TheThaiger
Banned
Have you played it? Or pretty much just watched youtube matches?
I'd have to play it to know for sure if I don't like it.
I suspect I wouldn't like the added difficulty.
Pulled up the recent final between Melling and Potts, and I noticed a few things.
- The cloth is so fast that every must be very gentle and have great speed control.
Plus with the rounded pockets, you can't really ram balls home unless
they're coming straight into the mouth of the pocket. So yeah, you better stay in line.
- Saw at least two shots where players reaaaallly had to baby the balls in.
One of them was a very long shot that seemed like it'd be dangerously slow on
a typical american table. You'd need a very clean, level, almost tournament-quality table.
They made the shots, but you can clearly see even with top level players,
the balls wobble and rattle and barely fall in at soft speed.
I'm sure for average guys, these balls would just hang up, especially if you haven't
learned how to trickle them in at pocket speed.
- Since rail cuts don't go, or at least not easily, I noticed melling didn't even try a shot
where his ball ended up frozen to a side rail and some distance from the hole.
Instead, he played a safe knocking one of his balls into that ball, and relocating it.
So basically, it seems like balls on the side rails become problem balls, almost like a cluster
you must break out, or at least fall dead nuts perfect to make the shot.
I'm inclined to say this is not a good thing.
If a ball is not tied up with another ball in american 8 ball, it's generally very makeable
no matter where it happens to be on the table.
Here, you can get penalized for having a ball unluckily land very close to a rail,
even if no other ball interferes. That's going to happen all the time after a smash break
and it seems like it adds some extra luck to the game.
Being able to move balls from cushions is a skill. You're not going to go far in snooker or E8B if you can't do it. I don't see where lucks fits into it.