When I was younger, I spent a lot of time shooting pool in a pool hall in Nashua New Hampshire, while some of my friends were just introducing themselves to the game. One of my buddies, Jake The Snake, was lucky enough to have a pool table on campus, and taught himself how to get better at pool whenever he had time free from classes and studies. Because he was staying at school, I hadn’t seen him in ages. Then one day he showed up at my pool hall Maxamillions Billiards. Boy was I shocked to discover he was suddenly a very good pool player!
It turns out Jake was pretty accurate and had some decent savvy, although he was a little bit heavy-handed. I found out that this was because his school did not know how to clean pool table cloth, nor how to go about recovering pool tables. The result was that the tables were slow-rolling and had a lot of debris particles on them. If he didn’t strike hard shots he ran the risk of missing the pocket or coming up short for position. Playing on Maxamillions’ professional Connelly pool tables was a whole new experience for him.
So anyways, The Snake and I wound up battling it out against each other on a regular basis. We were no longer rank amateur pool players, but we definitely had a lot more to learn. Our vastly different play-styles led to plenty of exciting matches, and we managed to teach each other quite a bit along the way. 8 ball was our favorite game to play, but we’d play 9 ball, straight pool, and even some one-pocket!
One of the things that Jake managed to beat into me was the idea that choosing high-percentage plays would help you win a game. I was on the other end of the spectrum. I was determined to run out the pool table every time I stepped up to shoot, and if that meant I had to make a 91* slice in order to keep shooting, then by Jove that was what I was going to do! We’d go back and forth, Jake would win a few games by chipping in clean shots before burying me in safeties that I couldn’t get out of. And then I’d win a few games by sinking risky bank-shots or making three-rail positions to trouble balls better left alone.
In the end we each developed new strengths from playing pool against each other. I wouldn’t say that we adopted each others’ play-styles. HAH! That would probably be taking it too far. But Jake The Snake was just too crafty for me at my most reckless, so I had to actually take a page out of his book. He taught me how to get better at pool by avoiding risky low-percentage shots that could hand an easy win to my competitor if I missed. And The Snake learned how to get better at pool by realizing he had to choose lower-percentage shots every now and then, and hope he cinched them, because playing safe could actually harm him more than it did him good. Boy did he hate watching me bank out of a sloppy safety, or run out a difficult table I had no business attacking in the first place!
Take advantage of every pool player you go up against! Pick their brains, analyze their play-style, observe their strategies. Even amateur pool players might have a trick or two to teach a more advanced player. There is a wealth of knowledge to be learned inside pool games you play every night, just open your eyes and look.
Hey, did I ever tell you about that guy Reggie The River…?
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