Slumps come out of nowhere. But luckily they don’t last long😎

[judochoke]

I was playing pretty well a couple of days ago, pretty happy with my play. Then-BOOM, started missing shots left and right?
keep on playing ghost 9 ball, and after a while, I could do nothing right. Shut it down for the night, and the next morning, pretty much the same. I was playing very badly. Realized that I was in a slump, and immediately shut every thing down.

I always slow things down, trying to figure out what I’m doing wrong. And I always go to my stroke drill. Just put a ball in the middle of the table, put the cue ball just off the short rail, straight with the object ball, and shoot it. Always seems to get me back in stroke.

after a day and a half of just doing basic drills and my stroke drill, I was back. Just slowing everything down, thinking about my pre shot rountine.

and just like that, the slump was over.

 

[chuckg]

I have never been very good at drills honestly. I was playing the 9 ball ghost the other day and was playing horrible,ran out 2 of maybe 10 racks. Position play was terrible. A guy stops by and wants to play some 8 ball and viola I play like a world beater,broke and ran a bunch of racks and got out most of the time. I just seem to bear down with a real opponet.

 

[Pin]

A few years ago I figured something out in my game, and since then I've had two speeds, where maybe a third of the time I play my old speed and the rest of the time I play much better. Consequently, most days I play I have a slump and come out of it.

For me, it seems that coming out of a slump is about keeping my cool, playing though it whilst doing the things I do when I play well; in not too long it all clicks back.

In the past, I'd have got frustrated or tried weird things to solve the problem, but the frequent experience of deliberately, successfully working through it has made me see coming out of a slump as a combination of a skill one can acquire and a case of holding your nerve and trusting your abilities to emerge.

Probably also a very personal thing tho...

 

[MitchAlsup]

To me, when I feel a slump coming on, it is time to go back to basics: {Stance, slow the stroke down, no upper body movement, pre-shot-routine, concentrate on pool} !

 

[ChrisinNC]

I was playing pretty well a couple of days ago, pretty happy with my play. Then-BOOM, started missing shots left and right?
keep on playing ghost 9 ball, and after a while, I could do nothing right. Shut it down for the night, and the next morning, pretty much the same. I was playing very badly. Realized that I was in a slump, and immediately shut every thing down.

I always slow things down, trying to figure out what I’m doing wrong. And I always go to my stroke drill. Just put a ball in the middle of the table, put the cue ball just off the short rail, straight with the object ball, and shoot it. Always seems to get me back in stroke.

after a day and a half of just doing basic drills and my stroke drill, I was back. Just slowing everything down, thinking about my pre shot rountine.

and just like that, the slump was over.

On the flipside though, hot streaks in which you are playing really good don’t seem to last very long either, or at least for me they don’t.

 

[straightline]

It's mostly prep. If pool is just stuffed into your rec bag, your pool is at the whim of your daily cycles.