"You make your own Luck"??????????

Luck in 9-ball??? Blah, blah, blah. When played with expert players, its ALL LUCK (well, maybe that's a slight exagerration). You might as well play paper/rock/scissors.

No one has yet addressed the crux of the "luck issue." Forget about the 9 on the break, the accidental pocketing of a ball on a missed shot, or the accidental snooker of your opponent when you miss. Those are just the "rub of the green" and must be taken in stride. The really pathetic part of 9-ball as a so called championship "sport" is that the break is the most important part of any game. There is WAY TOO MUCH luck involved in this particular shot for any game hoping to differentiate championship caliber players.

As I've said many times, at DCC this year we tried to predict the winner of each game after assessing the table after the opening break. We were correct 82% of the time. Try it yourself, it's easy with runout players. Why even bother playing the rest of the game (except, I guess as an exhibition which it really is). ESPN will soon be showing only the opening break of each game, then telling us who won that rack, then cutting away for some more interesting features on the current venue. Yes, I know there is some element of skill in the break, but not enough to counteract the luck factor. Even the uninitiated can see that there is a HUGE amount of luck in this part of the game. It diminishes the sport. End of rant. JMO, JMO, JMO
 
P.S. - you know how at the end of every victory Efren Reyes always says, "I was lucky."? Maybe he isn't just being gracious, professional, and dissembling; maybe he's being honest (though I doubt it). :) :) :) :)
 
RichardCranium said:
Ya know there is "luck" involved in every SPORT or game....Even on a run of 100 in straight pool...Your going to have to get lucky along the way...I watched Seigle run 150 in a match....He got "lucky" at least 6 times along the way....A 1/4 roll here or there and he was done...and he had a few "wired" balls that saved his run where he had no other shot.....It was still a GREAT run though....

Granted the game of 9-ball at the highest level is who has the better break that day...(usually)....Who thought of this game anyway????....and why the heck didn't they just use 1 more ball when they came up with the game???..

But here is the next issue....Why are we trying to penalize a guy that has a great 9-ball break???? ....That is almost the same as tricking up the golf course to take the driver out of the hands of those "Freaks" that hit the ball 300 yards.. (all carry)....

I personally like to see the matches where a guy strings 4 or 5 racks...misses once and the other guy strings 4 or 5...
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RC,
I agree with all your points. I still enjoy watching 9-ball, I still enjoy playing 9-ball - it's just not much of a championship sport. Right now, there are about a hundred guys who can beat anyone at short race 9-ball - boring.
I have beaten any number of pro's a game or two of 9-ball; and any game where I can beat a professional can't be much of a true test. Even up, I have NO CHANCE to beat them a game of straight pool to 200 or 300 EVER, EVER, EVER (unless I get better, which seems somewhat unlikely). Maybe that would be a better game with which to differentiate the top players. There is definitely some luck involved in 14.1, but there are ways to minimize it (as in 9-ball). Let me paraphrase a remark Grady made on an Accu-Stats tape. "I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I've lost a straight pool match because of luck, with 9-ball matches it seems to be an even money occurrence." (apologies if I remembered it wrong).
 
I wonder how opinion's would differ if they were playing called shot and Earl called the 9 in the correct pocket?

From the setup, I think I would have called it if I was having a random crack at it.
 
RichardCranium said:
I agree with that 100% straight pool is way more a skill game than 9-ball...
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Pardon me for waxing technical, but.... Suppose you have two players with one stronger by, say 20% on some scale. And suppose they were 20% apart in all games -- 14.1, nine ball, one pocket, etc. If we had two such imaginary players, we could find out which game was more controlled by luck by having them play two-hour matches, and see which game gave the better player the most advantage.

Clearly, one game of nine ball is a more luck-controlled match than 150 points of 14.1, but I think race to 120 at nine ball is less lucky than straight pool to 50. So, the question is which game can separate the wheat from the chaff in a shorter amount of time.

