Rolling along, and with improvement!

Last Sunday afternoon, I went to the pool hall for a few hours of practice.  I took along with me the excellent book "Break Shot Patterns" by Phil Capelle.  I was planning to run through several of the patterns in the book and see what I could learn from them.

Well, it took me over an hour to get through THREE of the patterns.  By "get through", I mean that I practiced the pattern until I could get it right ONCE.  They were much harder than I expected - it is amazing how easy the pros make it look.

The practice paid off immediately, though.  After going through three of the patterns, I decided to practice some straight pool of my own.  Within another hour, I had raised my all-time high run in straight pool from 17 to 25!  This is a huge advance, and I am really happy with it.

The next night was the next 8-ball tournament.  This time there were seven players, with these handicaps:

Roger (1)
Harold (3)
Jocelyn (3)
Jeremy (8)
Me (10)
David (12)
Scott (16)

I beat Jeremy in a tough match in the first round, and then beat Jocelyn in the second round.  My third match was against Roger, the top player in the tournament, and our match came down to the final game, which I managed to barely win.  This put me into the Finals, and I waited while Jeremy worked his way back through the loser's bracket (taking out Roger in the semifinals) to face me again.

In the final, I just needed to win one match out of two, and in the first match I won the first two games, which meant that all I needed to do was to sink two balls in the third game for the win.  Jeremy broke, and nothing went in.  I sunk two balls, and had my FOURTH tournament victory in a row!