I am loving this thread and the other one as well. The reason is because we FINALLY have a champion player bringing together the mechanics of the game with the feeling of the game from his perspective. Not only that CJ was a champion with the road victories and tournament victories to prove it but he was also a successful entrepreneur. For me this means he has brawn and brains.
Yes some champions are wrong about the actual physics. But there is a very good reason why scientists study world class athletes and not the other way around. World class athletes actually do the amazing physical actions that scientists would like to understand and explain. The only reason we as humans bother to break down every human action into it's component parts is so that we can someday duplicate it mechanically or figure out how to program ourselves or each other into doing it.
Why do we invent drugs to regulate mental states? Because we think that there is an "optimal" state of being that is conducive to performance and if we modulate our brain into that optimal state we can then achieve peak performance.
So with that in mind scientists study both behavior and performance to attempt to understand and categorize WHY things happen and how they happen. Using this information engineers then attempt to recreate the results.
So I personally am glad that CJ is here and attempting to describe how it feels to play pool from a champion's perspective. Almost none of us who have been here a long time have ever been championship caliber nor do we know what it feels like to look at pool from that level. Sure we can see the patterns, we know the strategies, we understand the physics, we know what we SHOULD do. But we are not battle hardened, we have not competed against other world class players in long sessions for more money than teachers make in a year, we have not prevailed time and again against full fields of champions in short set formats.
No, we occasionally dabble in gambling and we occasionally enter tournaments where we occasionally play champions and we MOSTLY get out asses handed to us by those champions and we occasionally eke out a victory against one of them. So it's fair to say that we definitely DO NOT know what it means to see a shot like a pro, we definitely do not know what it means to hit a shot like a pro because, WE ARE NOT PROS. Now we can act like there isn't much difference because after all we all put our pants on the same and we all have to shit no matter who you are.
But in fact the difference is probably an order of magnitude rather than a few percentage points. As in a professional player is not just 10% better than a very good amateur, he is 10x better. This is a bitter pill to swallow for players who are pretty good, players who are the top in their league, who hold their own gambling against most locals, who fare decently in regional events, it's a great wound to pride to think that another player isn't just two balls better but is 6 balls better in reality.
Now, maybe I am just projecting my own feelings onto this but somehow I doubt it. My friend Ilona Bernhardt, probably the greatest female player to give up the game, once said to me that most players way overestimate their ability. They think of themselves as good as their best day and not as what their average is. I can agree with that even though I certainly have no proof to back it up.
With that in mind professional players are the top dogs who are ALWAYS looking down because they are at the pinnacle. They describe the world from a place most of can never go and will never go even if we had the time to try. So I am grateful when they stop by and give us some insight from that perspective in exactly the same way I devour what leaders in business have to say and what the best leather workers have to say.
And I am particularly grateful to CJ Wiley for sticking it out and fading the heckling. It's hard to sift through to find the actual instruction and this post won't help on that score but I want to express my opinion anyway.
Yesterday I played with the inside touch more and with the aiming away from center pocket, I use CTE to line up and then adjust ever so slightly coming into the shot. I have to say that I can only imagine that this is how Efren must feel because in all honesty it FEELS like this opens the pocket up hugely. Just using CTE I feel like I am always lined up for a center pocket shot but as I have said before this carries with it the downside that ANY stroke error is huge and it becomes very easy to throw the ball OFF the center pocket line. So the aim is dead on and your stroke MUST be perfect.
With CJ's method I feel that I don't have to be dead perfect on the stroke because I have just increased the size of the target. Whether or not this is geometrically true or not the perception as you coming into the shot and the results speak for themselves. So I don't really care if the "math" is right. I don't play using math. I play by seeing a shot and taking it. I use any method that I learn to do this and if I like that method I keep it and make it second nature. So with that in mind I am so glad that CJ has been willing to give it up because if it works for him it's worth it for me to try. And so far this one is a keeper.
Thank you CJ, hopefully someday our paths will cross and I can buy you a wheatgrass smoothie!
