Amusing as the poll subject is, it will have to do without my vote, because: a) I like these excellent players and have played against all of them in a fine atmosphere, and b) calling someone "the most defensive" can hardly be considered a compliment. It just means: he does not have his game priorities straight, plays a tactically immature game.
"The importance of defense in 3-cushion is highest when the quality of play is lowest".
https://www.facebook.com/notes/bert...20-better-player-than-you-are/537313689640325
Bert,
Once again, I loved your articulate article and I have individually contemplated some similar notions. Just throwing out a few thoughts and ideas here to spur more conversation.
I have often noticed (after the fact) when I scored points using a 'small-ball' approach, that I would rationalize the suboptimal scoring tactic with the 'defensive hedge' justification. I've always felt something wrong with that mentality. We never identify a safety as being such after the point happens to score. In fact, we'd more readily compliment the good position play if a makable shot was the result. Similarly, we tend to neglect assigning proper credit for high-quality control in positions when shots fail to score. Obviously, we can't help but notice 'great' safety play - when a player misses.
It's a good bet that a player that is actively hedging their misses ON EVERY SINGLE SHOT, is routinely making less-than-optimal choices (for the speed/spin/line) that will maximize their chance of scoring. They are most likely ignorant on how - I think this is what you were alluding to when you said 'tactically immature'.
Are the traditional ideas about 'position play' for the 99% of us in 3-cushion overstated?
When we consciously decide to play defensively, our concern is that, if left to chance, the likely outcome will be an open shot: an easily makable position. We tend to know where the difficult positions lay, and we try to leave them for our opponents to tackle. We'll go through great lengths to hand the table over with a familiar array of parameters that constitute undesirable leaves (e.g. easy to the red with no face to bank at, long distance, frozen balls, diagonal corner layouts, etc).
Why doesn't this idea apply similarly in our thinking when it comes to looking ahead toward our own leaves? Too many times we anticipate an easy leave only to be faced with, after the final roll of the balls, an ugly shot that requires a lot more than was bargained for. It's delusional for most of us to think they can control the exact positions for 3c leaves (unless your last name is Caudron). I don't think it is a stretch to say that even very general leaves are extremely difficult to achieve when attempting the control of all three balls.
In the interest of spending our playing energy wisely, perhaps the lowest hanging fruit in 'playing position', is less about looking for specific configurations, and more about avoiding difficult leaves. Doing so entails taking chances and trusting that all of the open shots we feared we might expose for our opponents, are the same open shots we can expect will manifest for ourselves to capitalize on. We only need to take a little extra caution against leaving for ourselves that familiar array of difficult leaves we wished upon our opponents.
We may then take additional care to keep our cue ball nearby the other balls, so that the task of ballstriking becomes naturally be less taxing. If the other ball happens to be the red, AND the opponents cue ball happens to be frozen to the rail 10 feet away AND you happen to miss - then we can just call it a difficult shot for the other guy rather than celebrating such a 'well-played safety'.
Maybe we can then put all of our focus on developing our shotmaking repertoire and expanding our degrees of freedom to the point where we are comfortable manipulating our way out of any number of variations that the table may throw our way.
All that said, I still love to witness an aggressive, safety-laden battle - where the solutions are strong and nothing is ever given away.
-Ira
