Always a Student but Occasional Teacher

If you don't read the blogs associated with PoolSynergy, I would highly recommend that you start doing so. This past Monday night, being my normal league night, I was at Bumper's Billiards with my team awaiting the arrival of our opponents for the week. We were practicing while waiting and a situation arose that happened to coincide precisely with some of the tips from the most recent PoolSynergy article.

My opponent (a SL3) left me (also a SL3) with not much of a shot. My ball was near the short rail about 8 inches from the corner pocket and my opponents ball was directly in front of the corner pocket but a few inches out. Based on one of the tips in the article, I thought about doing a "ticky" shot. Having not practiced it yet, I opted to play a safe by banking my ball in front of my opponents ball to block the pocket. As fate would have it, they were perfectly aligned with the corner pocket with my ball maybe an inch out and my opponents ball maybe two to three inches further out with the cue ball about 18 inches from the pocket.

One of the SL4 players in the group suggested the ball might follow to my opponent and he tried to make the shot. He missed. The SL4 said it was worth a try and that he didn't think it could be made due to the closeness of the two balls. Having read the article and feeling cocky, I told him I could make the shot. After some friendly banter about bets (which I declined) I lined the balls back up and prepared for my shot.

I placed some serious draw on the cue ball and moments later was rewarded with both my ball and my opponents ball dropping neatly into the corner pocket. The applause from my friends and teammates was very nice to hear. The example of the shot I performed can be seen here but please read the whole article authored by Gary Frerking. It is well worth it! :-)

Welcome!

Just wanted to post something so this page wouldn't look quite so empty. I am a fairly new pool player but I am a long time science fiction fan so once I found that "poolstudent" was already taken the next logical step was "poolpadawan". For all you non-geeks out there, a padawan is a student/apprentice of the fictitious Jedi religion/cult in the Star Wars universe created by George Lucas. Basically it's just another way of saying I am a student of this exceptional group of games collectively called pool.

I'm not sure how often I will be posting yet but I hope to post a few times a week as I am learning new things all the time. :-)