Has anybody done this?

cousin.

In short the disguise thing has been beaten to death. It is so old it might be new again. Never know until you try!
It wasn't a discuise it was Dis guy is likely to play for 5. Mike Danner put the touring gal player on me at the White Spot 9 ball weekly. She had no chance......we discovered. She took it well. 🤷‍♂️
 
The M O that I favored back in the day when finding a new small tournament was to break and run the first one and then never try to run from the break again. Just a small seed that brought just enough tension. 🤷‍♂️
 
I don't know about making it a habit......
This book relates a similar situation.

.View attachment 804639
His escape plan to sneak out through the bathroom window hit a road block. Being backed into a corner will definitely get the fight or flight tickle to the brain.
It ain't fun until it's done.
Being broke doesn't require the POS. Bad decisions or life's issues can lead to the broke situation. Knowing how to survive......is Priceless 🤷‍♂️



I don't think there was a road player that hadn't went bust on the road, or one that didn't sleep in their car one time or another. A whole lot of the stories that are funny today were pretty interesting when they were happening.

Hu
 
I don't know about making it a habit......
This book relates a similar situation.

.View attachment 804639
His escape plan to sneak out through the bathroom window hit a road block. Being backed into a corner will definitely get the fight or flight tickle to the brain.
It ain't fun until it's done.
Being broke doesn't require the POS. Bad decisions or life's issues can lead to the broke situation. Knowing how to survive......is Priceless 🤷‍♂️
I read that book over 25 years ago as a young player. Danny McGoorty is not necessarily a good example of a "non-POS".. You DID read the part about him getting the girl pregnant and basically telling her to have a coat hanger abortion, right? He did have his moments when he played great.. And he was the last professional 3-Cushion player to live through the Hoppe era. I give him credit for being able to eek out a living on his skills through the Great Depression... But he was a bit of a low life scuffler. He had some great stories about pulling his arse out of the fire.. Because he wasn't top tier champion in any game. He stood a chance at getting beat by any local hotshot who could play a little. (If he was playing pocket billiards..)

Jack Cooney is more my style of pool hustler. Threw a bit of money around to the lower level players, while targeting someone who could easily afford to lose many thousands.
 
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I don't think there was a road player that hadn't went bust on the road, or one that didn't sleep in their car one time or another. A whole lot of the stories that are funny today were pretty interesting when they were happening.

Hu
Not that I woulda known who Earl was but I met him as Billy in the back of a van in LA. He was real pretty back then - :ROFLMAO: , kidding - never turned. Van was prolly full of other young whites too.
 
Th
Yeahhh, that was never me. I was always "I am gonna give my all on every stroke, every game."

So much so, that I get extremely annoyed with players that cannot play full bore unless there is money on it. I see them as fundamentally weak mentally. Do I gamble? Certainly. Does it make any difference whatsoever to how I play? Not really. I am either in stroke from practice.. Or I am not.

I have found it to be such a core concept to play full bore 100% of the time, that I believe you can never break through certain plateaus, until you reprogram yourself to make that mental switch. It's "easy enough" to beat 600 level Fargorates, even when laying off a little bit.. But getting past 650+ level players consistently takes a whole other level of execution, that one generally cannot bring, if they haven't built their entire game around that.

I think it is super important.. Because you never really know what you are capable of.. Unless you put yourself through the fire with every trip to the table. If there is a gulf between me and another player, I am giving up spots, whether there be money on it or not. That's how I found out I was capable of running racks of 8 ball one handed on a 9 foot Gold Crown, on my first date with my future wife.

I have never met a decent European player who lays off, just because their opponent doesn't play as well as them. Freeplay.. Tournament.. Gambling.. Doesn't matter. This is a fundamental weakness of the American pool scene, and it's focus on gambling and winning money as a prerequisite for putting in practice time. The action eventually dries up if you get to a 650+ FR, and unless SVB lives locally, you have no reason to improve.
That's fine if you're not playing to pay the bills. I never was a tournament player. Just a road dawg. Leaving w the cash was my one and only consideration. Playing upper level players meant working too hard for the money. You always get a few, but most are shortstops and below. Never wanted to work that hard for the coin. I'd already done that getting there.
 
I loaned my copy out somewhere in the '80s. Have no clue where it is now. 🤷‍♂️
Definitely interesting reading. Definitely not a role model. Some of life's lessons are better learned from books than lived.
If I wasn't so stubborn back then, I could have avoided a lot of mistakes by reading about others'. But then again, you couldn't tell me anything in my 20's. Thot I knew it all. Boy was I in for a rude awakening!!😂
 
1974 Mustang ll Giha. Removed the passenger seat and slept in a mummy bag. It was just the right length. All one winter on the east side of Seattle doing siding . Was my favorite motor home. 1956 Chevy panel van was another. Shrug 🤷‍♂️ I wasn't homeless I was home Lee.

