Corey Deuel is the new U.S. National Snooker Champion.

Sort of. All players entered had to be either US citizens or permanent residents who had not represented any other country in the past three years. The top-ranked eight players were seeded into the 8 round-robin groups. Other than the residency requirement, anyone with $100 (plus $10 annual membership, if not a member) could have entered.

Next year the US National Championships will likely be on one of the other coasts as we try to move it around.

Bob Jewett
USSA Treasurer

Why didn't you enter? Conflict of interest or another reason?
 
"You cant train in what god left out",


if it was all about hours, coaching the guy who works the hardest plays the best. the world inst flat and pool and other sport isnt that linear.

I cant throw a ball 100MPH if my dad took me out when I was 5 to teach me to throw 100mph it was never gonna happen.

I was playing a friend the other night who hasnt practiced near as much as me, hasnt hit as many balls, and he robbs me, i have zero chance. im 46 he is 21.

with the practice makes perfect logic the older guys to a point would be the strongest players(until eyesight, stamina) becomes a issue.

Dont work that way, either you have it or you don't, and that applies to other things than sport, in business I have done very well-yet i never learned how to tie a neck tie, never read a book on business, dont have a MBA or any training etc. I'm just good at being a leader and making the right decisions. Like poker players getting away from a losing hand that looks good, they cant explain how they have their instincts. I cant explain why i'm good at what i do, but i can prove it.
 
It's a combination of many factors that separates the good from the bad.

The only ones who believe that are the ones who make excuses why they can't play as good as someone else
No question about it I know guys who play everyday , I hardly play and I could give them the 7 . What separates the top is god given that applies in every sport it's a ridicules assumption that practice is all that separates the good from the bad


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Without the talent, none of it will matter. Without the practice and the acquired knowledge, a person's best will never be reached.

What separates those with talent from each other is practice. And those without as much talent can be BETTER than some with more talent if they practice more and learn more about the game.

That's ALSO true in all sports and walks of life.

Jaden
 
How much did Corey win?
It wasn't a money tournament, but to answer your question and some others:

1st -- $1000 plus $1000 in support to go to Latvia for the World Championships
2nd -- $500 plus $1000 in support for Latvia
3-4 -- $200
5-8 -- $100
High Break -- $100 (Sargon Isaac, 79, against Azemat)
High Break not in the money -- $100 (El Sayed, 41)
High Break not in the last 16 -- $100 (Visovan, 32)

Here is the chart from the finals:

CropperCapture[50].png
Bob Jewett
USSA Treasurer
 
I am really curious, as a thought experiment, what would happen if Johnny Archer and Ronnie O'Sullivan locked horns for two solid months on the snooker table. I am certain that in the first month Ronnie would torture Johnny, but after Johnny learned the moves and what shots to take and what to pass? What then, would it just be a question of accuracy at that point?

All you stake horses line up to finance Archer in this quest.

Ronnie won the World Snooker Championship this year having played only one tour event all season.

He won £250,000 - that's about $375,000, and it will higher next year.

Archer at 45 is at past the age where many top snooker players start losing their long potting ability.
To reach the top level starting at his age is impossible.
JMHO :D

No sure, but I think the only two players on the tour who would be older are Steve Davis and Tony Drago.
 
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Why didn't you enter? Conflict of interest or another reason?
I put my hand up at the wrong time and was the tournament director so it would have been impossible for me to both play and do a good job as TD. But beyond that, my lifetime high break on a 6x12 is 63. Ajeya, who lives near me, beats me like a rented mule.

Bob Jewett
USSA Treasurer
 
And Hollywood continually reinforces the dream that you merely have to aspire to something to achieve it. Keeps us all doing shit jobs day in, day out. One day, Toto, one day.




Conversely, you are perfectly free to practice playing snooker for 10 hours a day. I'll see you at the Crucible in about, say, 250 years? Hint: you'll be there selling cases, not playing...

I don't have the desire to play any cue sport professionally. Neither do you. So we won't be seeing you playing anything professionally ever either.

If I did have the desire and ability to practice that much then I would be a world class player. Of that I have no doubt. Whether I could produce that level of play against other world class players would be a matter of my nerves under pressure more than my ability.

I have no talent for leather working. Neither does Jack Justis. He read a book on case making and followed the directions and kept going. I didn't read any books and plunged in making a ton of mistakes while learning how to do it. Anything that people might call talent that I do is simply a matter of experience and spending a lot of time thinking about solutions to problems. I have a whole wall full of experiments, some of which turned into actual cases or parts of cases and others which are not yet being used.

Is it talent if a person comes to me at a show and wants to have a case made with some special request and the other case makers turn him down but I sketch out the solution in three minutes and build it? Maybe to outside observers it is but to me it's not because I know that I have already solved this problem years before. If the other case makers DESIRED to solve it they could have just as easily and possibly better than me.

