Actually each and every table made and assembled are victim of air conditions let alone the frailty of human variances assembling one. Next duplicating Mosconi's greatness would be mpossible.
Why has no one beat Mosconi's high run?
- Thread starter nineballsafety8
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Actually each and every table made and assembled are victim of air conditions let alone the frailty of human variances assembling one. Next duplicating Mosconi's greatness would be mpossible.
Right there with you.
But I note once again that you didn't include balls, or other equipment. An eight foot Diamond with Simonis and Aramith Super Pros is not what Mosconi used either.
Frankly, I would far rather someone beat it on a modern professional table with the best available equipment. Then no one will bother putting an asterisk after the record.
Our greatest advantage is that we can live stream every practice run of every moderately competent straight pool player. That increases our pool of possible runs enormously, and we ought to be able to double or ten-tuple Mosconi's entire lifetime of playing in a very short time.
Thank You Kindly.
It probably doesn't matter even if conditions were identical. If you put Hohmann on a table with balls and cloth that he isn't accustomed to (what about the tip and the chalk and the humidity?), and he doesn't beat the record, people will say he isn't used to those conditions the way Mosconi was so he was at a disadvantage. Since the size of the table is probably 90% of the issue, just get an 8' table and put modern equipment on it. If nobody breaks it, then it probably never will be (until the next Mosconi comes along).
lol. What use is it to record the play of a moderately competent player (when you said "live steam" I assume you meant "record")? Like Schmidt said, you only need to keep an eye on maybe 6 or so players in the world. It would be a waste of time to record somebody who is only moderately competent in the billion to one fluke chance that he breaks the run.
It's cool that this is such a hot topic still.
I didn't dig through all 10 pages but I'm surprised nobody is coming right out and saying it.
Why has it not been beaten? ...luck.
All pool games feature it, even game that is supposed to minimize it. Every break shot is a bit of a crapshoot because of the tiny gaps affecting how the racked balls spread. You can't totally predict or control it.
So there's potential for a funny roll leading to a tough shot (or no shot) after every break.
It's not a 50/50 coin flip, the player's skill tilts the odds in his favor. But even if he comes up with something makeable 90% of the time, after 37 racks, eventually those odds catch up and he'll have nothing worth shooting. Or he'll finally miss one of those 80% shots he's supposed to make, because after 15 or 20 of those, you're just due to miss one.
Maybe the table helped, certainly mosconi's skill helped, and the number of attempts, but at the end of the day, having something worth shooting after 37 break shots is a bit of a statistical miracle. That doesn't factor in all the other bad luck that works against you too like skids, balls tying back up despite a heroic breakout effort, etc.
I think Mosconi's run was the perfect storm of a guy with top tier skill, getting all the rolls, or at least no bad rolls for many hours.
I didn't dig through all 10 pages but I'm surprised nobody is coming right out and saying it.
Why has it not been beaten? ...luck.
All pool games feature it, even game that is supposed to minimize it. Every break shot is a bit of a crapshoot because of the tiny gaps affecting how the racked balls spread. You can't totally predict or control it.
So there's potential for a funny roll leading to a tough shot (or no shot) after every break.
It's not a 50/50 coin flip, the player's skill tilts the odds in his favor. But even if he comes up with something makeable 90% of the time, after 37 racks, eventually those odds catch up and he'll have nothing worth shooting. Or he'll finally miss one of those 80% shots he's supposed to make, because after 15 or 20 of those, you're just due to miss one.
Maybe the table helped, certainly mosconi's skill helped, and the number of attempts, but at the end of the day, having something worth shooting after 37 break shots is a bit of a statistical miracle. That doesn't factor in all the other bad luck that works against you too like skids, balls tying back up despite a heroic breakout effort, etc.
I think Mosconi's run was the perfect storm of a guy with top tier skill, getting all the rolls, or at least no bad rolls for many hours.
Fact is Mosconi did it and no one else has. Most players today rack 9 ball and a good break run the table. In a run of 7, 1 down is nothing. Down 70 in straight pool is Pork Chop Hill.
Actually, several people have run more than the record. Even Mosconi ran more than his record. The other runs just don't count due to politics. BCA holds the record books, and they get to determine what constitutes the record.
I was on the way to 527 until I missed the second ball.
Having watched some of the past masters of the game, I can say with some certain, while there is some luck factor involved in the break shot, those who specialized in the game minimized it as much as possible. They didn't just slam the break shot, they played at a speed where they controlled where the cue ball went, plus they knew pretty much where the cue ball would make contact with the rack and guaranteed a shot. Making 37 break shots and always having a shot certainly wasn't luck- it was skill and knowledge. Yes, bad rolls come into play, but the masters of the game limited it to a bare minimum. I saw Dallas West run 150 and out at a college exhibition, where every break shot was pretty much the same, and he never had a hard shot afterwards. This was on by todays standards a ratty table, and he made it look like a stroll in the park. We tried to get him to keep going, but he was ready to get something to eat. I have no doubt he could have run A LOT more
here is my answer.
