The rule isn't weak at all. In fact it's very effective and simple to perform. The only reason it appears not to work is that too many pool players are too dishonest to follow it.
Do you even Pattern Rack bro
- Thread starter 7forlife
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It just seems to me there is some unwritten law of the jungle among the pros that it's tolerated. I don't know if you'd be considered a rat for calling a player on it, or it's a professional courtesy (i.e. I'm OK with it if you are, wink-wink, nod-nod). I don't know if they consider pattern racking to be a legitimate skill and are civilly disobeying the rules. Heck, maybe it's ego or bravado (pattern rack all you want, I'll beat you anyway). Maybe they consider it a move to call a guy on it. I just don't know. I'm aware most pros are not rocket scientists, but neither are most professionals in any field other than rocket science. But not much that occurs on the pool table gets past a seasoned professional. So obviously they are as aware of what's going on as the rest of us. The fact they don't call each other on it is therefore not ignorance or accidental. Whatever the reason, it seems a considered decision.
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That's why I feel 10 ball is a better game.
I know its not TV speed but I would prefer to watch a game of eight ball on an eight footer, nine's too big, 7 too small.
I'd prefer to watch straight pool too, on 9 or 10.
Chess opens with the same moves over and over again so what separates the best from the rest is what happens after that ,, playing pool over 40 yrs never once saw rules on the wall that say no pattern racking
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In chess both players get to move, not runout a connect the dots pattern. I guess the WPA rules need to be put up in a few places in each poolroom. The bathroom would be a good place to start. Johnnyt
A perfect example of how to rack and break the balls. I gave this a try after watching the Donny/SVB match. I've never used a soft break in 9 ball and actually never even used a cut break in 9 ball. I racked them up and started with a four pack and trust me I am not a four pack runner
Yeah, maybe we can put a buffet table under the newly posted WPA rules, then at least we'd know a few WPA officials would show. Quite frankly don't care about the WPA.
This is a nicer way of putting it than I did above
I agree with you - clearly the pros have decided that this is a rule that can and should be ignored. If we start seeing more breaks like Jayson Shaw's at the recent Bigfoot event we'll probably see a crackdown though.
The players should adhere to integrity & not be a part of this shabby play, that some use to make money. At some point, they may enjoy the ill gotten rewards, but when the have destroyed the game for the common man, it will be gone for all.
Pool & Billiards is a beautiful game, It has been enjoyed by ladies & gentlemen for many, many years. The oak tree that grows for a hundred years, can be cut down in a day. Destroying something is a great deal easier than building it.
Pool & Billiards is a beautiful game, It has been enjoyed by ladies & gentlemen for many, many years. The oak tree that grows for a hundred years, can be cut down in a day. Destroying something is a great deal easier than building it.
Pros and racking...
I play pool for fun and try to get better, but I am not expecting any huge improvements.
I don't intentionally break rules or cheat as it would ruin the game for me and I expect the same from others.
I recently watched the 2015 World Pool Masters 9 Ball match between Shane and Liu Haitau and Shane broke and went through 7 consecutive racks to win. There was a ref and he racked with a wooden rack and Shane still put that 7 pack together.
I guess my point is this. Some only care about winning and they go through life like that. They are not honest people and they eventually expose them selves for what they are. But, that changes nothing for those that worship them and we see this every day in our world.
So I take pro pool and pro players with a grain of salt. It is what it is and what the pros do has little effect on me and my love for pool in the big scheme of things.
It is us, the common every day players that support the pool halls, custom cue makers, billiard supply manufacturers and the pool industry. It is not the pro players as their livelihood depends on them being able to draw money and benefits from the billiard industry..
The pro players and tournaments directors and refs will only clean up their act and enforce existing rules when they know they are loosing money due to a lack of spectators. Spectators who make it known they are not watching or attending billiard events due to a lack of rule enforcement. With out spectators they loose advertising money, vendor money, viewer participation, money, etc. and it effects the bottom line.
If the pro players won't step up and clean up their ranks then they are pretty much stuck in the muck.
Living in Alaska I have no local billiard events to attend other then a couple of pretty well run tournaments in Anchorage twice a year. I don't buy pay per view streaming pool as I keep hearing about issues with it. If I lived with in driving distance of big events and I felt they were not enforcing existing billiard rules I would not participate in it.
