POOL MOST DIFFICULT SPORT

Pool hardly is the most difficult sport and IMO, there’s some question if it’s really a sport versus parlor game.

I won’t purse that debate at this time but pool is definitely not the hardest sport. Now I am not certain which
sport truly qualifies as the hardest competitive sport. Nonetheless, I am reminded of how many highly talented
athletes from so many other sports take up the game of golf and struggle to match their skills, performance &
athleticism in their chosen athletic professions. How many times has a top athlete being interviewed at a golf
tournament complained about how hard it is to hit a motionless ball sitting on a tee right before their eyes?

The darn ball just doesn’t want to always go straight or airborne, avoids water, etc. Baseball players, basketball, swimming, football, tennis, track & field, Olympic competitors & medal winners, Nascar drivers, gymnasts….the field of top athletes enamored with the difficulty and challenges golf poses unanimously agree on how hard it is. So let me repeat that I do not for sure which sport is the hardest but I know for sure pocket billiards doesn’t qualify. Heck, even 3 cushion billiards is harder.
 
Bavafongoul said:
Pool hardly is the most difficult sport and IMO, there’s some question if it’s really a sport versus parlor game.

I won’t purse that debate at this time but pool is definitely not the hardest sport. Now I am not certain which
sport truly qualifies as the hardest competitive sport. Nonetheless, I am reminded of how many highly talented
athletes from so many other sports take up the game of golf and struggle to match their skills, performance &
athleticism in their chosen athletic professions. How many times has a top athlete being interviewed at a golf
tournament complained about how hard it is to hit a motionless ball sitting on a tee right before their eyes?

The darn ball just doesn’t want to always go straight or airborne, avoids water, etc. Baseball players, basketball, swimming, football, tennis, track & field, Olympic competitors & medal winners, Nascar drivers, gymnasts….the field of top athletes enamored with the difficulty and challenges golf poses unanimously agree on how hard it is. So let me repeat that I do not for sure which sport is the hardest but I know for sure pocket billiards doesn’t qualify. Heck, even 3 cushion billiards is harder.
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How arduous is the task of getting from your average pool player to be comparble in talent to the best in the world. Svb and the likes are the elite pool players who have spent their entire lives getting to that point. This is very similar to athletes in other sports. Imagine putting any athlete in the world on the same table as svb and expecting them to compete. Give them five or 10 years to do it, and they still wouldn't. The Op's question wasn't about athleticism, it was about difficulty to be the best. I was playing pool on a 9-ft diamond table with an elite pool player who just ran circles around me and made phenomenal shots. I asked a friend how he became that good and he told me he's been doing this for 30 or 40 years. To get to that level is extremely difficult and arduous.
 
SeniorTom said:
The Op's question wasn't about athleticism, it was about difficulty to be the best.
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The Op didn't have a question. He quoted a statement by Mark Wilson which was:

"Recently while commentating a pool match Mark Wilson stated that
pool was the most difficult of all sports."

Difficulty to be the best wasn't stated. You can take a male or female who was never on a pool table or touched a cue in their
life but show them how to form an open bridge properly, how to stand, how to stroke the cue, where to hit the CB, and how to roll the CB into a pocket on it's own, and they'll be able to do it in a matter of minutes. I know because I've done it. Adding an OB starts from real close and extends from there, but they will and can do it easily enough. It's easier than throwing darts or rolling a bowling ball to strike the pins.
 
SeniorTom said:
How arduous is the task of getting from your average pool player to be comparble in talent to the best in the world. Svb and the likes are the elite pool players who have spent their entire lives getting to that point. This is very similar to athletes in other sports. Imagine putting any athlete in the world on the same table as svb and expecting them to compete. Give them five or 10 years to do it, and they still wouldn't. The Op's question wasn't about athleticism, it was about difficulty to be the best. I was playing pool on a 9-ft diamond table with an elite pool player who just ran circles around me and made phenomenal shots. I asked a friend how he became that good and he told me he's been doing this for 30 or 40 years. To get to that level is extremely difficult and arduous.
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Comparing the ability to excel at pool like a world champion is a fallacious comparison. How many people perform
at that level in pool in comparison to the average pool player. And the average pool player may also play golf or some other sport or game. You just cannot compare the best in the world at one thing with the rest of the world doing the same thing. That’s like comparing Tiger Woods in his prime or Scheffler and McElroy today with Shane getting on a golf course with them. You cannot compare the best, nor the difficulty of any task, to determine or decide which activity is the hardest to learn and master, or at least get better at doing more easily than another activity. Different skills, ranging from eyesight, motor skills, reaction time, strength and stamina, etc. are involved in different sports & games.

