dmgwalsh said:
Steve: Last night after our Red Shoes League, I was talking to Bobby Hunter a little. I told him a bit about the Harriman/Schmidt match, which I had scored down at Derby. John only had 1 miss, yet lost the game. Danny had 2 misses but John wasn't able to capitalize as well.
Bobby just shook his head and said back when he was playing good straight pool, his goal was to never miss. If he couldn't make the shot, he'd play a safe. Never leave the table on a miss. He said if I missed, there was a good chance I was going to lose the game.
At his level, I can see it. At our level, it is something to aspire to.
Yo Dennis. I think Bobby's waxing a bit nostalgic here. I do believe that his
goal was to never miss, but there are plenty of misses in straight pool. Danny and John's match was a good one apparently - usually there will be a few more misses (not a lot), even at the high levels. One only has to look at the recent world straight pool tournaments to see evidence of this - from what I hear, the last couple matches in both years were very, very sloppy. To say nothing of the matches in the round robins.
I would guess that in a typical race to 150, on reasonably tight equipment, there might be 3 misses per pro-caliber player. Depending on how you look at it, that's either a lot or a little.
I take issue with Bobby's statement on two counts:
1) It assumes there's a place to play safe. What if you just get awkward, with a fairly open table? You have like a 70% shot and no legitimate safe.
2) It assumes you'll always win the safe battle. Depending on your opponent, you should be willing to accept varying levels of shot difficulty before playing safe. Against someone like Allen Hopkins, I'd rather take a jump shot that originates on an adjacent table than get into a safe battle with him.
My feeling is that if you are afraid to miss even a single shot, you'll play too tight. You'll feel the nerves in your arms. That would make it pretty tough to play perfect pool.
I mean, who am I to argue with Bobby - he's a world champion. So I guess I'll just assume that he didn't mean his statement to be taken literally, that sometimes you just have to go for it because the situation demands it. The thing about pro players is that most of the time they let themselves take that medium-difficulty tough shot, they make it.
Just my thoughts,
Steve
