Thank you. I recognize the kind intent. Believe me I am keenly aware of my decisions and consequences. My wife may well agree with you. Recognizing the effort required, I set my goals very early in life. I am still fairly young and my goal is early and active retirement. We take a lot of time off with a minimum of 4, 1 week trips and 1, 2week trip per year that I totally need, but in 16 months, I will be working much less and only by choice. Now if God is willing and good health remains, I will be playing a LOT more pool!
Owning your own table.
- Thread starter middleofnowhere
- Start date
This is a good point, and the reason many league players never get any better than average.
I'm sure a lot of us have been asked too many times, "How'd you get so good?" My answer is typically, "I play a lot." Then the person will say, "I've been playing 5 years on this league already." I tell them it's not about "time", it's about "quantity".
An average one night per week league player might play 5 to 10 games of pool every week. That might come out to about 1500 games in 5 years. But a player like myself, or many others here, might be playing 50 games or more every week. We hit 1500 games within 3 or 4 months, versus 5 years. When looking at in a shot-by-shot basis, the numbers are even more staggering.
Simply put, if you want to be a better player, you have to play more pool and hit more balls on a daily or weekly basis.
Are you going north and joining us in Wisconsin?? If you are I think I know someone with a home table to play on for the time being.
I guess that depends on how much the individual likes pool. I've had my table for about 10 years now and the buzz of owning it has not wore out yet, not even close. The closest non bar table is over 30 minutes away from me, thats a minimum of 50 miles round trip whenever I want to hit some balls. I doubt I would be playing much pool if I had to travel every time I felt like hitting some balls. On average I play 5-6 nights a week on my table, less in the summer but still often enough that I'm glad I have it.
Same here! I love waking up in the afternoon (nighshifter) and making some coffee and turning on some good tunes and going to the table for some drills. That really wouldn’t be doable for me if i didn’t have a table at home.
KentuckyAre you going north and joining us in Wisconsin?? If you are I think I know someone with a home table to play on for the time being.
Political discussions are no longer allowed, but lets just say I'm not leaving because of the Pizza 
The Salotto app can be used to set up matches, I think. It can also put your results into FargoRate.
Salotto - Find, Play & Score Your Pool Game with FargoRate
Salotto Is The World's Premiere Pool & Billiards Mobile App. Connect FargoRate, Find, Host and Play a Pool Match. Download Today & Get Ranked.
salotto.app
I don't know if they have a "weirdo" filter. Considering pool players, I doubt such a thing could ever work.
soyale
Well-known member
That was a hypothetical situation to illustrate a point. You’re totally right though, i spent a few years on the road during my prime skating years and although the toll is heavy i wouldn’t trade those years for anything.
Nowadays i have a 1 bedroom apartment, a fiance, and a huge dog, so life on the road is all but a memory. I thought we got lucky with this place but the biggest room is about 2’ short on the wide side for a 7’.
We’ve actually considered putting a cheap CL table in here anyway just to bang balls on, but like i said in an earlier post, i’d rather not play at all than play with an obstruction.
Thanks for the support though, pal. Another life ago, your words would have been the fuel to my fire for that day.
soyale
Well-known member
The Salotto app can be used to set up matches, I think. It can also put your results into FargoRate.
Salotto - Find, Play & Score Your Pool Game with FargoRate
Salotto Is The World's Premiere Pool & Billiards Mobile App. Connect FargoRate, Find, Host and Play a Pool Match. Download Today & Get Ranked.
I don't know if they have a "weirdo" filter. Considering pool players, I doubt such a thing could ever work.
So if one was so inclined, they could set up a match on their home table open-invite style?
They should add a feature where you can either be looking for a home table or looking for folks for your home table game, with a way to connect those folks or to browse by category. I dunno i’m just spitballing here.
Weirdo filter is an absolute must though. They gotta develop some 1984 big brother type of thought police app to measure intent.
Got a house. I used to have an 8-footer in the basement. Had to take it out when I needed to support my downstairs floor. Went a couple of years without a table. Couldn't take it anymore so I got a bar box for the garage. I put on new cushions, new cloth, and it plays pretty nice. It's all I need for now.
Oh... And speaking of big ass dog.....
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Agreed, but it is absolutely necessary to compete against similar skill level or better players in a pool room, particularly if you are at a point where you are still improving your game as opposed to an older player on the decline, and even then competition is still the best way to keep your game.
This reminds me of an old joke along the lines of:
Three people are stranded on a desert island, a college professor, a Navy SEAL, and an engineer. There's no food or wildlife other than a giant pallet of canned food that washed ashore.
The SEAL makes the first attempt to open some food, smashing a can with a rock. While successful, it destroys the can and spills a good deal of the contents out, leaving enough for only one person.
