Quick one.

Was playing a pro in a small hall in London with a 1 start to 5 in sets for £20 and was down a bit for the session (playing against pros as cheap as possible is critical to getting your game very good fwiw - a small investment to a good player can yield huge dividends in future games against amateurs). I always throw my cue case under the table when I play – mainly because when I was young I thought it gave some aura of dominance or ownership over the table, but has now just become a habit whenever I play.

Either the pro missed me doing this or forgot I had, because as we finish up he quickly offers me an age old 'hustle' (more con trick imo but whatever) that involves laying a cue across the table and betting that you cant get a ball under it without touching the cue itself. The bet is impossible if the ball is on the table as the cue sits too low to get under it. The trick is to roll the ball under the table – thus getting the ball 'underneath' the cue without touching it.

So he offers me this old proposition obviously expecting me to either know it and quickly refuse it or to not know it and let him double the money. I quickly accept and he grabs the white and rolls it under the table only to hear a loud crack as it hits my cue case and sits under the table. Look on his face as I collected all my money back and grabbed my case from below is one of my favourite memories of my early pool career.

edit:

If you ever see anyone doing this hustle or trying to get you to do it, distract them and get a jacket or other blocker under the table without them noticing and clean up. Hustling hustlers is about the sweetest way to make money on earth.

story please , if you don't mind ofcourse.

Got arrested with about 3.5g of coke, 5g of ketamine, ten microdots and 50+ tablets of valium/xanax while staggering home after a three day pool/poker session with a big drug dealing whale. Was all for personal consumption but due to the amount of benzos and the fact I had a lot of cash from the match on me they did me for possession with intent which bars me from entering the US for life without a special visa.

enjoying your storys wamy, keep em coming! Only experience i have with pool hustling is watching the hustler. Like that film? seems like newmans biggest problem was his ego, had to prove he was the best, show how others how to play pool etc. What were your biggest mental struggles as a pool hustler?

Seems like it could be a dangerous lifestyle to live, you ever get into situations where you thought you could get seriously hurt?

Did your age impact anything in the early years? I'd imagine most pro pool players/hustlers would be quite a bit older than 12!

Yeah obv a great film. He has the key conflict of wanting to not be a con man and just show his skill, but deep down he knows that this will come at the ulitmate price of forcing him to never get a high level game again. Classic bit of contradictory self destruction.

My key struggles young (11-13) were ego and temperament. I remember at 13 I was playing a league doubles match against two pros when this came to a crux point in my career. We had put a sizeable bet down when they offered us 4 to 1 on the match and my partner and I were on the hill when they left me with two shots on the black (In England we often play two shots rather than ball in hand) to win the match. All game long they had been winding me up about being a 'chess player', as I had been playing slowly and tactically to slow them down and give us a chance.

I turn around and arrogantly say 'Should have played more chess I guess' to them as they sit there looking nervous. Instead of taking the correct shot, which was to knock the black over a pocket and use the second to go for it, I let my ego get in the way and played a harder double/bank, missed it by an inch and left it safe. We lost the game and match.

In retrospect this was quite a blessing, as getting taught so young the importance of mental stability has been a huge part of my game. Over the years having a stable temperament has probably saved me hundreds of thousands of pounds so now I actually remember this quite fondly (at the time I was so ashamed of this match I basically stayed in bed for two days - but it obviously worked, as I have pretty much never made this class of mistake again no matter how tilting the opponent is).

Have some other good mental ones from later on I will try and go over in future posts.

Lot of the guys I play with were/are drug dealers who have large sums of money but nothing much to spend it on except the cash industries. Many of these guys I have seen with guns and other weapons, and have witnessed numerous savage beatings etc. No murders as yet.

I've been in a few fights but nothing that serious. I would always rather get robbed than resist - and as I've said before, most of the skill of playing pool for a living is in tempering these emotions in people or spotting situations where they will kick off. After a while you just get a feel for it tbh - like you can smell violence in the air or something. A point that has kept me out of numerous bar room fights/brawls as well.

I was very tall very young (like 6ft by 12), so most people didn't know my age. Being young has it's advantages (learning very quickly, not making mistakes twice, being resilient), but some big downsides (being impressionable, naive, impulsive, and often easy to take advantage of). Might sound harsh but I was pretty battle hardened by 13 - something which I would say was a blessing and a curse in near equal measure.

amazing thread!

more storys obv and more hustles please

and how did you get so good so young?

tyvm - will keep posting stuff at a steady rate over next few days when I get time.

