Ronnie Allen was watching a one pocket tournament years ago…he said “See the shot that kid just played..took me ten years to learn.”
……it was pioneers like Ronnie that upped the game.
I got friendly with Li'l Joe Villalpando on the net so mostly for grins bought his first two DVD's or maybe he gave them to me. I have bought a few sets and sent on to people and forget what I bought and what I was given.
Anyway, the point is that for seventy dollars and probably three months of 30-40 hour weeks working with the disks somebody could learn what took me five or six thousand hours on the table to learn. Part of me was amazed at how easy so much pool goodness was to come by, and I was a little bit pissed that somebody put all of that on the street for seventy bucks. I wasn't pissed at Joe and I knew if he didn't do it somebody else would, still it was amazing.
A few years or so down the road I watched three young guys take about ten grand out of a pool hall in three days, cell phones and internet be damned! What I found very interesting is that they played with young men's eyes and bodies but an old man's knowledge. Close to the cue ball control of Toby Sweet as an example since we have been talking about him on the forum. I knew I was almost certainly looking at the results of a few years coaching by an old master.
Instructional material and better equipment to play on and with is flattening out the learning curve and performance levels of players today. While it is a source of discord on here, it is fact that it took a different level of skill to bounce around on the road and take in and adjust to the total room conditions when the rooms had all different levels of climate control and lighting. Now you go into a decent room almost anywhere and the conditions are almost the same on most tables.
I played for a few years primarily out of Buffalo's place on Airline near New Orleans. The old AC ran wide open 24-7 in the summer months but still couldn't keep up. Heat and humidity could both get pretty ugly. I formed my opinion of the new generation Diamond tables, red and then blue labels, there. They play pretty consistently from table to table but they banked pretty badly short. Adapted and it worked just fine.
Then I spent a week in Dallas. I got on Diamonds a few places including the Chinese Restaurant Billy I and company were running. The banking on the Diamonds was distinctly longer than on the same blue label nine foot Diamonds in the old low ceilinged poorly climate controlled building Buff had to settle for immediately after Katrina laid waste to the world down there. While it is true some tables bank longer, anyone that couldn't bank on those Diamonds in Dallas couldn't bank on anything. I had to revise my opinion of Diamonds a bit upwards and I already liked them.
Not much difference in the players at the very top. Drop a young Efren, Buddy Hall, a handful more into today's scene and I think they would quickly rise to the same level as they were before in comparison to other players. Take a little longer due to more to learn but I think today's top players would also quickly find their level playing seventy-five years ago, Not much movement at the very top that can't be explained by equipment and conditions.
However, the high C to A level players is where there has been a lot of flattening out. If I spent two weeks on the road just taking what I found I might bump into three to six mid B level or above players. I would probably find over a dozen players the same speed or better today in a few days without particularly looking. The skill level doesn't seem higher but there seems to be a lot more people that are at the mid to upper levels than there was fifty years ago.
The bangers are still bangers, but there are a lot more people above banger level than there used to be. If he had the street smarts to go with the pool a mid "B" level player could make a half decent living on the road, plenty of fish below him. Now there are a lot fewer fish below him and they are all too aware of their standing. I think it was William Claude Dukenfield that said never smarten a chump and never give a sucker an even break. The chumps have been smartened for the most part.
Hu