I think he more meant a young player of the decade.You mean a slow playing, lint picking, stiff artist nit? Hopefully the kid sets his bar higher than Archer.
Hayden Ernst 14 Years of age...Straight shooter
- Thread starter Duane Remick
- Start date
Whyncha tell me so?I think he more meant a young player of the decade.
Too much too soon IMO. 14-15 in mens’ competitions is really young and that stage is too crazy. IMO. I would put Meglino on it in his home state over some other players though. I do agree that if he’s 775-800 at 17-18 it might be good to do.
wlycdgr
New member
I could well be wrong about his skill level, but I don't think his age alone should be a disqualifying factor. Another 14yo prodigy comes to mind - Yagiz Kaan Erdogmus, the Turkish chess Grandmaster. He just finished on a plus score - ahead of the current world champion Gukesh D - in one of the strongest annual invitational chess tournaments, Tata Steel (https://www.chess.com/events/info/2026-tata-steel-chess).
Now, I know chess and pool aren't quite the same, but there are many similarities also (and, Yagiz is not the only example of a 15yo or younger player already thriving at or near the top level. Another is the 15yo American GM Andy Woodward, who won this year's B group (Challengers) at Tata Steel).
Yagiz's current FIDE chess rating, btw, would translate to something like 725-750 in Fargo terms. But he's competing successfully against players who are (in Fargo terms) 775-825+. Young players on an upward trajectory are often significantly underrated, so even if Hayden is not quite ready, I don't think we need to wait until he's 775+ as long as he keeps posting strong results and making progress.
MC is badvertising. It's not child's play.
I see what you are saying. Chess is different, although I am sure brain maturity and experience matter a lot from a 15 year old to a 21+ player. Exposing them to high level play is one thing. But the too much too soon approach can damage development. And people can easily overrate a young player. The classic example is the comparison between the development of Tiger Woods and Michelle Wie. I said back then I thought Wie was being mishandled. She had the POTENTIAL to be a great LPGA player. She had zero chance of playing the men’s game. Zero. But the hype and her parents etc… had people believing she could. I was happy to see her finally have a little success in the women’s game, but IMO her talent was not developed right.
Chess seems to be an intellectual haven and those guys think way long game. IOW, less overt danger for the upstart.
Haven't there been a few pool players that were world champions at 15 or 16?
If you're beating champions you're beating champions period.
Interesting article from a recent edition of The Economist:
Why child prodigies rarely become elite performers
Hot-housing promising youngsters works—but not as well as you might think
Jan 14th 2026
NOVAK DJOKOVIC first picked up a tennis racket when he was four years old. At the age of 12 he left his native Serbia for a tennis academy in Germany. He won his first major title—the 2008 Australian Open—when he was 20. Today he has another 23 majors under his belt, and has spent more time ranked number one in the world than any other player.
Mr Djokovic’s illustrious career fits a common idea of human excellence: a child prodigy, schooled intensively in his early years, goes on to conquer his chosen field. But a paper published in Science at the end of last year suggests he may be something of an exception, rather than the rule. It concludes that the very best performers, in all sorts of fields beyond just sport, tend to follow a rather different path.
This study, led by Arne Güllich, a sports scientist at the RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau, in Germany, crunched data covering more than 34,000 elite performers in several areas, including sport, chess, classical music and academia. It concluded that, although they often reach a high level, the best-performing, most intensely drilled teenagers tend not to become true superstars as adults. Those who do make that grade, by contrast, tend not to stand out early on. They take longer to reach their peaks and seem to keep their interests wider for longer.
It is no accident that both Dr Güllich and one of his co-authors are sports scientists (the other two are psychologists). Sport makes a good laboratory in which to study how excellence develops. There is no shortage of volunteers, in the form of talented youngsters dreaming of making it big. Performance is easy to measure. And, since spotting future stars is vital for professional teams, there are many well-funded youth academies.
The received wisdom—and the logic on which the academies are based—is that the best way to nurture talented youngsters is to identify them early and drill them relentlessly. But a lot of the research backing that approach had looked only at school or university-level athletes, says Dr Güllich. It had not followed its subjects into their professional, adult careers.
Some more recent studies have, however, done this. Dr Güllich and his colleagues collected them and found the beginning of their new hypothesis—for all these studies agreed the received wisdom was wrong, and that early performance was not a reliable predictor of adult outcomes. Thus jolted into action, they extended the analysis beyond the sports field and came to similar conclusions.
Gathering data for other fields of endeavour took them two years. Chess was fairly straightforward. Both national and international chess outfits maintain so-called Elo ratings of players. These give a numerical assessment of those players’ strengths. Academics can similarly be ranked via databases that use citations of their work as a proxy for how influential it is, as well as by the award of prizes such as the Nobels or the Fields medal.
Music was the trickiest, says Dr Güllich. For this, he and his colleagues relied in part on a study carried out at the University of California, Davis, which tried to rank classical composers using expert consensus, mentions in musical encyclopaedias and (for those who wrote such things) how often their operas have been performed in the world’s best opera houses.
