You're both right.
Neil: I am a firm believer in what you're saying and a firm believer in practice, as I've mentioned before the past few months have thought me a lot. One of those things is what's going wrong or what I'm doing wrong as far as fundaments. I'm working on that.
Ktrepal85: I agree with your last statement but that a big problem for me. See I don't get to play much, the times I do the competition is sub par and I can do no wrong when I play them, even if I have a bad game i''m usually able to pick myself up next turn at the table or next rack or two. I found a great sparing partner who I totally downed the first time we truly met and played, since then i've not been able to duplicate that game which he came to like and what made us friends. I cam close the other day as we went head to head for 10 racks with no game lasting more than 2 turns then I fell apart, last night after my 14.1 match (which again I went toe to toe with a much better player before the wheels fell off) he came out just so that we could play a quick set, I lost 7-0.
I am somewhat humble enough to know that I have flaws and weaknesses but also know that I have a decent ability and should not be missing the shot that i miss and most importantly the way that I miss them. I just really can't help but feel that this is the only part of my game that is not seeing any improvement and that just adds fuel to the fire.
This will be long. To understand better, let's use extremes for the example. If you had a robot shoot pool, it should play flawlessly. Given that, what is it that makes it play flawlessly? It's programming does that. It is programmed to follow a set of steps to complete the shot each and every time, and each and every time, it follows those steps to the letter. Hence, perfection. The robot has no emotion, it only follows the steps it's supposed to follow.
Now, that is the optimal play. However, we are not robots, we are people. But, we also have "programming". It is when we have faulty programming, or don't follow our programming, that we fail. Our programming is what we call our fundamentals. The steps we go through on each and every shot.
Fundamentals can be broken down into minute parts. And should be broken down into minute parts when learning them. By knowing them intimately, we can then more easily determine what part went wrong when we fail on a shot. For a quick example, I miss. I feel that my thumb was not in the usual position on that shot. That means that I had a slight twist to my stroke (steering), and consequently did not hit the cb where I intended to. That also then means that I did not send the cb down the desired shot line, hence the miss. Knowing that, I only need to be aware to put my thumb in the correct place on the next shot to alleviate that problem.
Now, this does not mean that on each and every shot, I am consciously going down a checklist a mile long. No, in practice, I have done that, and thereby taught my subconscious how to perform the shot correctly. In play, I allow my subconscious to take over and shoot the shot. Exactly like I allow my subconscious to take over my legs when I decide to walk.
But, when you are intimately aware of what your fundamentals are, then you usually easily pick up what went wrong immediately. Part of those fundamentals are your mind set. Your focus. Fundamentals are not just all mechanical, but also mental.
If you are playing a supposedly high pressure match, and you are focusing on the pressure, your fundamentals on the mental side are off. You are not then focusing correclty on the shot, and what needs to be done to successfully make it, but are instead focusing on the final outcome of the entire match and the consequences of not winning it.
The being out of correct focus, one should recognize immediately as not part of their programming, or fundamentals, and immediately stand up, and then tell yourself to get back on your proper "programming" or fundamentals, and then allow your subconscious to again take over.
Now, being human, we will not have flawless programming. There will be glitches there. And, sometimes we will notice those glitches because we then miss the shot. Often, we will not notice those glitches, because the shot just happened to go in the pocket anyways. We often tend to dismiss the glitches when the final outcome seems acceptable.
The best players are finely in tune with those glitches, and notice them all. They are observant to a very high degree. And, when a glitch comes up, and something was just a little off, say the ball went into the pocket, but the wrong side of the pocket, they don't just dismiss it, but their conscious mind tells their subconscious that the shot was actually not successful, and then the subconscious can make then necessary fine tuning adjustments to correct the problem before it becomes so serious that a miss is made.
When we miss an easy shot, it is most often because we got sloppy on our fundamentals. We look at the shot, and our conscious says, this shot is easy, can't miss this one. That tells our subconscious that this shot is different. It doesn't have to follow the old programming, but now has new programming. Problem is, it's not exactly sure just what that new programming even is, so it just makes it up using some of the old programming. (edit to this part: That is when you see things start to cascade downward. Now your subconscious is only following the new program it just made up)
Most of the time, that works. But some of the time, it doesn't, and an easily makeable shot is now missed. We then get flustered and basically tell our subconscious that something is wrong with our programming, and it needs to fix it. That is where we go wrong. We don't tell it which program is wrong, and it can't decide on it's own, so it changes the first program. When all along, we should have stayed with the original program and changed it.
That probably sounds confusing. I'll try and explain again. It means that we never change our programming by telling ourselves it's an easy shot. Instead, we just tell ourselves, it's another shot. And take the same steps on it that we do on each and every shot.
The same goes for the game winning shot, the sell-out shot if missed, the very first shot of the game. They are all just shots, and we have to treat them all the very same. It's when we change our fundamentals by adding or subtracting things, such as pressure, must do, easy, hard, ect., that we fail.
Once at the table, there is no room for emotion in the game. It only changes our programming, and how we execute our proper fundamentals. Emotion is fine in between shots, or after the game, not during a shot. During a shot, it should be strictly following the fundamentals as we know them. (to improve, one must be constantly adding things to fine tune our fundamentals, that includes knowledge of what has to happen when we do certain things)
Fundamentals can be broken down into two parts, the physical, and the mental. Without both, one does not have proper fundamentals.
Hopefully, that all was clear enough to understand.
