Components Necessary to Become a Pro Level Pool Player?
- Thread starter ChrisinNC
- Start date
Anyone else reminded of Sam Lambert when reading this thread?
Eye of the Tiger
Desperation born out of no other possible opportunity
A crazy fasciination with the game
A natural skill
I disagree with people who think it is all hard work
and instruction
My experience is that good player get good quick
I mean real good real quick
I remember Shannon Dalton waling into Rustys about 12 years old
with bermuda shorts and PF flyers,socks hanging down
he beat some great player at one pocket,he was in the far corner with his cue ball
I mean the crows nest ,way way up table, he back cut the object ball on the spot.
Not once but in two games in a row.Same shot,12 years old, pocket speed
I had some old newspapers with poctures of little Willie Mosconi,6 or so years old
The story tolds about him running 15 balls on the 10 footer his first month of playing
No instruction ,no long routine of playing
If a player can't beat everybody in his home town ,by the time he has played a year
i doubt he will ever be any good
Back to Shannon,what did he do when he was not gambling on the pool table?
Playing poker
He was not practicing,he was not shooting drills, he was not worrying abo
ballance point on his cue, he was not herpo worshipping Jack Cooney asking how to play this shot or that
He was asking Jack for a game
My guess is champions are born,plus they play a lot real soon,improve real fast
and stick with it if they have no other opportunity to excel in another endeavovor
I have never seen a guy who played over 2 years suddenly or gradually get great
Golf or pool, young phenoms become champions
Self image ,psychological cybernetic hopefuls,positive thinking gerus
are all hot air,I never saw one grow to be a world beater
In fact I have seen players who were close to being the best,start getting
psychological sports psychologist inputand go caput,
CJ was as great as anyone around here,then he studied psychology.
got advice,next thing you know he was n o longer the player he
had been.
If practice and all that helped,Dick Lane would have been the worlds best player
Desperation born out of no other possible opportunity
A crazy fasciination with the game
A natural skill
I disagree with people who think it is all hard work
and instruction
My experience is that good player get good quick
I mean real good real quick
I remember Shannon Dalton waling into Rustys about 12 years old
with bermuda shorts and PF flyers,socks hanging down
he beat some great player at one pocket,he was in the far corner with his cue ball
I mean the crows nest ,way way up table, he back cut the object ball on the spot.
Not once but in two games in a row.Same shot,12 years old, pocket speed
I had some old newspapers with poctures of little Willie Mosconi,6 or so years old
The story tolds about him running 15 balls on the 10 footer his first month of playing
No instruction ,no long routine of playing
If a player can't beat everybody in his home town ,by the time he has played a year
i doubt he will ever be any good
Back to Shannon,what did he do when he was not gambling on the pool table?
Playing poker
He was not practicing,he was not shooting drills, he was not worrying abo
ballance point on his cue, he was not herpo worshipping Jack Cooney asking how to play this shot or that
He was asking Jack for a game
My guess is champions are born,plus they play a lot real soon,improve real fast
and stick with it if they have no other opportunity to excel in another endeavovor
I have never seen a guy who played over 2 years suddenly or gradually get great
Golf or pool, young phenoms become champions
Self image ,psychological cybernetic hopefuls,positive thinking gerus
are all hot air,I never saw one grow to be a world beater
In fact I have seen players who were close to being the best,start getting
psychological sports psychologist inputand go caput,
CJ was as great as anyone around here,then he studied psychology.
got advice,next thing you know he was n o longer the player he
had been.
If practice and all that helped,Dick Lane would have been the worlds best player
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Yup. I referred to him obliquely above. A 10,000-hour believer.
I had a student (briefly) who was a 10,000-hour guy. He had taken lessons regularly from a local pro, had his own table, and had a well-known instructor come in for three days of training. He wanted me to set out a training program for him to follow, possibly with regular email/phone contact, for his 10,000 hour attempt. He seemed extremely motivated.
We met at a pool hall when I was on a trip to his area. I asked him to shoot some shots for me so I could see where he was at the start. It turned out that he had never learned any kind of cue ball control. Like simple draw shots. I'm not sure what the other instructors worked on with him. But what is puzzling is how he could have watched good players and not realized how far he was below them and all the things they did that he had no clue about how to do.
I suppose I could have told him that his burning flame would make him a champion. And taken his money for phone and email consultation. At the age of about 40 he was at the level of play I had reached when I was 16 and had been playing casually for four months on a friend's fold-up Sears table.
Instead he saw how much he would have to learn, realized that his previous instructors had been milking him, and abandoned his plan to be a champion.
Here is an example of an OK player but no champion. I mean the older guy in the video, not the younger one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1AQ21-oBmU
This is a topic that has been beaten to death, but I always like to throw in my two cents when it comes up.
Natural talent definitely exists, and for pool I think it can be broken down into two main attributes. Hand/Eye coordination and spatial awareness/pattern recognition. These are skills that can be improved with practice, but some people are just born with a higher level than others.