The point I was trying to make is in my recollection, I’ve heard lots of athletes voice frustration and satisfaction concurrently about the game of golf. Deion Sanders remarked that he considered himself a complete athlete in two different professional sports he played concurrently (MLB & NFL). Heck, Bo Jackson was an All Star in MLB & NFL (only player to accomplish it). He was considered the modern day equivalent to Jim Thorpe. And both of those athletes said golf was the hardest game they ever played. How about Michael Jordan? The question as to which is the hardest sport can differ from person to person and was their answer based on actually having done lots of things, or only a fewer number of things, deciding their answer? Is their answer based on what they perceive the difficulty of something to be despite never having attempted or was it from actually performing it and if so, infrequently, occasionally or often?

I think difficulty should be based upon what the masses think, what they do and how they fare at doing it. However,
relying on how great someone already is at something with others not as skilled doesn’t accurately reflect the difficulty.
 
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SpiderWebComm said:
In golf you're using the entire body and it all needs to be very coordinated and in correct positions throughout the swing. In pool it's only the hand and the arm.

If you miss a lot of greens in golf, an excellent short game of chipping, pitching, sand shots, and putting might get you some pars along with bogeys, double bogeys, or higher. Sand traps and different lies in there can be brutal.

An entirely different skill set from the full swing and every bit as tough because of different lengths and thickness and types of grass around the greens and crappy lies. The greens themselves have uphill, downhill, sidehill, breaks to them with different speeds and types of grass. It's not perfectly level 4 1/2' x 9' Simonis cloth installed for each shot on the table along with sand traps, trees, wind and water.
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If you’re stroking with only the hand and arm at billiards you’re going to have a weak stroke.
I golf, you hit it from the toenails, as Hogan said….that works with a cue also.
I was a tall skinny kid with buggy-whip arms who could drive par 4 greens (not PGA ones) and draw the length of a table from the
length of the table on a 6x12….you can’t do that thinking from your upper body…gotta be from your feet.

…don‘t get me wrong…I don’t know if I can disagree about what is the tougher game…seems pool might be a hybrid…sport and game.
I played decent street chess, but I’m pretty sure Stephen Hawking would beat me…at 9-ball, he’s got the rainbow crush. 😎
 
pt109 said:
If you’re stroking with only the hand and arm at billiards you’re going to have a weak stroke.
I golf, you hit it from the toenails, as Hogan said….that works with a cue also.
I was a tall skinny kid with buggy-whip arms who could drive par 4 greens (not PGA ones) and draw the length of a table from the
length of the table on a 6x12….you can’t do that thinking from your upper body…gotta be from your feet.
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Has anyone ever put out a video on using your feet for better pool? I'd love to see it. I have seen a few guys using their feet to haul ass out of a pool room because they didn't have enough cash to cover their losses. It was impressive.
pt109 said:
…don‘t get me wrong…I don’t know if I can disagree about what is the tougher game…seems pool might be a hybrid…sport and game.
I played decent street chess, but I’m pretty sure Stephen Hawking would beat me…at 9-ball, he’s got the rainbow crush. 😎
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Nah, you'd stomp Hawking in both. He dun croaked a little over 5 years ago.
 
