My first pool tournaments

My first pool tournament entry was born out of frustration.  I was in a bar league in Chicago, where you play for a bar's team and the winning team in the league gets a trophy.  We were in the playoffs - cannot remember if it was the finals or not - and my match was pivotal.  I remember getting to the 8-ball (all of the leagues were 8-ball leagues then; since then I have seen some that are a mix of 8-ball and 9-ball), so all I needed was to make the last shot to win the game.  I remember it being a thin cut shot...and I ended up missing the 8-ball entirely with the cue ball.  That gave my opponent ball-in-hand (meaning that he could put the cue ball anywhere on the table for his next shot), and he ran out and won the game.

I was disgusted with myself - I had let down my team, and even though someone else on our team (at least) must have lost that night too, my loss was the most visible and came when we needed the win to advance.

I had recently moved from downtown Chicago (where the bar league was based) to out near O'Hare Airport (Northwest of the city center), and really the bar league play was my last link to my life in the Gold Coast area of Chicago (just north of the Loop).  Maybe it was the fact that I was "done" with my downtown life (I had moved out to the airport area because my job was no longer downtown; I was now a consultant who often worked north and west of the city, and even the reverse commute was a real pain, especially in the evenings), but when I saw an ad somewhere for a 9-ball tournament the night after I lost the 8-ball match, I decided to give it a try.  New pool hall, new area of town, nobody knew me...what was the worst that could happen?  I play badly, and decide that 9-ball is not for me.


LEE STREET BILLIARDS

Lee Street Billiards was an interesting place.  Unlike every other place that I had shot pool, it was not a bar.  As such, it attracted a mostly under-21 crowd.  At the age of 25, I did not feel out of place when I first walked in the night of the tournament, but in the ensuing weeks I realized that I was often the oldest player in the room.  I did not mind the lack of alcohol, though (unlike a lot of my over-21 peers, I guess), and the folks who played there and ran the place were all very friendly.

Unfortunately, though, you do not have to be over 21 to smoke...and these were the days before smoking was banned in many public places.  It took a long time for my love of pool to succumb to my dislike of second-hand smoke, but from the start I really hated that aspect of going to a pool hall.  Even when I would go to a mostly-empty pool hall, I would still find the lingering stench of cigarette smoke in the air.

I never really understood the connection between smoking and pool, anyway.  You cannot actively do both at the same time, unless you wanted to get ash on the table, so what ends up happening is that everyone else breathes in the smoke from one player's cigarette while it rests on the edge of the table or on a nearby surface.  The smoker does not even actively smoke during most of the life of the cigarette, if he/she is serious at all about pool.


Those first few weeks
Somehow, even though my bar league career ended in disappointment, the regular practice must have done me some good.  I actually won the entire tournament that first night at Lee Street.  I have no idea how my interest in pool would have fared had I not done well, but I somehow played well enough to keep winning my matches, and at the end of the night I had won first place!  I did not feel like a favorite in any of the matches - I just assumed that those who were used to shooting 9-ball regularly were better players than I was - but I just kept plugging away.

A couple of months later, I found out that while I was feeling like an interloper in the 9-ball world, the regulars at Lee Street were viewing me as the new gunslinger in town...the one that no one wants to see coming.

The week after that first tournament, I decided to see if I could defend my title, not really thinking that I could do it.  Luck was with me again, though, and once again I came in first place.  Inside I was laughing - if they only knew what I really shot like.  I kept thinking that someday my life as the Wizard would be revealed as a sham once someone dared to look behind the curtain.

Life got even weirder when I won the tournament the third week as well.  This was ridiculous.  I was not even practicing much in the interim...I just went and warmed up for an hour or so before the tournament, and then played my matches.  Admittedly, these were mostly teenagers...but still.  Three tournament wins in a row?

