Veteran game changing moments

[Bambu]

How many players that have been shooting 20 or more years have come across that "light bulb moment?" You know, a time when you decided to change your entire game. (It felt really weird at first, but it worked out.) Form/stance? Visual or head adjustment? Aiming system? BHE? Another persons suggestion? Sometimes I try new things, but usually abandon them in favor of experience. Who has succeded where I have failed? And what was it that made you decide to change your game?

 

[cuenut]

Using the clock method for kicking. It was a V8 moment for me.

 

[ShootingArts]

watching Willie on TV

How many players that have been shooting 20 or more years have come across that "light bulb moment?" You know, a time when you decided to change your entire game. (It felt really weird at first, but it worked out.) Form/stance? Visual or head adjustment? Aiming system? BHE? Another persons suggestion? Sometimes I try new things, but usually abandon them in favor of experience. Who has succeded where I have failed? And what was it that made you decide to change your game?

I have said it many times on here but thirty minutes or so of watching Willie Mosconi on TV when he was having a very good day changed my entire game. I was a pretty big fish in my small ponds playing typical sloppy bit better than a banger pool. I watched his clean tight game never moving the cue ball an inch further than he had to and thought he could play pool just fine on a table without any rails if he needed to. It took several years of intense effort to learn to shoot that style if not that skill level. The rewards were fantastic.

Decades later I watched video of Efren, the 2006 one-pocket finals at the DCC. The highest level I have ever seen Efren play at and there was magic in the air. Too old and not as much ambition so this didn't change my game again but had I been the same person that saw Willie all those years ago it probably would have.

Both made me have to revise my opinion of what was possible on a pool table. Nobody in between ever did. It is hard to describe how huge that is. For me it was like when a new discovery makes the big brains have to make a radical rethink of physics. A few years of dedicated work after watching Mr. Mosconi people started noticing that I was very lucky and rarely had to shoot a hard shot. I got almost all the good rolls and they got almost all the bad rolls. Turned out that pool is mostly a matter of luck.

Hu