Recent content by Taxi

Be nice to have names attached to that picture! Some of them are easily recognizable, but the focus is a bit fuzzy. Last time I actually played Ronnie was in 1980 at Guys and Dolls, even up nine ball. Wouldn't have dreamed of trying to match up with him in one pocket. We came out even, but...

Last time I ran into Ronnie was at Triple Nines in Elkridge, maybe 2 or 3 years ago. It was during one of their Saturday night 8 ball / 9 ball tournaments, but he wasn't playing, just sitting at a table near the bar in the front of the room. He must have been pushing 80, but he still looked to...

Apologies for a stupid question, but was that the same Buck who used to play at the old Guys and Dolls in Silver Hill, along with the likes of Strawberry, Lefty Joe, Jackie Robinson and Bus Driver Ronnie? I never matched up with him because he played nothing but one pocket while I played...

The late Leonardo Andam once showed up at a non-handicapped 9 ball tournament at Orange Ball Billiards in Rockville, MD. I beat him in the first round and to this day I'm sporting a 100% winning percentage against him. That was one great tournament while it lasted. Two Mosconi Cup players...

In 2010, the year before Appleton beat Shawn 13-6, he beat Corey Deuel 15-13 in what may have been the most exciting U. S. Open final ever. IIRC the rule that year was that the player had to win by 2 games. That was the closest that any non-SVB or Fedor American has come to winning since...

BITD Steve Gumphrey was the best 9 ball player in the DC area. With the break and BIH I would beat him, but without BIH I needed the break and the slop 7. This was long before the template came along, and my break has always been a POS.

One thing I love about this tournament is that it's literally the first time I've ever seen a set of balls where it's easy to tell all the balls apart. The two ball and the six ball are the biggest improvements, and the seven is now easy to tell from the three. Now if they could just stick to...

I'm 81, and the main problem is consistency. Some weeks I'll easily beat 600+ Fargo Rated players and win our local non-handicap tournament, but then the next week I'll go 2 and out while dogging shots that a small child could make. I only wish I could combine my current stroke mechanics with...

Don't know if he's been mentioned above, but the best one hand player I ever saw was the late Michael Gerace, AKA "Geese".

Along with allowable time outs for parking lot "tune ups" if a player gets three games behind.

In Washington the only balls that were spotted after a scratch were "2 before the money". So if you scratched on the 6 ball it stayed down, and you had to put the cue ball behind the head spot and shoot at the 7 ball. If the 7 ball was behind the line it got spotted. And if you made the 7 or...

Our local Saturday night tournaments begin at 7:00, and whenever I make it to the final rounds it's usually pushing 1:00 or later. At that point I'm playing better than I was in the earlier rounds, and could probably make it another hour if necessary. Adrenaline is a powerful stimulant...

My all time pool hero was Mickey McGuire, a local bookie who won our weekly 9 ball tournament on his 80th birthday, beating a top Washington area player (Freddy Boggs) in a hill-hill final. I was "only" 49 at the time, but from that point on, my ambition was to duplicate Mickey's feat, and on...

Rogan loves pool, knows the game, Completely agree. The more publicity pool can attract, the better, and Rogan both loves and knows the game. On a funny note, when you wrote that "Living in Austin, he’s only about a three-hour drive from Frisco", I started wondering just how fast you and...

In the mid-2000's, in a local Rockville MD tournament, there were two players who had a habit of getting down, standing up, getting down, standing up, and repeating this for as many as ten times each. Both of them were really good people, and one of them was a world class nine ball player who...