When they crunched their data, a reliable pattern fell out. In every field, elite youth performers and elite adults were almost entirely separate groups. Around 90% of superstar adults had not been superstars as children, while only 10% of top-level kids had gone on to become exceptional adults (see chart 1). It is not just that exceptional performance in childhood did not predict exceptional performance as an adult. The two were actually negatively correlated, says Dr Güllich.
Dream to be different
The adult superstars also had a reliably different approach to their fields from that of the child prodigies, in that they seemed to maintain interests besides the one in which they eventually became elite. The best sportsmen and women tended to have played several sports at a relatively high level (and even had formal coaching) for much longer than their lesser-performing confrères. Their performance in the sport they eventually played lagged behind that of their more focused peers when they were young. But when they did specialise, their progress was much quicker—they had better “training efficiency”, in the sports-science lingo.
The same was true in other disciplines. Nobel-prizewinning scientists were less likely to have won academic scholarships than those nominated for a Nobel who did not win. They also took longer to reach senior academic positions, had less impressive early publication records, and maintained interest in fields beyond that for which they won their prize (see chart 2).
Why so many exceptional performers show the same pattern of broader interests and later flowering is hard to answer. But the researchers had a stab at it anyway. They scoured the literature on excellence for theories of how it arises, but none seemed compatible with their data. Instead, they offer three of their own.
One is “search and match”, an idea derived from labour-market economics. This holds that having a broad range of interests and waiting before choosing in which to specialise gives a better chance of finding the field best suited to your talents. The young Rafael Nadal—another all-time-great tennis player—flirted with a career in football before plumping for tennis.
A second is “enhanced learning”, the idea that learning is itself a learnable skill, and that a good way to hone it is to pursue a variety of things. When the time comes to focus on one of these, a better ability to learn makes training more effective, which means improvement is faster.
The last possibility is the limited-risk hypothesis, a fancy name for the straightforward idea that avoiding the hothouse, at least for while, may stop youngsters burning out, becoming disenchanted with endless practice or simply getting bored with an activity after spending years pursuing it to the exclusion of all else.
The researchers hope to extend their analysis to more fields of endeavour, such as business and art. In the meantime, Dr Güllich is keen to emphasise that his team is not saying the hothouse model does not work. It is a reliable way, he says, to produce highly competent people—just not the truly world-class ones. Sports academies, selective schools and high-end conservatoires, in other words, may want to rethink how they do things. ■
Why child prodigies rarely become elite performers
Hot-housing promising youngsters works—but not as well as you might think
Jan 14th 2026
NOVAK DJOKOVIC first picked up a tennis racket when he was four years old. At the age of 12 he left his native Serbia for a tennis academy in Germany. He won his first major title—the 2008 Australian Open—when he was 20. Today he has another 23 majors under his belt, and has spent more time ranked number one in the world than any other player.
Mr Djokovic’s illustrious career fits a common idea of human excellence: a child prodigy, schooled intensively in his early years, goes on to conquer his chosen field. But a paper published in Science at the end of last year suggests he may be something of an exception, rather than the rule. It concludes that the very best performers, in all sorts of fields beyond just sport, tend to follow a rather different path.
This study, led by Arne Güllich, a sports scientist at the RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau, in Germany, crunched data covering more than 34,000 elite performers in several areas, including sport, chess, classical music and academia. It concluded that, although they often reach a high level, the best-performing, most intensely drilled teenagers tend not to become true superstars as adults. Those who do make that grade, by contrast, tend not to stand out early on. They take longer to reach their peaks and seem to keep their interests wider for longer.
It is no accident that both Dr Güllich and one of his co-authors are sports scientists (the other two are psychologists). Sport makes a good laboratory in which to study how excellence develops. There is no shortage of volunteers, in the form of talented youngsters dreaming of making it big. Performance is easy to measure. And, since spotting future stars is vital for professional teams, there are many well-funded youth academies.
The received wisdom—and the logic on which the academies are based—is that the best way to nurture talented youngsters is to identify them early and drill them relentlessly. But a lot of the research backing that approach had looked only at school or university-level athletes, says Dr Güllich. It had not followed its subjects into their professional, adult careers.
Some more recent studies have, however, done this. Dr Güllich and his colleagues collected them and found the beginning of their new hypothesis—for all these studies agreed the received wisdom was wrong, and that early performance was not a reliable predictor of adult outcomes. Thus jolted into action, they extended the analysis beyond the sports field and came to similar conclusions.
Gathering data for other fields of endeavour took them two years. Chess was fairly straightforward. Both national and international chess outfits maintain so-called Elo ratings of players. These give a numerical assessment of those players’ strengths. Academics can similarly be ranked via databases that use citations of their work as a proxy for how influential it is, as well as by the award of prizes such as the Nobels or the Fields medal.
Music was the trickiest, says Dr Güllich. For this, he and his colleagues relied in part on a study carried out at the University of California, Davis, which tried to rank classical composers using expert consensus, mentions in musical encyclopaedias and (for those who wrote such things) how often their operas have been performed in the world’s best opera houses.