I have no room for a table, while I am not a huge believer in technology I do think the camera would be more definitive than 15 people who signed a piece of paper. In Mosconi's defense they did not have the camera back then. Plus as previously stated I would not want to practice on an 8' table with 5" holes. I might be able to do it as I am still learning, I would want to practice where I am comfortable ( 9' table with standard sized pockets.) Emphasis on the word "might".
I have no room for a table, while I am not a huge believer in technology I do think the camera would be more definitive than 15 people who signed a piece of paper. In Mosconi's defense they did not have the camera back then. Plus as previously stated I would not want to practice on an 8' table with 5" holes. I might be able to do it as I am still learning, I would want to practice where I am comfortable ( 9' table with standard sized pockets.) Emphasis on the word "might".
I see he ran 284 balls in Denver Colorado.
that's pretty good considering pool is a harder game at our altitude.
I meant live stream, so it is recorded in real time. This prevents photo-shopping of records.
No, the more people attempting the record the sooner it will be broken, there are 7.3 billion people on the planet, billion-to-one chances happens every day. Plus it will have other benefits in terms of exposure.
Thank You Kindly.
He did have a good point... That there is only a small # of people that could possibly beat it.
I would guess the #is far more than 6, but to state the planet's population and to allege 'billion to one' occurrences happen daily in a manner that implies that by such logic, Any one of 7.3b might break the record...that is just silly.
And anyway, what is the incentive to do it?
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Yes, of course it is. The population of the planet has nothing to do with this conversation. There are only a relatively small number of people in the world capable of running 100 balls. Here's how I see the problem if we try to videotape all play from all "moderately competent" straight pool players in hopes of catching a 526 ball run:
First, what is "moderately competent"? This is subjective, but let me throw out there that this is a player who can run 100 balls maybe once a year. If we look at Corwyn's numbers provided earlier in this thread, a guy who has a 1 in 1000 chance of running 100 balls has a 6.67% chance of missing any given shot. This means that if you give him 1000 attempts, he will most certainly run 100 balls. How long does it take to attempt 1000 trys? Let's say 10 attempts per day, and three or four nights a week of trying. This would take one year. So now we have a guy who is very likely to run 100 balls if he tries 1000 times over the course of one year. That's my "moderately competent" player.
How does this translate into his chances of running 526 balls? His miss chance is 6.67% so his pocketing percentage is 93.33%. So we can calculate the probability of him tying the record like this:
probability = 0.9333^526 = 0.00000000000000017. So this is the chance that our moderately competent player is going to snap off 526 on any given run. Lets use the same numbers above and say he tries 10 times a day for 3 or 4 days a week, for 1000 attempts in a year. So that takes us right upwards of 6 trillion years. That's about 500 times the age of the universe. So our player might run 526 tomorrow, but it could equally take until the universe has expanded into nothingness, or re-collapsed into another singularity (not to mention that our planet is gone in 5 billion years).
So the point is that it is silly, even in theory, to videotape or livestream anybody and everybody and expect a fluke run of 526 to come out of it. It is simply too far out of reach even if you have large numbers of such players all attempting the record at the same time. You are about a billion times more likely to win tonight's $500 million lottery than to run 526 balls. Amazing, isn't it?
The figure of 6 people on the planet came from the John Schmidt audio interview posted by Mr. Bond earlier in this thread. He said there are probably 6 or 8 people who have a realistic shot at doing it.
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I love this post, however, the age of the Universe is thought to be 12 BILLION years,
not 12 trillion, soooo, the already miniscule probabilities are, in fact, 1000 times smaller.
Dale
Yeah, you're right. I was off about the 1/2 age of the universe. Too many bazillions to think about! It doesn't change the odds, though. The numbers are still correct. It's just my comparison to the age of the universe that was off. I corrected the post.
If you watch the science channels they say that if the universe expands forever, instead of contracting again, in a couple trillion years everything will be so far apart and with no energy left that the universe will be essentially empty.
Also, when the moderately competent player plays for maybe a billion years, he will get good enough to become the greatest player ever, and his odds of breaking the record will improve.
All people who try could possibly beat it. The odds are just exceedingly small. Odds are never zero for any non-contradictory proposition.
I never implied that any of the 7.3 Billion was likely to beat it. And that was the wrong inference to make from what I wrote. I was pointing out that 1-in-a-Billion chances happen every day, so I claim that something was 1-in-a-Billion, and therefore impossible is just wrong. There is a famous result in Mathematics which says that every person should see a 1-in-a-Million coincidence about every month. So a once-in-a-Billion is approximately once in a lifetime (for each person).
Of course, if one is allocating limited resources, the number is much smaller (there aren't 7.3 Billion pool tables for a start). I bet there are more than 6 people right now who claim to have beaten it, but don't have a recording. If we had some idea about the number of people at each miss percentage we could even calculate the optimal number, and how long we should expect it to take.
Thank You Kindly.
There should still be stars and our galaxy (plus Andromeda) left at the 6 trillion mark. Heat death takes a lot longer (high entropy, not low energy).
Also, when the moderately competent player plays for maybe a billion years, he will get good enough to become the greatest player ever, and his odds of breaking the record will improve.
I certainly hope it wouldn't take me much longer than 10 times the length of practice time that it took Mosconi.
Thank you kindly.