Bavafongoul said:
The point I was trying to make is in my recollection, I’ve heard lots of athletes voice frustration and satisfaction concurrently about the game of golf. Deion Sanders remarked that he considered himself a complete athlete in two different professional sports he played concurrently (MLB & NFL). Heck, Bo Jackson was an All Star in MLB & NFL (only player to accomplish it). He was considered the modern day equivalent to Jim Thorpe. And both of those athletes said golf was the hardest game they ever played. How about Michael Jordan?
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While he was at Carolina, Michael Jordan spent an inordinate amount of time playing pool, never demonstrating any real skill at it. Have Deion Sanders or Bo Jackson ever tried playing pool, and if they did, how good were they?

Just to be clear, I also think that mastering and maintaining a high level golf stroke is harder than achieving and maintaining a comparably high level pool stroke, for the simple reason that the former requires more moving parts. But whether someone perceives that golf is harder than pool doesn't really resolve the question.

What would be the pool equivalent of maintaining an 80 average in golf? What would be the corresponding Fargo rating? Is occasionally shooting par for a single round on a PGA-level golf course harder or easier than (say) running a 5 pack of 9-ball, or running 100 balls in straight pool? How many golfers or pool players are capable of reaching this level, even once in their lifetimes?

I don't know the answers to these questions, but I think they address the question of relative difficulty more than just asking certain individuals which sport they think is the more difficult.
 
Math is challenging, playing pool is memorizing vector field maps.

That means excelling at billiards is like passing a graduate college math exam.

From this logic billiards is a sport that requires baseline mathematical fluency in terms of distance and time.

How many athletes fail to meet the minimum educational requirements to understand billiard dynamics? In other sports the baseline is how high can you reach or how fast can you run. The demand is physical and more intellectual.

That means the competition to be the best at billiards is to a general audience but filtered down by education and physical ability. In other sports exceptional physical ability is the main requirement.
 
justnum said:
Math is challenging, playing pool is memorizing vector field maps.

That means excelling at billiards is like passing a graduate college math exam.
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No, it really isn't. I mean, it really, really isn't. I don't think you could find a worse analogy.
 
Taxi said:
Just to be clear, I also think that mastering and maintaining a high level golf stroke is harder than achieving and maintaining a comparably high level pool stroke, for the simple reason that the former requires more moving parts.
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As well as the training to coordinate all of those moving parts into a single cohesive flowing turn back and through to the finish after striking the golf ball. The entire body comes into play in golf. Everyone isn't blessed with physical coordination of that magnitude even after years of playing and lessons.
Taxi said:
What would be the pool equivalent of maintaining an 80 average in golf? What would be the corresponding Fargo rating? Is occasionally shooting par for a single round on a PGA-level golf course harder or easier than (say) running a 5 pack of 9-ball, or running 100 balls in straight pool? How many golfers or pool players are capable of reaching this level, even once in their lifetimes?
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Hard to answer. It does seem like those who play golf and want to get better don't think twice about taking golf lessons from a PGA teaching pro and shelling out the money. Pool players, for the most part, are cheap. Just keep banging those balls and it'll get better attitude. Or, "who gives a rats ass, it's only a game."
 
Patrick Johnson said:
Give him a minute...

pj
chgo
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There are entire books written with two balls are on a table what happens if it is hit.

The more advanced billiard situations are like good formulas. Using a rail system for aiming is always an impressive display.

The ability to be precise on a pool table is similar to being precise simplifying algebra.
 
The difficulty of any task or sport is based on the complexity of the actions required to perform it,
let alone at a very high level. The skills required can all have some degree of similarity, however,
there can be substantially greater differences as well. For example, golf has to deal with the weather,
course conditions and variable green speeds unlike pool which is indoors. Nowadays, cloth & table
brand is becoming more common too. So at the outset, the same swing and shot in golf on a sunny,
calm day is completely different when it’s overcast, wind 9-10 mph (gusts 12-15 mph), 10% chance
of rain. You play the course as much as the weather and the British Open is drastically different than
the U. S. Open, both in terms of course design and especially weather. Pool tables are basically the
same and you can come up with reasons that tables can & do vary but there isn’t any weather factor.

