I used to play a lot of competitive foosball against people who are world ranked.
A bit of history on foosball: It was huge in the '70's and '80's. The first national tourney was in ~'72. There was a tour in the later seventies that had over a million dollars in prize money. I knew a guy who had won a corvette as part of his prize money in one tourney in the late seventies. Others won porsches, pickups, etc. in addition to cash prizes. Table manufacturers took a friend of mine on a tour of Europe to expand their brand.
Now, tho, there is only one person alive who makes a full time living playing foosball. Basically the best player in the world. I can't think of another person who has dominated a sport like Frederico Colignon has dominated foosball. He was, for a long time, so far above everybody else that he would win almost everything. He would routinely go to international tourneys and win everything he entered: Open Doubles, Mixed Doubles, Singles.
There are many interesting things about foosball. It is such a combination of mental and physical that the difference between a good non-tourney player and a bad tourney player is ridiculous. There are guys who come to a weekly tourney because they are the best person in their frat house, neighborhood, dorm, whatever, and get absolutely smoked by low level tourney players.
When I first started playing foosball tourneys, I thought I knew how to play. I played two tourneys a week and practiced as much as I could, played pick-up games, etc. and I didn't win a match in a full year. There were matches where I lost two games 5-0, 5-0 and never had the ball on my front rod.
Anyhow, I digress, foosball is mostly people who played as teens in the height of foosball thirty years ago. Most of them quit playing for a long time while they raised their families.
There is a big desire and no effective action locally to get new people involved. The problem is that there aren't enough people who will take the abuse of losing so badly long enough for them to continue with the game. Couple that with the fact that these people have mostly known each other for a couple of decades or more and can be loud, angry, impatient jerks, there is little reason for new players to come back.
Foosball has one last difference: There is no standardization for tables. Everybody here likes to talk about the difference between bar boxes, diamonds, GCs, etc., but foosball is much, much different. Different tables have different shaped men, different balls (cork, rubber, hard plastic, different textures, etc.), the weight of the rods is different, the size of the goal is vastly different. Some tables have sloped corners and one goalie, others have flat corners and three goalies. Literally there are some shots and passes that a person will spend a ton of time perfecting on one table that won't work at all on another table.
If anybody is interested to see one of the top players in the world, watch this, Tony Spredeman vs. Frederico:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAeSaJgcdcc
My claim to fame is that I beat Tony in a tourney by stuffing one of his shots back into his goal. This is like a B-player beating Efren hill-hill by making a three-rail bank.
dld