So to answer the OP's question, I would say
1. Hand/Eye coordination
2. Spatial awareness/pattern recognition
3. Dedication in the form of focused table time, i.e drills, tournaments, gambling, etc.
4. Competitive
5. Short memory
There are certainly exceptions out there to the notion that any really good player has to make incredible progress in his game the first five years of playing, and that they are likely not going to get significantly better after their first 10 years of playing. I know of a player in his late 20s, has a full-time professional career, and tries to play as much as he can on the weekend regional tours. He started playing very young, likely as an early teen, so he’s easily been playing 15+ years.
He played in our room here for a couple years while he was in graduate school roughly 5 years ago. He was clearly a very talented young player at that time, but no better than our other top players, and would likely have had a Fargo rating in the low 600s. Now 5 years later, even working a full-time job and trying to fit in regional tour events when he can, he now has a Fargo rating in the low 700s. Certainly an exception to the rule. Whose to say in another 5 years he couldn’t continue to improve his game and raise his fargo rating to the mid to upper 700s? Not likely, but what he has already done has defied common logic.
He played in our room here for a couple years while he was in graduate school roughly 5 years ago. He was clearly a very talented young player at that time, but no better than our other top players, and would likely have had a Fargo rating in the low 600s. Now 5 years later, even working a full-time job and trying to fit in regional tour events when he can, he now has a Fargo rating in the low 700s. Certainly an exception to the rule. Whose to say in another 5 years he couldn’t continue to improve his game and raise his fargo rating to the mid to upper 700s? Not likely, but what he has already done has defied common logic.
No such thing as natural talent. Motivation, desire, hard work and hard meaningful practice=great athlete.
Of course there is such a thing. How a person is built, the muscle and nerve structure, reflexes, hand to eye coordination and a hundred other things are traits we are born with. Just like a person can be particularly adept at doing complex math, learning new languages, singing, jumping high or almost any athletic endeavor.
Nobody is born able to play pool at a high level but we all have different traits that either limit or accelerate our ability to improve with hard work.
Sent from the future.
You should read "The Sports Gene." It might change your mind. It is a most excellent read, and you can get a hardback copy delivered to your house for $6.
Briefly: you're wrong.
So how do you explain a young player whose played / practiced 20-25 hours a week for his first 10 years playing who is still a “C” ranked player, whereas another young player whose played / practiced 10-15 hours a week his first 5 years has advanced from a “C” player to an “A” player? We have two such players in our pool room - playing on the same tables, against the same opponents, in the exact same environment. To me it’s obvious - natural talent for the game.
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Hey Bob, what about spatial perception? Aren't some people's brains just, for lack of a better term, "wired better" for the game? Some people just don't compute the 3D part of playing pool/billiards as well as others.
This one sentence sums it up quite nicely.
Seems to be a number of people who have posted on this thread who beg to disagree with this premise.
Shannon grew up about 30 miles from where I live although 4 or 5 years younger than me. There was a really strong player in Shannon’s home town he used to practice with. The guy said when Shannon was real young you could show him a shot and in 2 tries he could execute it.
Physical attributes is not talent. If I play basketball, being 6'5" is not talent in any way.
I don’t think the question of what makes a top level pro can be considered at the individual level. To be a top level pro, you need to be able to compete with your peers. If the top 10 guys in the world all have natural talent, and they all put in 1000’s of hours of hard work, and you only have one of those things, you aren’t going to compete with them. Does anyone believe that SVB, Reyes, Strickland, Pagulayan, Filler, Shaw, Melling, etc don’t have natural talent? Does anyone believe they haven’t also spent their whole lives on the table? I think you’ll find that any competitive sport, regardless of financial motivation and public appreciation, is championed by people that tick both the boxes labeled talent and dedication.
And then you have tiers of natural talent, and the difference doesn’t have to be very big. You see minute differences in natural aptitude have enormous consequences in all aspects of life. 5 IQ points could be the difference between an Ivy League and a local university, which is the difference between connecting with future national leaders and connecting with local business leaders, which is the difference between landing in a Fortune 500 and landing in a borderline surviving franchise, which is the difference between earning an average income and being in the top 2%, which is the difference between building generational wealth and building wealth to cover your funeral costs. Likewise, having a 5% advantage in hand-eye coordination could mean 6 months less time mastering a particular shot, which leads to 6 months more time spent on something else, and so on. It’s compounding.
And then you have tiers of natural talent, and the difference doesn’t have to be very big. You see minute differences in natural aptitude have enormous consequences in all aspects of life. 5 IQ points could be the difference between an Ivy League and a local university, which is the difference between connecting with future national leaders and connecting with local business leaders, which is the difference between landing in a Fortune 500 and landing in a borderline surviving franchise, which is the difference between earning an average income and being in the top 2%, which is the difference between building generational wealth and building wealth to cover your funeral costs. Likewise, having a 5% advantage in hand-eye coordination could mean 6 months less time mastering a particular shot, which leads to 6 months more time spent on something else, and so on. It’s compounding.