8 Ball Situation

This is an interesting situation to end up on the 8 ball. I was in a similar situation once, the only difference was that the 13 ball wasn't right in front of the pocket.

With the 13 ball in front of the pocket, it makes a safety much more difficult. This sort of forces you to try an offensive shot, which doesn't seem possible to the naked eye.

By elevating your cue stick a little bit and hitting the cueball hard, you can cause the 8 ball to become airborn a fraction of an inch. By hitting the rail higher that usual, this causes the 8 ball to have a launch angle. This launch angle increases with how hard you hit this shot. If you hit it too hard, the 8 ball may bounce straight up or just plain jump off the table. But once you figure out the speed, you can make this 8 ball bank 2 or 3 times out of 10.

Here is a video demo...



Thoughts...other options?

Triple Bank Situation (8 Ball)

Personally, I have never been in this situation...but have been in something close. The 8 ball was a little off center and I had a chance to cut it...but missed it. This triple bank on my personal experience, is about a 4 in 10 shot on my home table. On a bar box that I'm unfamiliar with, it is likely half that...or 20% at best.



Other options include trying to cut the 8 ball in the corner or bank it in the corner. Neil on AZBilliards suggested playing a pure safety with a halfball hit on the 8 ball as show below.

What is your opinion?

8 Ball, Solids And Stripes Tied-up

There a couple breakout issues here, I went for a breakout on the first shot and missed. Managed to get in shape enough to make the breakouts, couple tough shots on my last stripe and the 8 ball to get the 8 ball run!

WW Gold League Stats (Week 9)

As a team, we have finally turned things around a little bit on Wednesday night. Our team was 2 weeks away from being dead last in the position round week (forcing us to sit out that week) and in 11th place. We started off the league a respectful 11-13 after the first 4 weeks, then our team went 1-16 (1-5, 0-6, 1-5) the following 3 weeks to drop to last place. Last night, we managed to go 5-1 and give ourselves a little breathing room from the last spot.

I personally, played very poorly and was the only person to lose more than 2 games. I lost 3 games and shot a 34...there wasn't a single game where I had more than 2 innings at the table and my opponents were finishing me off when I made a mistake. I had an ERO in the 4th round as that was the only highlight of the evening for me.

I rearranged our team order, and Ryan (Mr. Anchor) was again last as he was in the our City Championship run. It came down to him 3 times (all 3 rounds that I lost in the 4th spot) and he won 2 of them. The video below, shows the result of Ryan's combo/safety that didn't quite work out. From my personal experience, it is very difficult to make the 8 ball when an AWESOME show was made on the ball before the 8 ball. Butch missed the 8 ball in the side and gave the game (and round) to Ryan.



Our team discussed not drinking until our 9:30 Cappy's Jagerbomb to get the team out of the cellar. Chas and I had glasses of pop and were ready to celebrate our 5-1 victory with 2 jagerbombs. Hopefully this is the turning point for our team and we will work our way back up to the middle of the pack. We are still more that a dozen games under 0.500 and will have our work ahead of us to recover from our 3 poor weeks of league.

Nail In Head

Another good one from Cyanide and Happiness...

Struggling In The Gold

I have been pretty quiet about our league so far this year, it started out okay with an 11-13 start. Then we started struggling and have dropped from 5th to last place, I can't remember ever being in last place in a pool league in my entire life. Well I'll start with how we got there, and what we are going to do to get ourselves a trophy by seasons end!

Three weeks ago, we went 0-6 against the now 2nd place team. I played well going 5-0, but as a team we only managed to win 8 out of 25 games. We were missing 8 ball shots for big wins and scratching a lot which sort of brought us down. We had a bye week which made things worse (for me at least).

Last week after our bye week, we played the now 4th place team at our bar. We went 1-5, again winning 8 out of 25 games...I went 0-5 and shot a 19! I can't remember EVER losing all 5 of my games in this format, even in my high roller season.

Turning things around is somewhat of a statistical anomaly, things just haven't been clicking this season. After 7 weeks last year in the Silver, we probably had 8 or 9 ERO's...this season our team has 1. I've messed up at least a couple this season, and only have 1 runout against me so far.

Making it to 3rd is probably a stretch, we are playing our nemisis from last season "Risky's Broken English"...but I like our chances. I think we can definitely make it back to 0.500 in this league, but anything higher will require a few good rolls.

More diagrams to come, I forget the layout if I don't make them the next day...