The engineer believes that with the right rock, they can minimize the food loss and get enough food for each of the three people per can.
Suddenly, the college professor proclaims to have solved the problem and instructs the other two to gather round the campfire for his lecture about the solution.
He draws complex equations with a stick in the sand, and begins his lecture: "First, assume we have a can opener . . . ."
Three people are stranded on a desert island, a college professor, a Navy SEAL, and an engineer. There's no food or wildlife other than a giant pallet of canned food that washed ashore.
The SEAL makes the first attempt to open some food, smashing a can with a rock. While successful, it destroys the can and spills a good deal of the contents out, leaving enough for only one person.
The engineer believes that with the right rock, they can minimize the food loss and get enough food for each of the three people per can.
Suddenly, the college professor proclaims to have solved the problem and instructs the other two to gather round the campfire for his lecture about the solution.
He draws complex equations with a stick in the sand, and begins his lecture: "First, assume we have a can opener . . . ."
Nyquil said: "Downside for me is I play by myself most of the time since my wife isn't into the game. That's the only thing I miss about the pool hall scene.
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Soyale said: "There needs to be a resource for guys like you and guys like me to link up and play games. The caveat is said resource would need some way to weed out all the weird people you might not necessarily want in your home"
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Addressing this to Nyquil + Soyale and posters in posts numbers 51, 52, 55, 63, and 65 who expressed similar "link up with other regional players" thoughts. Some of you might be interested in reading about the very effective, easy and pleasurably rewarding solution I once came up with (in 1992) :
I installed a great Diamond 9-footer in the finished basement of my then-*extremely* rural New England home. There were only two pool rooms in the whole state (VT) -- one was an approx. 90-minute round-trip drive, the other a little over two hours round-trip driving. And both could be not only longish, but very unpredictable, hazardous drives in cases of sudden driver-blinding rainstorms (with power-lines-down river floods) that were possible year-round, and I knew there would have been prohibitive snow/ice storms in winters (fatal accidents on icy roads).
There were however, dozens of villages, hamlets and low-population towns within a radius of just 25 or so, miles around me. I don't smoke or drink myself, so I wasn't a very good fit for the area's 4 or 5 small beer bars. I was very aware though, that folks of all ages were very friendly, who deeply knew -- and with good reason -- greatly trusted everyone else.
So, with that in mind, on a hunch, I placed an inexpensive small ad in the leading regional newspaper and included a good headline and four lines of text conveying that I'd enjoy meeting and having some regular sessions of Straight Pool, Eight-Ball or Nine-Ball with any local player who loves pool and "who might love playing on a 9-foot table". New, top-quality home table was mentioned as well.
I ran the classified ad for two weeks and quickly heard from four differently-skilled locals who were overjoyed with the opportunity. One of the "best of the best" contacts made me overjoyed. He was an aging, energetic lifelong 14.1 player who had a hard time meeting anyone who really knew the game in any depth. He had a multiply-witnessed lifetime practice run of 244 and a beautiful Mosconi/Jimmy Moore-like slip stroke. He had won numerous state titles in New England-wide Elks inter-club tournaments against very advanced players, and at age 84 would regularly run 30 or 40 at will, with short position rack navigation, rarely more than a tip of english, on my tight pocket Diamond after he got the feel of it. He'd spot me 20 on our usual 100-point matches and emerged as winner 75% of the time.
His eventual bad health made driving difficult and actually quite illegal for him. I did get most of the 8-, 9-ball guys very interested in improving their overall skills via a lot of 14.1 with me and the eventual 5 other locals I met directly or indirectly from my ad. Two of them later bought home tables and we'd travel to each other's homes. I became very close friends with the guys and their families.
So . . . pleasing and surprising results all around, and not a single thing ever damaged or "lifted" from my home. With due diligence, this daring-sounding approach might help a few AZBers interested in meeting interested local players. At first I'd always very tangentially ask about people we might know in common and would soon hear about where they worked, or attended school, and who they were related to. Trustworthy locals were never hesitant about casual, subtly reassuring (to me) conversation like that.
Arnaldo
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Kentucky seems like a place that I would like very much, I consider you very lucky.Kentucky
"Nothing in the world beats the sheer pleasure of running racks of Straight Pool . . . . playing barefoot, in your underwear, at 2 o'clock in the morning."
LOL. I used to think I was the only person who did this.
When did they start wearing pants at pool rooms? What’s the world coming to?
middleofnowhere
Registered
Its both, competing as well as training. It can be hard to train at a pool room, too many distractions. Not to mention you don't really want people in your business. I like to practice alone when I am working on things, not have kibitzers. Some also feel self-conscious doing drills in public.