Such an experiment is hard to do, but I'd be willing to try with a suitable government grant.
 
RichardCranium said:
I agree with that 100% straight pool is way more a skill game than 9-ball....I will make your case for you...I played Santos Sambajon in a tournament about 5 years ago...in San Diego...I broke and ran the firs rack...I was LEADING the World Summit winner 1-0...(yeah baby)....I broke and ran the next rack down to the 9-ball and jarred it....He broke and ran the next 4 and ended up beating me 7-2......But I had the lead at one point... :D
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I dogged it against him too. I lost 9-7 to him in a Pechauer tournament last year. It was 7-6 me, then I jarred the 7 leaving it in the hole. He broke and ran the last two for the win (if I remember correctly). Once I took the lead on him, a crowd of people started watching, and I got really nervous. It was an easy 7-ball also, it was almost straight in with a little angle and I had to pop the cueball out with a firm stroke to get shape on the 8, man I hit it terrible. I remember when I got down on the shot it didn't feel quite right, but my heart was pounding and my arm was shaking and I just shot it. I don't know why I did that, I had alot of things going thru my head at the time. After the match, I broke my cue down and put it away, and Santos showed me a simple kick-safe I could have played earlier in the match. He handed me his cue and let me try the shot- that's right- his beautiful purpleheart and ivory cue, man that thing hits great, and it's one helluva work of art. About 6 years ago Santos used to come into the poolhall I was learning at, and the owner used to stake Santos for thousands. He would give me lessons like once or twice a week, never charged me a dime. Real nice guy. Around that time, Santos was supposed to play Roger Griffis for a couple thousand, after a big tournament in LA, they were supposed to play the match at my home poolhall. Well Roger never showed up, but Shannon Daulton did, and Santos got drilled 2 sets. People were saying that Santos didn't stand a chance against Shannon, but it looked like Santos was playing really bad that day. When I saw him give Jennifer Chen the 6 out and the breaks and barbecue her, he played better than Efren. Right now, I think Santos can beat anyone in the world.
 
Bob Jewett said:
Pardon me for waxing technical, but.... Suppose you have two players with one stronger by, say 20% on some scale. And suppose they were 20% apart in all games -- 14.1, nine ball, one pocket, etc. If we had two such imaginary players, we could find out which game was more controlled by luck by having them play two-hour matches, and see which game gave the better player the most advantage.

Clearly, one game of nine ball is a more luck-controlled match than 150 points of 14.1, but I think race to 120 at nine ball is less lucky than straight pool to 50. So, the question is which game can separate the wheat from the chaff in a shorter amount of time.

Such an experiment is hard to do, but I'd be willing to try with a suitable government grant.
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Hey Bob,

You could probably "reverse" your test to reduce a few variables and make it a bit easier to implement.

Have a single player play themself at each different game for a couple of hours (pretending all the time to be two separate players).

Which ever game has the most variance in the scoreline after the two hours is the game with most luck involved, since the player should be equally matched to themselves.

Doing this test with only one player would remove potential result contaminates to the scoreline such as fatigue levels, mental state and environmental settings, etc.

Could perform this test with a few different players and get some pretty good statistical data. The real only tricky bit is finding a player who would play against themselves the same way they would against someone else.

Cheers!
 
Billy_Bob said:
Every once and a while, another player will claim that a difficult shot I made was "luck" (but it was not).

This kind of irritates me, but I don't say anything other than "That's where I was aiming" or "That's what I was trying for". Then they say: Yea Right!
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Admit the luck and get on with your games. You know you worked hard for the shot. So what if your opponent, in his envious grace tries to take away a great shot you just made. It's merely a distraction. A bigger distraction to him is that you were lucky, and you went on to win a game by "luck". Let your opponent live with emotional distress, not you. Instead when an opponent says you were lucky, say "thanks" just as if he had just paid you the biggest complement. Believe me it works.
 
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