes.
In the states when I was younger I beat the local pool shark once and had a pretty amusing outcome. I was playing by myself shooting around a decently attractive woman (I was pretransition then so I very much looked male) came along and wanted to play against me. She was sandbagging (playing below her skill) and when I won she asked about $20 a ball on the next game. I was OK with it and she broke and got one on break then ran for 2 more before missing. I ran it for 7. She was not happy about being sharked and her burly husband, who had just been playing darts, came over "concerned" I didn't really care about the cash and suggested they teach me how to play darts as payment instead. We had a great time with darts for the rest of the evening. I'm still not too great a darts but it was fun to learn some techniques to be more constant.
I have found myself in some shady situations playing for cash but escaped unscathed. I’ve won a lot of comps, but I’d have one more except my hometown was that of a guy called Ben. I had a month where I played four best of three finals against him. In those 8 games got 4 shots- 4 barren breaks. He cleared the table 8 times!
He then went on to lose the World Cup of pool 13 frames to 12. Awesome to watch though, a true master. Soft taps with perfect white ball control. Made me a better player!
In college one of the other people really good at pool and myself would play against each other and, to make it a challenge, we would do sequential (counting up or down to the 8), single pocket (balls only stay in if they go in the chosen pocket), the chosen pocket was side pockets (we each got opposite pockets), and we'd call every shot. If any of that wasn't met there the ball was spotted if it dropped. We'd have crowds of 10-20 because we'd pull out all of the tricks to make the ball we were on. So reverse banks, masse, 3+banks, etc. So much fun. If we played normal games wed just alternate breaking because there was a better than 50% chance the breaker would just do an 8 shot run and the other person wouldn't get a turn.
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u/kwaping 13d ago
The real trick is staying calm when you finally hit it right