Recharging your pool game batteries… so you don’t Short Circuit

Thanks to John Biddle; Pool Synergy is a collective effort of Pool writers on the internet all blogging about the same topic.  This month’s host is:

Michael Reddick @ www.Angleofreflection.wordpress.com

Check it out!

The 80′s were a great decade for movies: but when I was 3, lightning struck!  (Unfortunately 3 year olds don’t understand movies; but by the time I was 5 I was ready).  The movie starred a cool wise cracking robot named: # 5 .  Please take a second and think it over… any guesses ???  For those of you that guessed Honey I Shrunk the Kids with Rick Moranis….please stop reading immediately.  But for those of you that said: Short Circuit… you are either really cool, or you at least read the title.   I don’t care because either way you are awesome in my book.  The movie is about an inventor that never leaves his lab and is constantly working on developing the perfect robot (kind of sounds a lot like pool players…)  Any way Johnny Five (and the other robots, at least 4 that we know of) is at his military debut when a freak storm rolls in…. and you guessed it:  Number 5 is hit by lightning!  The lightning causes him to Short Circuit bringing him to life… which makes perfect sense so please don’t question the validity of this plot; as a Five year old it clearly made sense to me and still does to this day.

In pool it works almost exactly like the movie.   Usually we start playing pool because it is fun and we like making balls.  Then the following Exact Scientific Sequence Happens: 1. We watch The Hustler, then we decide to play straight pool against Larry from down the road who has never seen or heard of Minesota Fats,  The Hustler,  or straight pool, but we beat him anyway in a race to 24 balls.  But who cares because we won.  2. Then we watch The Color of Money, which we rewind and watch about 8 more times.  Now we have moved on to batton twirling, Werewolves of London, and most importantly 9 ball.  This is now the only game we play and we get really pissed when we lose to our friends because we leave the 8 and 9 after making the 1 through 7.   3. We decide we hate 9 ball and go back to good old 8 ball as 9 ball is clearly for bangers anyway right?  (We also maintain that safeties are for women and continue playing only offense).  4.  We play in a few more matches,  5. We see Efren Reyes run 7 racks in a row on ESPN and that’s when it happens…. Johnny Five comes alive and we are struck by lightning.  We become cyborg robots obsessed with learning all we can and becoming great at the game of pool.  After hours of practice and reading we play in a big match or tournament and we are certain we have outworked 90% of people in that room.  Then the unthinkable happens.. that’s right, we play like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (see an earlier post).

For a lot of players this is when we can get discouraged and maybe even start feeling down and burnt out.  For me(and a lot of others too) the opposite happens… it makes me mad!  But not in a bad way, or at the person I am playing.  I get mad at myself because pool is a very honest game( if we were robots we would make no mistakes but we aren’t… well maybe Efren is, but they don’t have tests for robots that advanced yet) and if we aren’t playing as good as we like to it means we either had an off day  or need to practice more. ( Actually, it just means we need to practice more).  Sometimes the answer is both…   Wanting to win every time we play is not a bad thing, but being realistic about why we want to win and what we are doing about it is!  If you’re goal is to win your local league or the U.S. open, the only thing we can control is getting better each day.  The competitions are just telling us where we are at on that day so who cares.  I can’t remember what I did this morning, so by tomorrow I will have already forgotten what I had planned for yesterday… or something like that.

Johhny Five doesn't always drink.... but when he does, he prefers Gin and Tonic

Practicing drills for hours at a time and making no visible progress sucks!   I have proof: it’s called the stupid IPAT 2 workbook…  (I am writing this after just practicing IPAT 2 and after about 25 minutes of not making it past the 4th ball on a 10 ball drill I thought about taking up knitting; but I clearly don’t have the coordination and I would almost certainly end up poking myself in the finger and bleeding all over the place ruining the stupid afghan I was working so hard on in the first place)  so I decided to stick with pool and went on to fail a different 6 ball 3 rail position drill about 15 times.   But I don’t care because I get a little bit better every time I practice.  Track your results and map out a plan; then do it!  So what if Starla(not her real name but eerily close) at Gary’s thinks your intense or maybe a little nuts.   For me the best way to recharge is to not Short Circuit in the first place and remind myself of a famous Angus Young Quote:

It’s a long way to the Top if you want to Rock and Roll so don’t get Thunderstruck and Short Circuit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RukUetw0hAM&ob=av3n

Click on this link and I guarantee you will be thunderstruck and come to life just like Johnny Five (and be ready to kick some serious ahhhh… pool balls.)

-Johnny Five