I won't support and admire pro players that are dishonest rule breakers and I never want to be a name dropping people worshiper and have a hard time being around those that are. Life is full of choices.
I play pool for fun and try to get better, but I am not expecting any huge improvements.
I don't intentionally break rules or cheat as it would ruin the game for me and I expect the same from others.
I recently watched the 2015 World Pool Masters 9 Ball match between Shane and Liu Haitau and Shane broke and went through 7 consecutive racks to win. There was a ref and he racked with a wooden rack and Shane still put that 7 pack together.
I guess my point is this. Some only care about winning and they go through life like that. They are not honest people and they eventually expose them selves for what they are. But, that changes nothing for those that worship them and we see this every day in our world.
So I take pro pool and pro players with a grain of salt. It is what it is and what the pros do has little effect on me and my love for pool in the big scheme of things.
It is us, the common every day players that support the pool halls, custom cue makers, billiard supply manufacturers and the pool industry. It is not the pro players as their livelihood depends on them being able to draw money and benefits from the billiard industry..
The pro players and tournaments directors and refs will only clean up their act and enforce existing rules when they know they are loosing money due to a lack of spectators. Spectators who make it known they are not watching or attending billiard events due to a lack of rule enforcement. With out spectators they loose advertising money, vendor money, viewer participation, money, etc. and it effects the bottom line.
If the pro players won't step up and clean up their ranks then they are pretty much stuck in the muck.
Living in Alaska I have no local billiard events to attend other then a couple of pretty well run tournaments in Anchorage twice a year. I don't buy pay per view streaming pool as I keep hearing about issues with it. If I lived with in driving distance of big events and I felt they were not enforcing existing billiard rules I would not participate in it.
I won't support and admire pro players that are dishonest rule breakers and I never want to be a name dropping people worshiper and have a hard time being around those that are. Life is full of choices.
Competition is exciting & that excitement brings spectators. When folks find out that rules were broken, to enable a win, the excitement will be diminished & they will be done with those particular events.
Amen AKGuy. Thanks for speaking up for right & wrong. With your way of thinking. you could probably be a good friend of mine.
I am yet to walk into a place that has any rules posted on the wall. Does that mean all standard rules are out the door and we play by none or we just make the shit up as we go?
This is false. What you and the rest of the 'anti-pattern rackers' (APRs?) need to learn before you start opining on this subject is a little bit of the history in play, so let me take the liberty of enlightening you a little...
See, back in the olden days the rules used to be that players would rack for each other. Now of course this was a horrible situation because many players knew little tricks for making the balls break poorly and they would use those tricks pretty much all the time. Some were better (or worse depending on how you look at it) than others, but pretty much everyone who played 9-ball for anything significant would do this. And it was hard to blame them because when your opponent is stringing racks together and you're just sitting there in the chair it for some reason doesn't feel quite fair for some reason, so you would do stuff just in self defense. Even the so-called 'good' guys did it.
Of course it wasn't long before all of these tricks started to become known by just about everyone who played a lot of 9-ball, so people started inspecting the rack for stuff. And as more of the tricks became widely known and harder to get away with they would slowly disappear, and then something else would all of a sudden come up and you'd have to watch out for it. There were even some rule changes to prevent certain stuff, which is why if you watch an older Accu-Stats match you'll see the racker tapping the 1-ball (or sometimes banging it loudly) with the cueball to get it to freeze, but after about '94 that was banned because it was believed that helped make the rack worse -- though interestingly enough that somehow became okay again when the Sardo rack came onto the scene. But I digress.
So anyways there was always a lot of back and forth between the racker and the breaker in most 9-ball matches. And once people got wise to the various ways to leave balls in the rack loose there were other moves just about everyone did as well, like racking the balls that little bit higher or lower, or twisting the rack slightly or whatever. And if the breaker didn't like that he or she would complain and then there was bickering and so on and so forth until finally there was rack up there that made them both happy.
Now throughout all of that, the one thing that was never discussed or talked about back then was what we've come to know today as the so-called pattern rack. Except in that case it wasn't a pattern that was designed to make the rack easier, it was designed to make the rack harder. I'm sure most readers are aware of it, but for those who don't it looked like this:
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3 5
6 9 7
2 4
8
The theory behind this of course being that the one would tend to go to the top of the table, the two to the bottom, the three to the top and then so on. So if the breaker makes a ball the idea is that he has to move the cue ball up and down to the table on hopefully each shot in order to run out. It worked too, or at least it worked often enough that everyone did it. It was so prevalent that Pat Fleming even included it in one of his instructional videos about how to 'gain an edge' on your competitor.
