I won my league match last night. It was a straight 5-4 race that went hill-hill and ended up getting decided when my opponent scratched on the 8 ball. He also did that in the first game. He was a good shotmaker, but a little lacking in position play and stroke. I used that to my advantage in the end. I was left with the following situation playing stripes. I just missed the break out on the previous shot. My two options were to play off the left side of the 14 with hopes of obstructing his chance at the 5 and bumping the 8 closer to the side pocket or play off the right side of the 14, which is what I tried to do. My thought was maybe I could get the 14 and 8 both on the rail to force a bank. I tried it, but the 14 came off the rail a bit too much. My two-way on this though was to get the cue ball above the 5 ball so he didn’t have a natural angle to set himself up for the 8 in the corner (see page 2).

So he pocketed the 5 ball, tried to bank the 8 and wound up scratching instead. The rest of the match was pretty tight though. I shot well, even having to bank the 8 once. I took a 4-1 lead, but he won the next two matches to get to the finish.

On Sunday, I spent some time focusing on a few shots from the APTSA program. One was a simple trick/fancy and follow shot. Another was a draw shot that Gordon Hedges asked me about. And the third was a stroke shot that Andy Segal made against me at the Comet Classic. This third shot seemed to be problematic for a lot of players though, and I’m still having a rough time of it. The cue ball is within a chalks distance of an object ball, and you have to get the cue ball to jump enough so it caroms off the object ball and over a cue stick. What’s more, the cue ball also has to have enough spin on it to take it down the table rather than just relying on the carom. Here’s my best diagram of it from Cuetable. There’s a bit more involved with it, but this is the gist.

I recently got a Jacoby Jump Cue, so I went to try it out for the first time yesterday. It’s pretty lightweight and has a small notch which makes using a dart grip easier. It’s pretty easy to jump "normal" distances, from one balls width away up to about two feet away. It took a little more work to get it to jump half the table though, so I’ll probably stick with another cue for that. The Jacoby Jump Cue gets the cue ball up and down pretty quick too, so if the target ball is close to the blocking ball, it’s not much of a problem. I think I had a little more control than with my Chilton, but not a lot. One-handed jumping also took a little more effort than I would have liked.

I played in a local 9 ball tournament today and got rocked. I just played poorly; no real excuses. I lost 4-1 and 6-2, so neither of the matches were really close. My first opponent sank all the 9 balls, except he scratched on one of them essentially handing me the game. Both of them pocketed the 9 on the break once each too. It took a while to get used to the fast tables. Also, one of the tables I played on, the floor underneath it was uneven. The table itself was level, but it was awkward when I was standing on a slanted surface trying to aim the shot. Oh well. Hopefully 8 ball league tomorrow will turn out a little better.

In an effort to make my website easier to navigate and more interactive, I changed around some of the pages so all the tutorials and videos can be accessed from the Shot Index page. Each video and tutorial page has a rating and a comment section for people to tell me what they think of the shot or ask questions if they’re having problems with it. Check it out and let me know what you think.

I went down to Rhode Island today to do a couple shows at a retirement home. The first show went well and was for the residents at the home. Probably around 30 showed up. The second show was also good and was for the family of one of the residents there, with about 14 people. Each show went about an hour, but I was able to mix in some different shots for each of them. It was a lot easier to get volunteers for the second one though. The football shot didn’t get a lot of applause in either show. I used the railroad shot as my opener and I think it’s a good one that people like. I’ll have to work on getting more a flow going instead of just thinking up shots on the spot. But it was fun either way. They even fed me dinner, which was well done.

I won my straight up league match tonight 5-2. Perhaps my best play was this following safety since I didn’t feel confident cutting the 10 ball all the way up in the corner:

My opponent kicked off the long rail at the 6, catching the back side of it and scratching. That left me with ball-in-hand and a fairly easy run out, even for someone of my speed ;^)

Yesterday afternoon, I was able to get some trick shot practice in though, mostly for my gig coming up on Friday. It’s been a while since I’ve tried a lot of the simpler show shots, so it was good to get comfortable with them again. I think I’ll even be able to pull out the Y Not shot I diagrammed earlier here.

So my pool league got cancelled for the second week in a row because of a baseball game. The pool hall is right next to the stadium so parking is impossible on game nights. Instead, I got some practice time in yesterday. I started with some easy drills, breaking 4 balls and running them in rotation and moved my way up to 6. The most difficult shot tended to be the first one. I was trying to work my way to 9 but someone offered me a match. He was a good one pocket player, but we ended up playing 9 ball and I picked up a few pointers from him to help with my kick shots and rail-first shots, which I’ll have to practice on.

In other news, it turns out I won’t be able to make it to the World Championships because I need to attend a research review meeting which got rescheduled for the first day of the tournament. That’s a bummer….