Week 2: The Table Strikes Back

Before we begin this post I have an issue I would like to address. When I posted my first blog post, I received some great, inspiring posts with suggestions and words of encouragement in my billiards journey. That was great, and I thank you for that. However, some people commented that I could use billiards to hustle people and win money, to which I say what is wrong with you? While I am broke (Seriously, I can't even buy personal copies of books I've already read. Is life even worth living?) the goal of this blog is to serve as a wholesome space to learn billiards, not to hustle people. For shame…

Please keep commenting though....I don't
want to be that person with no BBF's

Anyways, now that I've finished calling you all out, let's turn the attention to me and my recent failures. I say most recent because there has been a string of many incidents that I'm sure will one day come back to haunt me, but I would like to focus on a specific one that almost convinced me not to play billiards and switch my topic. This horrendous problem that plagues my waking hours all stems from the table itself, and I feel the impact of this to this day. The table has it out for me.

                                            

Okay okay I get it, you think I'm insane, but I'm not kidding. Over the course of the first week alone, I have sustained 3 cuts, 8 bruises, and 2 cues to the stomach all at the hands of the table. At this point, I injure myself somehow at least twice per game, and I haven't even started playing the real games yet. I think that might be the scariest part of all. I have come to this conclusion because there simply isn’t anything else that could have caused this. What’s that? It’s probably my lack of athletic skill and inherent clumsiness you say? Of course not….but anyways, the table has it out for me, so if I disappear, you know who to blame. 

                                            

So now we've finally arrived at the part of this blog post I've been dreading: the research I barely did. If you don't care about this part, please feel free to skip to the next creative Disney gif, but stay tuned if you're interested in the logic behind pool. Let's just get this over with, and talk about math. I despise math and everything that comes with it, but now we're here, so I guess we'll just have to deal with that. This week my goal was to learn vocabulary (which I already complained about earlier this week so I won't bore you again) and how to break and aim, so there really wasn’t much research to do, but I did find some fantastic videos to help. Fair warning, one does involve PBS in conjunction with math, so watch at your own risk.

This will link you to the PBS article!

So the other thing that I found while learning to break and aim are these cool sets of diagrams that show you where to aim, where to hit, and all the paths that the balls will follow as a result. I'll include some of them here, but they aren't all too hard to find on the internet.

                                         
                                          
                                          

This is linked to the website for more info!

So this was cool, and it involved less math so I preferred it to the PBS video. Over this week I learned that while the speed of which you hit the ball is important, the velocity and placement of the ball is even more valuable in pool. Plus, I also learned the fact that should have been obvious to me, that where you hit the pool ball has an extremely large impact on where the ball will go! By making a mistake on this I learned how to jump shot, but it was also probably the number one injury causer of the week, so it's a real double edged sword.

This is going to be a long few weeks

After this train wreck of a blog post, you're probably all waiting for the reflection, if only because it means my blog post is almost over. Well congratulations, you've made it. Looking back, maybe I need to wear extra layers or use a protective bubble wrapped cue to ensure I don't injure myself anymore than I already have. From here on out (or for the next week), my goal is to learn how to play the basic billiards game of 8 ball using the skills I've painfully obtained over the course of this week. Hopefully in the grand scheme of things I can begin to correctly call my shots and determine how to decide which ball to hit into the pocket, but probably not (if you don't know yet I’m not very good at billiards).

Overall I don't know all that much, but I'm looking forward to learning it. Thanks for checking in again!