I watched it just now, if that guy is a 9 then I'm a 19, his understanding of strategy is poor at best, maybe he is really an 8 ball player, when you play a safety and you leave your opponent an open shot you won't win many games, it doesn't look this guy has played much 9 ball.
You paint with a very broad brush. We have a vibrant division here, 10-14 teams most sessions. Both 8 and 9 ball nights. (There are two nights of TAP in this room as well, meaning four nights in a row full because of league pool.) People ARE having fun (except for me when I play like a bonehead, sigh) most of us know each other pretty well by now. Is there a social aspect to it, certainly. But people take it seriously enough, and are usually pretty good sports, too.
If it's such easy money, maybe you should give it a try, if you can get through the vetting process. Try it first, then come back here and tell us how easy it is. Many of us are like ducks, we look calm and peaceful to everyone else but underneath we're pumping like crazy just to stay afloat. We do have many tools to help us but those have been developed over the 44 years APA has been around, so good for us that we can accomplish more than we used to and don't break down after a hundred teams or so.
You're probably right and I'm painting a very broad brush but this is from what I've seen.
Yup. And some of it is true.
I watched the best players do stupid shit under pressure. I watched Alex dog an easy 9 to win the world championships and he’s a pro so pressure could do all kinds of crazy shit to your brain to an average guy who’s never been in that big of a situation.
Don’t want to go home? I’ve never met anyone in apa leagues that didn’t love to play. Stop talking about things you have no idea. Those people love the game. Some of them may not be great at it but they love playing and have more respect for the game then you apparently do. Not everyone can be a world champion but that doesn’t mean they don’t love the game as much as you and I.
You're probably right as well.
When I hear people complaining about all the money our LO must be making, I have a lot of fun with them. First thing I start with is if it's so easy, why aren't you doing it?
Totally agree, and if you have not been there recently the APA's Championship Arena has come a long way...Table surrounded by elevated stands on 3 sides and an elevated commentators booth on the other. Bright lights, table conditions slightly different from what you played on all week leading up the final (and not allowed to hit balls on table at all before the match), and about 4-5 tv cameras.
You have a lot of basement champions who act like it would be no big deal. They would just play like they play with no one watching. Lol
Easy or not that is subjective. As a whole, the league can pretty much run itself because adults can still act like adults. They can still meet and play, keep track of score and leave the scoresheet in drop box or at the bar.When I hear people complaining about all the money our LO must be making, I have a lot of fun with them. First thing I start with is if it's so easy, why aren't you doing it?
Let's see... the amount of money you need to put up to get the territory rights? So that means the LO has some skin in the game, right? They have a right to actually expect to make a living, given their investment in their business, and in their customer base, right?
Then the actual work involved. Then actually dealing with and managing a very large group of people. Many of whom like to whine a little
When you explain the actual scope of things, some of them come around. There will always be those who think it's easy. They just want to bitch and whine.
If I didn’t have a diamond in my garage I wouldn’t be playing every day lol I’m beat by the end of the work day. No one way I would have the energy to goto the pool hall or around here bar every night to play. Some people don’t have the drive or maybe even the natural ability to get really good at the game but that doesn’t mean they don’t love it . I see golfers all the time who are terrible. It they are out their every week for the love of the game. They are supporting and spending money like the rest of us and god bless the for it lol
Oh, people cheat in APA but those same people don't cheat in Fargo? Excuse me, I forgot about the magic word. I didn't realize they suddenly all became honest in Fargo. Perhaps the way to cheat in Fargo is to keep your own rating down while keeping others up. What, that's a natural consequence of beating someone 5-4 instead of 5-0 like you can, or reporting 5-0 wins as 5-4 (what's the vetting process for reporting to Fargo anyway)? Maybe he's really a 500 or maybe the players he plays are really 700+ and maybe top Fargo players should be much higher. If I had a Fargo, it might be somewhere around 500, and top players are way more than 16-1 against me. That would be 400 points in Fargo, making top Fargo more than 900. So either they're too low or I'm too high, most likely both. Cheating in Fargo compresses the entire range between players. It's easy to do - just play in a league that reports to Fargo. You don't even have to lose any matches - just make sure it's reported to Fargo as hill-hill, whether it was or not. Take the blinders off - a cheater is a cheater. And those 2-way shots should be scored as defense.
So you didn't actually see the guy play but you're sure he's cheating. And that team in Tennessee - did you report what they said to the LO there? If nobody did and if nobody ever keeps score properly, what is it, exactly, that you expect the LO to do? Do you even know if what they said was true?
25% might have been close 25 years ago. Not now that we have the internet. And saying things like "I don't want to be a 5" is quite different than "I'm trying to become a 4". The former implies no foul play at all, and a good response to that is "And what are you doing about that?". And the latter is often an excuse for losing.
At the point of who actually doing something about it? In my experience, that bottleneck is in reporting it and learning to keep score properly. For some reason folks don't want to rat out cheaters or do their part to make it harder. They just want to complain about cheating in general, without any specifics. And how do you know that guy 10 years ago wasn't really a 7 trying to get some action from you?
That part is even easier now with the Scorekeeper app. It's easier for the LO AND easier for the players. One of those tools that was developed over the years. But the part that has to happen in between, that part is the work the LO puts in "under the water", so to speak. It doesn't magically get done by itself.
Very few, if any, LOs do anything like this. I've heard of LOs who bid their tournaments out, but that's as far as it goes. A location's business is their business, we don't want any part of it. They earn their money as much as we earn ours. There's a lot more to making money on drinks than just opening the doors to leagues.
As I understand it, there is no payouts from the bars here... its an exchange. The league gets to play there, and the players aremn't charged table time (beyond a small greens fee), and i exchange the bar gets to sell more food and drinks. The bar doesn't get to rent those tables during the time league is going on, thus the trade-off, they do it to sell the food and drink. Gets more people into their rooms, during the week, and maybe they'll come back again on a non league time as well.