It depends on when you first started playing any particular sport, game or activity and how much you
got to play or do it and for how long did you do it? Recreationally or Competitively? What physical,
motor and mental skills are required to master it? Everybody is different and a great marksman with a
rifle or handgun can struggle using a recurved bow or a compound bow. Different skills are required.
 

pt109 said:
If you’re stroking with only the hand and arm at billiards you’re going to have a weak stroke.
I golf, you hit it from the toenails, as Hogan said….that works with a cue also.
I was a tall skinny kid with buggy-whip arms who could drive par 4 greens (not PGA ones) and draw the length of a table from the
length of the table on a 6x12….you can’t do that thinking from your upper body…gotta be from your feet.

…don‘t get me wrong…I don’t know if I can disagree about what is the tougher game…seems pool might be a hybrid…sport and game.
I played decent street chess, but I’m pretty sure Stephen Hawking would beat me…at 9-ball, he’s got the rainbow crush. 😎
Click to expand...
There was an old Filipino around when I was coming up in the game who saw me practising my break and said to me, "You know you got it when u can hit it with your feet".

With my background in motor control studies I knew what he meant and improved immediately. He then laughed and said I was the first one to crack his cryptic statement. He said it to people freely....but he charged them to explain it. Now I charge to explain it :p

Actually caught me by surprise that anyone else uses this phrasing. Fun lil post by u... Im sure it flew right over everyone's head like the old man's lesson lures did.
 
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sjm said:
Like every other sport, however, becoming one of the very best at pool is difficult.
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Pool is as hard as your opponent makes it. One thing that helps pool players is that you can practice much more than most sports. If I tried to take 200 strokes in golf, or 200 swings of a baseball bat, my arm would fall off. 200 strokes of pool is getting warmed up.
measureman said:
Neptune Joe Frady a world class pool player and scratch golfer from N.J. once told me with out hesitation that golf was the harder game.
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Earl told me pool was harder.
 
What other sport needs the accuracy of the hit and position of the ball to continue a run that is as accurate as pool and golf to be done over and over and over? Darts requires accuracy, but their target to hit is larger than the contact point you need to hit on a pool ball and the stroke has much less variables in it to compensate for things like the shaft, tip, cloth, etc... Hitting a baseball at the higher levels of play is tough, but how many variables does a swing have past good timing and swing mechanics and how large of a target is it to hit the ball? You also get a bunch of tries to hit the ball and the pitcher has a bunch of tries to make you miss per out/inning. Pool you basically get one shot at it in a game and maybe 3-4 tries in a set against a good player.

I think if we look at the margin of error that a particular thing has and how many variables a single shot may have and how long you have to keep executing more or less perfectly to excel at the sport, pool is certainly up there with anything else. You don't walk up, swing a few times and then go sit down for a bit or walk to the next hole, you are shooting the shot over and over for hours in a tournament, sometimes for days.

How do we measure difficulty in comparison to other things that require very different mechanics and skillsets to be good at them? Not really possible. Even if you take an example of "take a noob and see how long it takes them to get good" that very much depends on the person. As a 5'6" guy with average co-ordination and build, I am not going to be good at football or basketball or baseball. Certainly not weightlifting or arm-wrestling no matter how many steroids I took. If we pick some random person off the street, they may be as useless to hitting a target at anything but end up being really good as sprinting with some training or something else.
 
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Well if he is talking about sports with sticks. I would guess he has never tried LaCrosse.
If he is talking about sports with cue sticks, has he never tried Snooker? You know the sport that Ronnie O'Sullivan compared to pool using a chess and checkers analogy. 🤷
 
I guess pool can definitely be called a sport if THIS is. Are the Olympics in the future? Do they have certified instructors?
Do they have their own forums with guys arguing and pontificating about all the possibilities and idiosyncrasies of stroking, tossing and aiming? Is there a Fartgo rating?

Edit: Yes, they do have their own forums. https://www.thecornholeforum.com/
I wonder if members get banned for discussing certain proven methods of aiming the bean bag causing flame wars with the untrained and opinionated in the forum?

www.slickwoodys.com

Is Cornhole a Sport? The American Cornhole League Says Yes

The American Cornhole League is working to make cornhole an Olympic sport. Learn about the history of cornhole and its rise in popularity.
www.slickwoodys.com www.slickwoodys.com
 
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