You call Corey talented and I call him dedicated. He spent countless hours figuring out things about what is really happening on a pool table to the point that he can do things on demand that make him seem like a freak of nature.

Florian Kohler? Is he talented or dedicated? You can follow his progress from enthusiastic kid five/six years ago to world traveling money-earning trick shot professional. If he was talented only then he would not have needed all those thousands of hours spent learning and perfecting the shots he knows.

Now someone might say oh Florian was BORN to to do what he does, it's god-given talent. But the reality is that he simply fell in love with making pool balls dance and decided to spend a huge amount of time figuring out how to do that.

Desire, dedication, practice.
 
I'm not that old...

All you stake horses line up to finance Archer in this quest.

Ronnie won the World Snooker Championship this year having played only one tour event all season.

He won £250,000 - that's about $375,000, and it will higher next year.

Archer at 45 is at past the age where many top snooker players start losing their long potting ability.
To reach the top level starting at his age is impossible.
JMHO :D

No sure, but I think the only two players on the tour who would be older are Steve Davis and Tony Drago.

I'm not that old and had lost my long potting ability in my early 30's, it was due to eyesight degeneration. I got lasik at the beginning of last year and it fixed that issue no problem...

Jaden
 
All you stake horses line up to finance Archer in this quest.

Ronnie won the World Snooker Championship this year having played only one tour event all season.

He won £250,000 - that's about $375,000, and it will higher next year.

Archer at 45 is at past the age where many top snooker players start losing their long potting ability.
To reach the top level starting at his age is impossible.
JMHO :D

No sure, but I think the only two players on the tour who would be older are Steve Davis and Tony Drago.

At this point it would be better to bet on Shane. And to that end if Shane would promise to dedicate himself to snooker as much as he did to pool I would gladly chip in $10,000 for a 10% stake in his winnings after expenses over 3 years after the initial year of training.

I would be happy to put up $100,000 (if I had that kind of money to spend) to send Shane to England and let him REALLY train for a year an then make a run at the pro tour.
 
At this point it would be better to bet on Shane. And to that end if Shane would promise to dedicate himself to snooker as much as he did to pool I would gladly chip in $10,000 for a 10% stake in his winnings after expenses over 3 years after the initial year of training.

I would be happy to put up $100,000 (if I had that kind of money to spend) to send Shane to England and let him REALLY train for a year an then make a run at the pro tour.

You might as well take your cash and throw it in the wind. He has no shot I would take and I cringe when I say this Mr 400 long before I would take Shane I think a good straight pool player has a better shot since they have the understanding of the stack but that JMHO

1
 
At this point it would be better to bet on Shane. And to that end if Shane would promise to dedicate himself to snooker as much as he did to pool I would gladly chip in $10,000 for a 10% stake in his winnings after expenses over 3 years after the initial year of training.

I would be happy to put up $100,000 (if I had that kind of money to spend) to send Shane to England and let him REALLY train for a year an then make a run at the pro tour.

Listen. You just don't get it. There's no chance on god's earth that ANY current American pool player will EVER get to pro snooker standard. Simply put, the damage is already done. Unless you're striking the ball cleanly by the age of about 10, it's just not going to happen. The difference between snooker and pool is stratospheric. Get over it.

Mind you, there's more chance of that than you ever admitting you were wrong about something lol.
 
You might as well take your cash and throw it in the wind. He has no shot I would take and I cringe when I say this Mr 400 long before I would take Shane I think a good straight pool player has a better shot since they have the understanding of the stack but that JMHO

1

I would take SVB all day long - he has the fundamentals for it, sort of. Mr 400 would need serious work on his cue action.
 
So a handful of American fans get excited over snooker and the snooker snobs pop into the thread to poo poo it as much as possible. :rolleyes:
 
No worries JB, I guess this is one of those hypothetical questions so it's hard to understand why it won't happen without a thorough knowledge of the game.

It would probably be like me saying that a 35 year old female netball player could become an NBA all star if she knuckled down and practised hard, or a the 35 year old Brazlian crazy golf (put put) champion could move to the USA and win a PGA title if he put the hours in. I think you wouldn't bet on either.

Several have mentioned it but maybe not articulated it very well, age is what is stopping Corey.

Look at it another way, Stephen Hendry is probably the greatest snooker player that lived with 7 world titles and countless records, he recently retired at the age of 44. Why? because he simply can not compete any more. He still puts the hours in I'm sure, he played all the tournaments, when was his last major victory? He last won a title in 2005 if Wiki is correct, when he was 36 years old....


