If Ronnie o took a year to practice straight pool do you think he could run 200+? 300+? 400+? It seems like a lot of them would make good straight pool or even one pocket players
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Not necessarily. Straight pool and one pocket aren't built around "accurate" potting in the snooker or even 9 ball sense of the word. Very little long shots and such (though being accurate always helps, of course). Those games are centered on strategy and imagination (which is why old pros like Mike Sigel, Ray Martin and Allen Hopkins can still compete with young guns at the highest level), and you don't learn to become a consistent 100 ball runner overnight, I don't care how good your shotmaking mechanics are. You need to have a prolific knowledge of thousands and thousands of shots, from caroms, banks, combinations, kisses, and know how to manufacture break balls and pick apart the rack, which bears some resemblance to snooker, but straight pool is snooker breakbuilding amplified to 100 (since you have to do it rack after rack after rack). In the Oliver Ortmann snooker match I mentioned, he read a combo in the pack of reds the snooker commentators couldn't even see. They expected Ortmann to play it like a snooker player would (expected him to play safe or another shot, IIRC). Ortmann made the shot and opened the reds and cleared the frame. That's the kind of imagination I'm talking about that you just don't pick up after a couple of years.
And running 300+ on tougher equipment is harder than a 147 break any day of the week. Very unlikely Ronnie could achieve something like that coming to the game this late.
If any snooker pro were to have a shot at making some genius runs, it'd probably be Steve Davis. Ronnie might be the snooker king, but I think Davis (with his knowledge of games other than snooker. Has an English Billiards background, etc) is a better all-around cue sportsman.
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