All one really needs is a house cue, some 600 grit sandpaper & a tip shaper.

vincett said:

Beautiful, but looking from a far like that, good Ebony look similarly "jetblack" dont they ? Unless they are of NA ebony or so. My stick looking from a far also has a jet black look to it.
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I’ll get a super closeup Wednesday

The article doesn't match the title in my opinion, causing some confusion.

The post runs a little long too. I should know, I am expert at long posts, so here I go!

The original post is about practice performance vs competition performance and I am going to focus on that. I'm not going to focus on pool, because it is hard to get concrete numbers from pool practice and most particularly, pool competition. Everybody misses "easy shots" sometimes. I missed an almost straight in half table shot in a tournament. I couldn't see the shot I had made thousands of times over the years. I came off the shot twice then let the thought my opponent would think I was jacking with him come in. "I'll aim for a straight shot then just shoot a little to the left." Missed that money ball and lost a game in a short set. I misjudged the margin for error. As it happened within a month I saw Efren and Bustamonte miss the same shot separate matches in the same tournament. Money balls in the matches. I forget if it cost them matches, it cost them the games they missed in. I might miss that shot one time in fifty or a hundred, they might miss it one time in five hundred or a thousand but watching them miss hammered home we all miss sometimes!

Putting the misses behind us is what matters. I tried rubbing the back of my head like Efren. In a few weeks I had a bald spot on the back of my head so I went to the technique that saw me through many forms of competition. I missed, but that isn't my standard. Forget about it.

I am going to talk about pistol competition because I shot a series of matches that were all worth 600 points and it is easier to analyze pistol performance than pool performance. Some targets in the series were worth ten points or zero but most you could score one to ten points on each target and there was a time limit. A couple years into shooting the matches I shot a perfect score, the first one in fifteen years of the competition. Then I expected perfect scores, I could do it, I had! About a season and a half later I looked at my scores for several years. Brutal truth, I had shot a few perfects but my normal performance was to drop a few points on one shot, maybe one point, maybe two, three points was a bad day as was dropping more than one point on multiple stages.

It was a bitter pill to accept but perfect wasn't my normal any more than dropping more than three points was. The scores were undeniable though. My normal was dropping one or two points, not one or two points average but one or two points each match.

This is something to recognize, our best is no more our normal performance than our worst is. We all have those magic sessions when we can do no wrong, and we have those sessions when our eyes are off, maybe it is our nerves not firing just right, maybe we are a little sore from an unusual activity, maybe it is the phase of the moon! Understanding our normal prevents too much upset about a bad day.

It seems that some expect to drop performance in competition compared to practice. I expect the opposite, I expect to perform better in competition, and I do. The bigger the competition the better I perform. That isn't to say I am perfect. I lost two pistol competitions on the last shot. Everybody was already counting me the winner! I remember those two shots fired decades ago. I never made those errors again though!

A big part of the mental game is realistic expectations. If, like me shooting a pistol, one fubar per sixty shot match was the normal, I had to accept that because I could see it on paper. I won enough matches in open competition to know I was good, but I wasn't perfect. In pool it is harder to judge our normal because we do have to judge it more than in a pistol match where I had hard numbers to look at.

Pressure can make us better or worse. Learning to deal with pressure can make us better when things are tough. I fully expect my performance to increase five to ten percent under pressure, and it does. If you don't compete at least as well as you practice it is time to work on your mental game.

Hu

BUMP

CocoboloCowboy said:

When the NUMB SKILLS decide to buy Diamond for our Pool Room, they sold off the GC II's & III's for $250.00 EACH.

I am sure those who got one of those GC's were HAPPY.

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Don't know that I've seen them that cheap, but $500 was common with pool halls "upgrading" to diamonds. Instead of spending 75K to "upgrade" they should've just paid Ernesto to come setup the GC's right. edit: IMO.

jalapus logan said:

My final answer... The arrow doesn't matter much. I've never played with low deflection anything nor carbon fiber. I played with both this past week exclusively in the Vegas BCAPL event in the tournament using a borrowed cue. Ran out just fine. The lighting level was low beside the tables and I grabbed my teammate's cue on accident and used it to complete a break and run. He asked me how the cue shot, lol, I didn't even notice it wasn't the loaner cue I was given to play with. I'm convinced, the cue barely matters. Again, final answer. Play with whatever you want. Peace

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Troll post of the week nominee...lol. I'll bite. I can play fine with either. I had someone comment just the other day that based on my video I posted it looks like I would've run out with a broom stick. That doesn't mean the advantage that technology provides isn't real. Consistency can be measured in fractions of a percent and confidence in your equipment can be the difference between winning and going two and out.

When I was in Viriginia years ago and went to meet up with and play with, crap I can't think of his handle now. He was dating Pink Lady and she lived with him at the time. An older friend of his had a really nice traditional cue at the time and I was explaining BHE to them. The older gentleman stated that he just couldn't adjust to low deflection and I explained the pivot point and he let me shoot with his cue. I shot a few shots to find the pivot point and then ran out a rack and they were both surprised that I could pick up a cueand adjust to it and use it with lots of side spin that quickly.

Knowledge and experience are the ultimate arbiter of results I guess is what I'm getting at, but how you get there and how confident you are with what you use shouldn't be discounted either.

Jaden said:

I don't know why anyone would bother with an 8 foot table.

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Because it's the best size.

Where do pros usually stay when they are in Vegas? If they are paying for hotels then 3 weeks of that adds up.

westcoast said:

I'm surprised more pros don't stick around after the Predator events- maybe not enough prize money?

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I think Vegas wears out even the toughest pros after 10-or-something days of PBS.

Not the greatest play in the final, looks like some nerves for young Dorner.