...so if Hendry can't be successful post 35 with 7 world titles behind him and a life time of playing the game what chance does a pool player crossing over have?

Like I said though, it doesn't mean Snooker is harder, it's just different and sufficiently tough enough that the luck factor doesn't exist, unlike pool.
 
Yes ... On both counts ...

So a handful of American fans get excited over snooker and the snooker snobs pop into the thread to poo poo it as much as possible. :rolleyes:

Yes, I am one of those who got excited and ...

Yes, the Snobs came out "in force".

I remain proud of Corey's Win, regardless of the Poo-Poo'ers.
 
My friend Calvin just called me again. He only watched the last two or three frames of the finals but he's rev'd up about going next year. It won't happen as neither of us is able to get much farther than than the three miles to his son's house where the snooker table resides. It's fun to talk about though, especially with Calvin as he can be hilarious.

I would like to see a national snooker tournament with a hillbilly theme. Calvin and I would be prime candidates to play. :) You can be sure there would be no foreign flags being waved about.
 
You might as well take your cash and throw it in the wind. He has no shot I would take and I cringe when I say this Mr 400 long before I would take Shane I think a good straight pool player has a better shot since they have the understanding of the stack but that JMHO

1

You honestly think Shane can't learn to handle the stack? This isn't rocket science we are talking about here, it's hitting the ball with a stick.

If anything Shane will have to learn to dial it back and shoot only a fraction of the shots he is capable of.

But the larger point is that if I had the money to invest then I'd do it just to see what happens. Because that's how "impossible" stuff gets done. By people ignoring the experts and know it alls and getting in the grease.

How about we make a $10,000 bet that Shane can run 100 balls in less than one month after he starts to try to run 100 balls. Anytime after today. I will back Shane and split the winnings with him. Johnny Archer ran 200 two weeks after he learned to play straight pool, beating Nick Varner in the finals of a straight pool tournament. Johnny went 150 and out and was encouraged to continue and made it to 200.

I'd further bet that Shane would run his first century in snooker in less than two months into his snooker training and sooner than that if you count line-up drills.

But before you go off on me this is all academic because none of it is ever going to happen. If you honestly wanted to bet on the straight pool Shane's backers will be willing to bet as high as you want but no one on the planet is foolish enough to take that action.
 


Yes, I am one of those who got excited and ...

Yes, the Snobs came out "in force".

I remain proud of Corey's Win, regardless of the Poo-Poo'ers.

It's not poo-pooing, and it's nothing to do with snooker snobbery. I'm originally a snooker player, and the only time I ever considered watching any kind of American snooker was when I heard Corey was playing. It is very exciting watching a pool player competing in a different cue sport, just as it's exciting watching a snooker player on a pool table. It's also exciting and interesting thinking of the reactions of the dedicated snooker players, and the possible implications of his win.

But, no one is poo-pooing that excitement, or his win. I believe the responses have been aimed at talk of Corey taking on professional snooker, or international amateur snooker for that matter. It's just a reality check, or an attempt to inform those who may not be too familiar with high level snooker.

And yes, it works both ways. I recently started playing pool after a long lay off from snooker, and moving to a country where snooker is basically impossible to play. When I say recently, I mean about 8 weeks ago. After finding a local club, I was invited to play in the equivalent of a state championship, 8 ball and 9 ball. I won the 8 ball, beating a Korean pro in the final, but went out in the quarters of the 9 ball.

The only reason I'm on this forum now is because I'm trying to soak in as much information about pool as I can. After watching some of the pros I know there is so much I don't know about this game. Next week I'm going to a national event, where the like of Kim Ga Young and Cha Yu Ram will be playing. I'm so excited to watch the pros play, and learn as much as I can, because I know I have no idea what pro pool is really about.

The parallel is that unless you've been exposed to the professional or high level game, you don't really understand what you're up against. It's like your average bar hack saying he has a mate who can shoot 8 ball. You know that this guy probably doesn't really understand what pool is really about. I think that may be the case when people are suggesting Corey world.

In my case, even though I beat a pro, and won a state title, after 8 weeks of playing the game I completely understand that I don't really know what happens on a table until I'm exposed to real high level play. And until that happens, I'm in no position to make any claims or have any expectations of success.
 
JB, I think you should probably start an entirely different thread to continue your "argument". It's getting old fast in this one.
 
JB, I think you should probably start an entirely different thread to continue your "argument". It's getting old fast in this one.

Meh, it's an interesting discussion, and it's fun thinking about the possibilities and circumstances that could make the 'impossible' possible, as John mentioned.

You can tell from my post count that I'm a total noob here, but people seem to take John's style of discussion a little too personally. He just seems to enjoy talking things through. Not sure why his posts get people's hackles up.
 
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