I think that there are many high level players that, for whatever reasons, learn to do things all kinds of cockamamy ways and have huge success: sideways chicken wing swarps; head over the wrong eye; jacked up strokes; massively loose finger tip grips; rigor mortis death grips; oil pump strokes; and even raising up on each and every shot.
BUT does that mean those players are entitled to come here and say it's the best way, the secret way, the advanced way, the road player way to pool nerdvana and a technique that should be adopted by the general pool playing public?!
No.
All these and more are the idiosyncratic methods players naturally fall into and make work all the way to championship level. It has nothing to do with the average pool player. Players find things that work and then try and find an explanation for why it works. The problems occur when they try and export that to the general populace as the the right or correct way to play.
Lou Figueroa
I can agree with this for the most part.
No 2 people are identical.
No 2 sets of mechanics are identical, despite some of them being very close.
On of the things i find interesting, is how certain people, who obviously do NOT play at a high level, feel that they can tell someone who does, what is right and wrong, when they can never reproduce what the high level guy does on a pool table in the first place.
That has always annoyed me to no end.
The other thing that annoys me is when you have the general pool playing populace, that has no chance of ever executing anything like the top shelf pro, crying foul when they never ever experience the same results, when given a tip on how to do something by a top shelf player.
Not that the information is wrong, mind you, but because they don't have the ability or knowledge to execute it properly.
I mean, i understand how things look on paper, how things are in theory, but sometimes, that just doesn't translate into something that is effective, ON an actual pool table.
At least in my opinion.
I am a firm believer in the
THOSE WHO CAN, DO; THOSE WHO CAN'T TEACH idiom.
Obviously, there are some exceptions to this in pool, especially, when the teacher is or was a high level pool player.
But another thing that is to be noted, is this is all about egos.
Pool is an ego based game.
As such, no one likes to be told that they don't know what they are doing, even if they suck at pool.
God help you if you try to tell someone that has been playing for years, that they don't know what is up.
Let alone, if you try to tell the guys who could never ever play high level pool, but who are experts on all the explanations of pool, how they don't know what they are talking about, simply because explanations only go SO FAR, and pool isn't about explanations, but about results ON the table.
The "What pros know, and what they "think" they know, vs all the experts that can't play, who are masters of technical data" debate will continue for all time.
But debate isn't going to cause all the technical guys to suddenly jump speeds and play like professionals.
It's beyond them.