My truck was a Camper Special intended to run some miles. Had a nice firm comfortable seat. One reason I didn't hook up with Danny Medina when he wanted me to, I was driving my truck which only had room for one person to stretch out and snooze and Danny was driving about a 74 Malibu. A midsized car then. He was a little shorter but at six-two I would have had a hard time getting comfortable enough to sleep.


Not that I woulda known who Earl was but I met him as Billy in the back of a van in LA. He was real pretty back then - :ROFLMAO: , kidding - never turned. Van was prolly full of other young whites too.

That was the funny thing when I started getting known to the road players. I had never heard of more than a few players. Never heard of Johnny Archer, Danny Medina, or a handful of other players. I didn't pay attention to names anyway, figuring they were more likely than not to be false.

I was a believer in home field advantage and would play anyone that came looking even, anyway. I figured them coming to me was all the edge I needed. On the other hand, if I was doing a little traveling I was mostly on the two lanes and not looking for big halls in big cities which I thought made it unlikely for me to meet an out an out monster. Of course I wouldn't have known they were monsters until after we played.

Hu
 
My truck was a Camper Special intended to run some miles. Had a nice firm comfortable seat. One reason I didn't hook up with Danny Medina when he wanted me to, I was driving my truck which only had room for one person to stretch out and snooze and Danny was driving about a 74 Malibu. A midsized car then. He was a little shorter but at six-two I would have had a hard time getting comfortable enough to sleep.




That was the funny thing when I started getting known to the road players. I had never heard of more than a few players. Never heard of Johnny Archer, Danny Medina, or a handful of other players. I didn't pay attention to names anyway, figuring they were more likely than not to be false.

I was a believer in home field advantage and would play anyone that came looking even, anyway. I figured them coming to me was all the edge I needed. On the other hand, if I was doing a little traveling I was mostly on the two lanes and not looking for big halls in big cities which I thought made it unlikely for me to meet an out an out monster. Of course I wouldn't have known they were monsters until after we played.

Hu
Avoid the heavy hitters if you can. That's hard won money.
 
Avoid the heavy hitters if you can. That's hard won money.

The heavy hitters were where the main pleasure was at. It would be almost impossible to survive on a diet of nothing but the heavy hitters. The vast majority of the time making a living meant chopping wood as I called it. Fairly low risk bets and a lot of play. I enjoyed the grind and didn't mind putting in many hours a week on a pool table. However, that time on a pool table was a lot like working a job for straights. I would have a hard time remembering a particular day. It was like asking a framing carpenter what they were doing on a particular day ten years ago. Details long ago forgotten.

Playing Johnny Archer I remember. He intimidated me terribly starting off with surely the best five shots in a row I have ever seen on a pool table. When he broke dry I never gave him another real chance on the table. Danny Medina and I were almost perfectly matched playing all offense. We hadn't discussed it though so when I realized Danny was edging me even with me having home field advantage I had to make a change. I started playing a few two way shots. Not every time I got a chance but just mixing a few in. We went from Danny winning five games to my four to me winning five games to his four. We were both young, laughing, truly having fun while fighting perhaps the most equal battle I ever played for four to six hours.

Before that, I used to basically shut down all other play tangling with the hippie. He was maybe six-six and barely weighed a hundred pounds. A stoner, he didn't have a nerve in his body. We would tie up on the old nine foot tables and give it hell. His cutting compared to play on a pool simulater today. He would shoot eight foot plus razor thin cuts and make a lot of them. I figured it was excellent training and would often try to hang with him cutting. It was a given night thing after awhile. Either of us might be a winner of an hours long cutting battle. Despite conventional wisdom when I needed to win I would bank balls when the bank was easier than the cut. I always won when I mixed in some banks. He couldn't bank at all.

The close battles I remember. They were like the fierce battles on a short track where every lap, even every turn was hotly contested from green flag to checkered flag. I remember a twelve lap preliminary race that was hammer and tongs from green flag to checkered. The fans normally stood for the start and the finish of a race, they stood for that entire race. When I climbed out the window of my car I found out my knees were rubber. I had to lean on the car a few minutes before I could stand alone or walk. A very few pool battles like the one with Danny were like that. I couldn't get in those kind of battles every night or I would have just swapped cash back and forth. Those battles were the icing on the cake though.

Hu
 
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