So now fast forward a few years and over time the game changed from predominately racking for each other to racking for yourself. And now along with that players started racking in a way that was 'good' for the breaker, where say the 2-ball and the 3-ball were at the top of the diamond rather than the 'bad' way where they were on opposite ends, and suddenly people started running more racks. And as soon as they did, all of a sudden up pops this chorus of whining about pattern racking. Hey, they screamed, the balls are supposed to be racked randomly! You can't rack them the same way each time!! But literally ALL of the people complaining about the 'good' pattern were exactly the same people who never once hesitated to put up the 'bad' pattern pretty much every time -- or with an asterisk would 'accidentally' put up a slug rack here or there at various times in the match -- so it's a little hard for me to take them at their word.
So why the sudden change of heart? Why was pattern racking just totally hunky-dory when players were doing it as a defensive measure as opposed to when they do it for offense? It makes no sense.
Unless the thing that bothers you the most is just getting beat, of course. Why then it makes perfect sense.
I'm giving you rep for the interesting post about rack shenanigans but am not seeing the connection to this current debate about pattern racking. "It used to suck even worse" is not much of a counterargument.
So anyways there was always a lot of back and forth between the racker and the breaker in most 9-ball matches.
I guess the question is, do you think this is a good thing? If we agree that it's not, then there needs to be some standardization. There are two ways to standardize - require a single pattern (or rotating series of patterns, as some have proposed here) or require a random assortment. The latter is very easy to understand and perform and follows the basic spirit of the game and its rules.
So anyways there was always a lot of back and forth between the racker and the breaker in most 9-ball matches.
I guess the question is, do you think this is a good thing? If we agree that it's not, then there needs to be some standardization. There are two ways to standardize - require a single pattern (or rotating series of patterns, as some have proposed here) or require a random assortment. The latter is very easy to understand and perform and follows the basic spirit of the game and its rules.
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Well first the question of whether it sucked worse back then is open to interpretation. When the players racked for each other the hi-jinks led to arguing and whining over racking (and even to outright cheating on occasion), but it could be argued that if you pulled those things out of the equation that the overall game was a little better. This because it took a little more skill to a) overcome an opponent's rack and b) to run out the tougher pattern.
As for standardization of the pattern, I don't see anything wrong with the having the 2-ball racked in the back of the diamond and the rest of the balls going wherever. Trying to do much more to legislate against this notion of 'pattern racking' is to me pretty dumb, because first you have to define exactly what a pattern is, which is pretty hard to do with only six balls to position (Like for fun and to test your math skills tell me what the odds are that in two successive random racks the 3-ball is in the same position, given that the 1, 2, and 9 are in set positions. Here's a hint: they aren't very high.) and then after that you also have to have some method for determining whether the player did it intentionally or not.
And then to drive yourself even crazier, say that you have a rule where you can't intentionally 'pattern rack' and then I as the racker make sure in that the 3-ball and the 4-ball are in different positions for an entire match, so as to make sure I don't break that rule. Of course that seems fair, but the actual reality of the rule the way it's written is that I actually broke it, didn't I? Because putting the balls in a different place each time is just as much a 'pattern' as putting them in the same place each time. So not only did I pattern rack but by the way I did it intentionally too!
So yeah, the rule is pretty dumb, and I for one think that it's just another result of people who really don't know much about pool trying to create rules for people that do. And I have no doubt that if someone came out with a preset template for each ball in a 9-ball or 10-ball rack someone like Cory Deuel or Shane would go into their garage for a few hundred hours and practice breaking until they found a way to maximize their advantage for that rule too and we'd be back to the drawing board.
So what's the best solution? Well we've known that all along haven't we? It's to have a neutral racker for every match. But for some reason that simple answer is very elusive to put into practice so I guess the real answer is a matter of opinion. For my money the best idea is to just let the guys play the game and if someone gets some racks run on them and starts whining about how it was done then rule makers and tournament directors should just tell that player to shut up and take their beating with some class. Of course that never happens either, but a guy can dream, can't he?
Then you and the WPA are in agreement that the rest of the balls should go "wherever".
The rules don't say that it has to be a different pattern every time. They just say the balls can't be intentionally placed. It's not complicated.