The fourth week I was exhausted from work, and I should never have gone to the pool hall, but I felt that it was expected of me (I am not sure who else expected it of me, but I DID have a bit of celebrity at that point).  That week, I lost in the first round.  That was when I realized the difference between what *I* thought of my play and what the *others* thought about it.  To me, a loss in the first round that night was about right - I was really tired, and I was not making the shots I needed to make.  Because of the previous three weeks, though, the people in the tournament reacted as if a mighty champion had somehow been toppled.  I was human?  Really?  

It is true that once people figure out that you can be beaten, they somehow have an easier time of it than they did before.  I still played in the tournament most weeks, but it was several months before I won it again, and it was a tough climb back to the top. 

Other ways of pushing wood

Two years have flown by since my last post...and, sad to say, the workshop has still not been set up for use. I have an old full-size lathe now, and some great other tools, and someday I am going to set up everything the way that I want it and start turning stuff again - at least pens, maybe larger stuff.

While this blog was set up to document the trials and tribulations of a beginning woodturner, I actually have two other hobbies to which the word "woodpusher" could apply.

CHESS

I have been a chess player for 30 years. With the exception of a two-year break while living in Chicago (more on that in a minute), chess has been a part of my life since I learned the moves at the (relatively late) age of nine.

There are several blogs out there about chess, and many people are documenting the learning process and even the teaching process. I do not have a lot to add to what exists already. I have reached a plateau in the chess world that I am happy with, and though there is a lot of online play and the very occasional OTB (over the board) game with friends, I am no longer actively attempting to learn how to improve my chess game. Continuing to play at the level I have achieved is fine with me.

POOL (BILLIARDS)

One day in 1994, I awoke in my one-room apartment in downtown Chicago and, for the first time since learning the moves, I did not feel like playing or studying chess. It felt very strange, but my brain must have felt like it had found a surrogate source to feed its strategy and planning needs - I had recently begun to take up pool. Several bars in the area of my apartment had pool tables, and I would become the strange regular patron who did not drink or smoke but would go into all of the bars regularly to shoot pool. I am sure that the wait staff did not appreciate the lack of alcohol in my drinking habits, but I was not going to learn much about how to improve at pool while drunk.

I played pool in bar leagues for a couple of years, and later when I moved out to the outskirts of the city I became a regular at a couple of pool halls there. The main difference that I had to get used to was that the pool halls had 9-foot tables (regulation size) while the bars that I was used to playing in had 7-foot bar tables. Learning to play well on the larger tables took a bit of doing, but I gradually got used to it.

I love playing pool, and even when I started up with chess again (one day, about two years later, I woke up and felt like playing again) I decided to keep playing pool. I played for about four years pretty regularly, and even did well in several tournaments. I also got to play pool in the pool hall used in the Color of Money (place called Chris's in Chicago - one of the few pool halls I played in that opened at 9 am).

What finally put a (temporary) end to my pool career was cigarette smoke. For some reason, people used to feel that they could not shoot pool without smoking cigarettes, and the air in the pool halls got really smoky at times. I tried for a while to patronize the only non-smoking pool hall that I could find, but it was 45 minutes' drive away and I was not able to go that often. Soon it closed, as smokers had too many alternatives. The only way that non-smoking pool halls would prosper, it seemed, was if they all went non-smoking at the same time. At the time that I left Chicago, that seemed far-fetched.

In 1999 I moved to New Hampshire, and played occasionally on the pool tables in the rec hall of my apartment complex. There was a guy that I met who loved to play straight pool (one of my favorite games now) and we would play matches once a week or so. The tables were not great, though, which took away from the experience a bit.

Seven years passed, during which time I got married, bought a house, and moved to the seacoast area of New Hampshire. During that time, I did not play more than the occasional game of pool. I still had my two pool cues that I bought when I was in Chicago, and kept them safe in a nice sturdy case, but they very rarely came out of hiding.

I plan to make the next few posts a retrospective of some of my stories from my Chicago years and my first tournament in New Hampshire. After that, I will get into my attempts to actively improve my pool game. I am now taking lessons again, for the first time in about 15 years, and the process has made me build my game once again from the ground up.

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