Hello Azers ,
practising and playing tournaments is of course not the same but in my case it makes me a completely different player and that got everything to do with stress .
I loose about 40% of my capability when i get under stress , in some cases i've got trouble to deliver the cue if you know what i mean . I completely freeze sometimes .
The remedy i use for the moment is drinking alcohol during a tournament and that works for a while untill i get drunk and loose concentration .
In Belgium where i live i count myself into the top 5 but i can do much better if i could deal with the stress .
I was wondering if there were players that experience the same .
Greetz
Thorsten Hohmann once said that it's good to be nervous, because it means what one is doing is important. Basically, when you're drinking alcohol to fight it, you're not embracing the idea of competition. Why do you participate in tournaments in the first place? On a very basic level, one has to ask oneself why one even goes there. My take on this is that I'm doing it for myself, that I have nothing to prove. It gives what I'm doing at the table more importance than when I'm practicing, which is what Thorsten means. In contrast to him, I've never been good at practicing in the first place, for the same reason - I have to talk myself into trying hard. Less so in competition. But there's something more fundamental to all this. Subconsciously, you know that billiards is about perfection. You don't need to convince yourself that the whole point of the matter is to pocket the next ball and play position on the following. You're giving structure to something that's inherently chaotic. Next to nothing is going to go right without your effort. In other words, you don't win, nor even do well, because you want to look good. You're there to play. If you embrace the idea, it follows you'll pocket that next ball and play position on the following the best way you can. Winning or losing is merely a consequence of what one is doing. The purpose of billiards is to try and play one shot to perfection, one at a time. Billiards is really that simple. If you freeze, it's got to do with something other than billiards. Something bigger, more general, ultimately irrelevant to the game, that is getting in the way of the simplicity of it all - and that probably has little to do with solving the problem. That's why I'm saying, on a very basic level, one has to embrace the idea: do I want to be here? If so, then to try and play that next ball to perfection - that's all there is to it. I always tell my students that if they stood at the bottom of Mount Everest and looked up, it must seem like an impossibility to reach the summit. To lift a foot and take a step is not a problem, however. Ironically, that's all there is to it. The nerves are merely telling you what you're doing is special: something worth doing, then, no?
Greetings from Switzerland, David.
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„J'ai gâché vingt ans de mes plus belles années au billard. Si c'était à refaire, je recommencerais.“ – Roger Conti
