It can be surprising how often you see bad misses in old matches, but I think a lot of those misses were due to players just having a faster and looser mindset. The tourney money wasn't great and most of these guys just played night and day -- gambling while traveling the country from tourney to tourney. So they just maintained their gambler's mindset. McCready was the poster boy for this approach. Yeah some of the greats could bare down back then but the truly mechanical, life or death approach to every shot didn't really start to take hold until Souquet started doing it. You can see the evolution of this with Archer's game. When he started out he played fairly quickly. By the end of his prime, he was picking 17 pieces of lent off of the table in between shots.