Search results

I don’t have anything on topic to contribute. I did, however, want to congratulate the person who raised the question. For the last week or so the other topics on the Forum have seemed less than interesting. I was worried at first that this string might be just a mirage in the desert for a...

I am definitely going to note the phrase “swap spit.”

Shakespeare’s Hamlet coined the phrase It’s “caviar to the general” public, meaning that a person who had not been introduced to haute cuisine would bridle at the idea that fish eggs are a delicacy. For the initiated, straight pool is the cat’s pajamas. Do I date myself with that expression...

WARNING: Before you start this post, I warn you it is long and self-indulgent and sentimental. Now that I have finished it, it's almost like O'Henry. So you are cautioned. Just skip over it to the next post if you think it might cause your diabetes to flare up. You guys really know some...

Long ago I read an article about an event which occurred some time in the 1930’s. Three cushion billiards was big, and an organizing body of the game approached some color specialists—there are such people, and they know what they are doing—and asked them what color the cloth and balls in...

Something about watching this video (Jimmy Mataya, Bill Staton, Strawberry Brooks) makes me think there might be less luck to Keno than one might naturally think.

Jay— Get well, and soon! From another person who remembers Mergard’s.

Before you sell Justin Bergman short because of his being absent from the tournament scene, you might want to give a very brief moment’s attention to the Wikipedia entry on Joe Balsis.

The horrible notion that champions are born, not made, haunts me. In my deepest heart lurks the idea that champion pool players spring up like a jack-in-the-box in their mid teen years. They simply have it from day one. Hoppe was champion of the world at sixteen. Jimmy Moore, age nineteen...

They aren’t even close. Pitching from the short grass right on the edge of the green and putting on the green itself are perhaps somewhat the same as pool. But the putting/chipping game is still thirty or forty percent tougher than pool. As for the game from tee to green, FUGGEDABOUDID! (Or...

I was sixteen when I grasped that you can learn a lot about a person’s character by playing golf with him. I was eighteen when I learned that the same thing was true in pool.

I struggled with choking for years. I decided that I needed to create the same condition somehow in practice that I was under in tournaments. I came up with this idea. I made a wager in my mind that if I didn’t run fifty balls in, say, ten attempts, I would send a contribution to some...

As for Hennessee’s recent “improvement,” I followed Hennessee’s Derby City play up close, literally, for several years. I became fascinated by how unlucky he was in crucial moments. I mean TRAGICALLY unlucky. At decisive moments! I thought to myself, “If this dude ever gets a decent roll...

Fargo rating? Number of WNT appearances? Popularity? Team Spirit? Fuggedaboudit! For winning the Mosconi Cup, you need pool players with a high John Rocker Quotient. Think Jason Shaw, but not so reserved.

I can tell you how mine was. I live two hours from the Derby. I am a pool nut. I have been to the Derby about twenty times. As usual I entered the one pocket and the nine ball. (Dead money.). I bought an arena seat. I reserved a room in Caesar’s for seven nights. I made sure I prepared...

Perhaps one problem with the nine ball scheduling is that nine ball isn’t so fluid as it used to be. Since the Filipinos introduced a more complex concept for kicking, it has become more tactical and, as a result, slower. Five hundred entries doesn’t help either.

Thanks for the “Like.” I had sensed a whiff of condescension in the first comment and thought I would clear that up

I think this may be an appropriate string of comments in which to raise the name of Andre Gillier. He was a French industrialist who worked with the French tennis star Rene Lacoste to invent the fabric that goes into polo shirts. So if you are wearing a shirt that “breathes,” he was the one who...

He’s really kinda smart about pool and billiards. Just the other day he explained something in his commentary I had often observed but had never had an explanation for. It pays to listen to him.