Table Brain

I feel the majority of great players can remember highlites....
...and can set up the patterns years later.
Understanding billiard angles makes this possible.

The ‘meh’ situations blur

Island Drive said:

Which pro player out there also has the ability to remember every shot in a 9 ball match when it lasts 1-2 hours.

One of these guys should be able too, but whom might that be? No one ever talks about that skill.

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I don’t know about pros, but, there are several local league players that remember complete patterns from 10 years ago, and, must tell about them full beer breath an all! Whew!!! It’s amazing!��

I can't even get the shot right when I miss the game before...It takes my whole team,

and I still think it was not the same....I do know why I missed, but setting it up the same

(exact) way is almost impossible for me.

An example would be from last week sometime, landed flat on a ball near the rail. Needed to

get to the middle of the table, was told to draw it...No would scratch...shot it like that and

I was right....when set up again, a quarter inch to the left and it is a completely different

shot. Which is where my teammate had me set it up...This game is made up of minute

differences, and rarely will find someone to set up the 'exact' shot.

Corey Deuel—-most cerebral player out there.

I don't see much value in remembering anything other than the shots in which we either a) exceed our expectations in shot execution, b) fall short of expectations in shot execution, or c) exceed or fall short of the standards we set for ourselves in shot selection. It is in these three situations where we gain the most from "after the fact" analysis and can learn.

It's of little value to remember that you hit a stop shot on a dead straight two foot shot on the three ball in rack six to get onto the four ball.

So, yes, it helps a lot to remember the key shots in a match, because they affect both your learning and your confidence.

I recall chatting with Rempe once as he reflected on a match in which he missed a nine ball. It was his fifth match and he told me it was the first ball he missed since he missed a seven ball in his second match. I was impressed, not just because he'd gone so long without a miss, but that he remembered the last shot he'd missed, which had been a full day before.

When I play golf, I don't need to keep score. I could get home later that day and recall every shot on every hole and every club I used and get my score.

I've never thought about it in pool but I played in a tournament on Tuesday and I seem to recall the runs

I am with the camp that believes humans remember outliers, high and low points. It is a basic component of how our brains work.

There doesn't have to be anyone who remembers everything.

And none of us have a concept of everything, anyway.

Who can remember every centerfold in Playboy?

That is a better memory than pool balls.

FWIW, the average brain can store 13.3 years of HDTV video and has the ability to store 20,000,000 four drawer cabinets of text.

And how do I know that?

Because I remember the date when I read it (over five years ago), the source, and the information contained in the article.

January 20, 2016 in the UK Daily Mail.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/science...S-memories-previously-thought-says-study.html

I went to a week-long memory course many years ago when I was in the Air Force. It was a "strange" course, where we sat in a dark room and all kinds of sounds were played and we watched flashing lights and video images projected around the room. It was kind of a psychedelic atmosphere. The objective was to make you aware of certain sounds, images, and things occurring around you, so that you could attach "tags" to things and later remember them. I have remembered hundreds and hundreds of complex "things" for decades and decades.

Your brain can store all kinds of information and it stays in your brain until it is "overwritten", like computer files. The information in your brain becomes "scattered" over time and you sometimes only remember small segments of the overall memory. It is like when a disk drive becomes fragmented or certain portions of the information becomes "corrupted".

Memories have "tags" and you can sometimes search your brain by running certain "tags through your mind until you find what you are looking for. If you can't remember the "tags", it makes retrieving the information more difficult because there is no "wild card" tag.

There are certain things that may stay in the mind forever and never be remembered, at least not by trying to retrieve them. These are usually things that your mind tries to repress because they something that was not pleasant...i.e., being abused as a child, etc.

The brain is a very sophisticated machine. It's too bad that a lot of people don't use them more often.

It is not what you remember...but what you can recall.

Tennesseejoe said:

It is not what you remember...but what you can recall.

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That's what I'm talking about.

There is tons of stuff in your brain, but if you can't get it out it isn't much use.

Our brains are the most sophisticated computers on Earth! None of us ever uses more than a small percentage of its capacity in our lifetime. We have the ability to learn hundreds of languages and amass the cumulative knowledge of mankind (thanks to the internet and libraries). But who does that? Answer, no one! It is enough for most mere mortals to specialize in one area of endeavor and learn all we can about that.

Bottom line - an individual could spend all day, every day of their entire lifetime in the quest for knowledge, and their brain could contain all that information and yet have the capacity for more.

As for me. I've forgotten completely about people I played in my early pool years, and even forgot events that took place in poolrooms while we were playing. More than a few times I've met people who reminded me of a game we played or something that happened while we were playing. I either have a vague memory or none at all! Some years in my life are just a blur. Outliers someone called them. All I remember is following the map from town to town looking for the next poolroom and the next game. I had a five year dose of that and got educated in the process!

There used to be a guy in our room that could play several games of chess at once without ever looking at the board while playing a game of pool. His pool game wasn’t much to speak of but he rarely, if ever, lost at chess. That always amazed me. Of course I only challenged him in pool. I’m not a total idiot.

Deleted...wrong thread



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Z-Nole said:

There used to be a guy in our room that could play several games of chess at once without ever looking at the board while playing a game of pool. His pool game wasn’t much to speak of but he rarely, if ever, lost at chess. That always amazed me. Of course I only challenged him in pool. I’m not a total idiot.

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When I first saw this thread, it reminded me of the classic study on chess experts and how they have such good memory for chess positions compared to amateur chess players. They can glance at a position, understand it, and recreate it. But only real positions - they don't have good memory for random positions. And I bet they can replay an entire game from memory after playing it, because they have names for long opening sequences and variations and then they'd understand what's going on in the middle game, etc.

Black-Balled said:

I am with the camp that believes humans remember outliers, high and low points. It is a basic component of how our brains work.

There doesn't have to be anyone who remembers everything.

And none of us have a concept of everything, anyway.

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I have an interesting theory about this I wrote a draft article about. I need to dredge it up again. Basically our brain categorizes ‘same’ memories and doesn’t remember them individually. That’s why it’s so hard for people who work repetitive jobs to remember days distinctly. Yet they can tell you what they ate every meal on vacation.