When they crunched their data, a reliable pattern fell out. In every field, elite youth performers and elite adults were almost entirely separate groups. Around 90% of superstar adults had not been superstars as children, while only 10% of top-level kids had gone on to become exceptional adults (see chart 1). It is not just that exceptional performance in childhood did not predict exceptional performance as an adult. The two were actually negatively correlated, says Dr Güllich.
Dream to be different
The adult superstars also had a reliably different approach to their fields from that of the child prodigies, in that they seemed to maintain interests besides the one in which they eventually became elite. The best sportsmen and women tended to have played several sports at a relatively high level (and even had formal coaching) for much longer than their lesser-performing confrères. Their performance in the sport they eventually played lagged behind that of their more focused peers when they were young. But when they did specialise, their progress was much quicker—they had better “training efficiency”, in the sports-science lingo.
The same was true in other disciplines. Nobel-prizewinning scientists were less likely to have won academic scholarships than those nominated for a Nobel who did not win. They also took longer to reach senior academic positions, had less impressive early publication records, and maintained interest in fields beyond that for which they won their prize (see chart 2).
Why so many exceptional performers show the same pattern of broader interests and later flowering is hard to answer. But the researchers had a stab at it anyway. They scoured the literature on excellence for theories of how it arises, but none seemed compatible with their data. Instead, they offer three of their own.
One is “search and match”, an idea derived from labour-market economics. This holds that having a broad range of interests and waiting before choosing in which to specialise gives a better chance of finding the field best suited to your talents. The young Rafael Nadal—another all-time-great tennis player—flirted with a career in football before plumping for tennis.
A second is “enhanced learning”, the idea that learning is itself a learnable skill, and that a good way to hone it is to pursue a variety of things. When the time comes to focus on one of these, a better ability to learn makes training more effective, which means improvement is faster.
The last possibility is the limited-risk hypothesis, a fancy name for the straightforward idea that avoiding the hothouse, at least for while, may stop youngsters burning out, becoming disenchanted with endless practice or simply getting bored with an activity after spending years pursuing it to the exclusion of all else.
The researchers hope to extend their analysis to more fields of endeavour, such as business and art. In the meantime, Dr Güllich is keen to emphasise that his team is not saying the hothouse model does not work. It is a reliable way, he says, to produce highly competent people—just not the truly world-class ones. Sports academies, selective schools and high-end conservatoires, in other words, may want to rethink how they do things. ■
dendweller
Well-known member
Saw him beat Oscar by a lop sided score. Oscar did not have a good week if the 3 matches I saw are representative.
I’m not sure about this. After reading your post I started looking at winners of world championships and seeing how old the player was when winning. I focused on the men because women can compete at the world level earlier it seems- across many sports we see this I think. Loree Jon won a straight pool worlds at 16 I think. We also have the issue in pool of what is a world championship. Willie Hoppe was around 18 it looked like to me when he won his first. Other players seem solidly in their 20’s when they win their first one. I looked at Archer because he was good at a young age. He was winning some events at around 20, but the world championship came a few years into his 20’s. Willie Mosconi same thing. The WPA 9 ball only started in 1990. That is an easy way to see a list and check the players who have won in the last 35 years.
An interesting biography given the post about child prodigies and playing other sports in this thread is Raymond Ceulemans. Looks like he gave up soccer at 21 and focused exclusively on billiards. He won his first world championship several years later and of course won a ton of them and had incredible longevity at the top level. He was born in ‘37, won his first world championship in ‘63 and his last in 2001.
I did not do a ton of research on this, I’m happy to see counter examples. But many times in men’s sports players don’t become champions until their 20’s. Of course as you point out, these champions may play really well at 15-16.
So yes, in pool a young player can beat some champions at a young age. There isn’t physical danger like in football or boxing or something. And at some point it will probably be obvious if Ernst is ready to win a world championship or play on the Mosconi Cup team. I don’t know him or his family etc… but pushing a young talent too quickly can be bad. And 14-15 is really young as far as men’s sports generally. Even those who turn pro at 18 may have to wait before they win. Check out Justin Rose who won yesterday on the PGA Tour. He’s not the only example of this.
Wu won at 16. World 9 ball champion
There’s the exception. And after his great 2005? Maybe Ernst will be an exception. This started as a Mosconi Cup question. I would be hesitant to put him on the team this year. I don’t think it would be that great for his development. That’s all. If he wins a world championship that would change things. But how likely do you think it is that he will win one before turning 18? This is not a knock on him. I was impressed with what he did at the Derby.
Apparently irony just doesn't register, huh?I think he more meant a young player of the decade.
You can't be serious. From what i just witnessed he's ready right now. If Hayden plays Meglino a big set for big cash i know who i'm betting on. BTW, what does 'home state' have anything to with it? Is the crowd going to be all-Floridian? Please.
You don’t think Meglino at his age playing in his home state is more ready for that crazy stage than a 14-15 year old?
i dont think home state is an advantage for the mosconi cup since there will be very loud fans rooting for the other team.
as for age being an advantage
from an experience stand point yes
from the attitude of invincibility from youth
i am not sure who wins that one
for both it would first time representing USA and playing mosconi cup
jmho
icbw