This is a very complex question. I had a tiny mini table when I was very young (5-10) and was always OK on that. When I first started playing in pool halls was young enough that I learnt very quickly from watching others. Unlike many young players, I was always very astute about watching good player's bodies as well as their shots. Stuff like keeping your head still, even/symetrical frame, consistent shot rhythm etc. Combine this with lots of practice and you can get very good very quickly (especially when young).

Match play is a much harder skill to get good at. Keeping your standard up under immense pressure is the hardest feature of all cue games. Some people are just not cut out for this aspect of pool/snooker imo - I know plenty of league guys who are close to pro standard with no pressure involved, but put a ton of money on it and they suddenly get very poor (and vice versa in the case of lazy hustlers who mess around with no money involved but suddenly get very good with a stake on a game).

I guess try and have a few handicapped money matches against good players and see how you do if you want to improve this part of your game - imo this is a skill that can only be learnt by years of blood and sweat actually being out there getting your hands dirty in very high pressure games (and even after that some players just don't seem to be able to stomach it).

Excellent thread, thanks Wamy

Awesome read keep them coming

I've hustled some at pool not for much but me and my mate used to get a free night out everytime we went in a certain pub like you say about light hearted banter keeps them wanting more

Some of the biggest games I ever played with strangers outside of pool halls usually always started as games based around buying drinks in bars and pubs. As people often buy their friends drinks, they don't really look at is as gambling – more an extension of their happy go lucky drunken night out.

At first.

Just like any good casino operator or live poker player knows though, once you get people gambling for something – anything in fact – you have done most of the hard work. Although a drink seems on the face of it to be a meaningless thing, it does not take long for the brain (particularly an increasingly drunken brain), to start seeing this previously very friendly unit of gambling currency as the cold cash it really is and for the usual instincts to chase losses and increase the stake to surface.

Games that start over small things like drinks will usually get big very quickly off their own accord if you get the right player, and often the key to bar hustling is not even to suggest money games, but to let your opponent's convince themselves to ask for them by stimulating their gambling desire using arbitrary units that appear to lack value but actually do.

Yeah spot on if we asked anyone if they wanted to play for £10 or £5 it was no but ask to play for a drink it's allways yeah

One time 2 very well known rugby league players came into this pub and we played them for drinks just beat them around 30 mins later it was for £40 each and in that game to add insult to injury we 7 balled them (for anyone not in the know over in england the general rule if you 7 ball someone they have got to run around the table with there pants around there ankles) and fair play they did it all the pub watched laughing and they left soon after but both come over shook our hands and said well played

heh, funny story. which players?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/rug...ct-charge.html

Funny that it happened why they was banned for betting on there own team lol

Sorry for going ot wamy

ahhh, i should have known. gleeson was in my local falling over drunk a few months back and 7-balled some kid i know. it was pretty funny to watch

On taking your cue in.

Many people brought up on watching films or playing in local leagues for no money instead of grinding in pool halls often seem to consider the act of taking your cue into a new pool hall as some grandiose act of treason, one that goes against the fundamental and beautiful trickery essential to hustling players in new halls. As with bad poker players and their classic 'weak means strong' mentality, the opposite is actually the case usually, and it is not only correct to take in your equipment when going into new halls, often you should be taking as much of it in as possible.

To see why this is true, just think of how rich amateurs in any sport actually behave (golf is the best example imo but there are many more). The first thing they do is go out and buy every possible piece of high tech equipment they can.

No pro is particularly worried about an unknown who walks in with an expensive cue and other accessories and wins a few games – if anything they start licking their chops at the sight of new meat for the grinder; but an unknown who can pick up a house cue and actually play is always a much more dangerous proposition – for the simple reason that anyone who can actually play will almost always have their own cue by that point, and is pretty much always hustling in this spot as a result.

I actually have a box full of all the crap accessories of pool for just this reason. Gloves, chalk holders, fancy patterned cases that don't protect my cue, balls with red spots to show screw, immaculate condition expensive cues of the makes that pros use, I even have this stupid laser accessory that claims to help you hit the right part of the object ball (play with that up on the table for a bit and enquire about money games and you will be fighting off offers from every player in the building).

The only exception to this rule is basically amongst players who are using house cues themselves. Here they will feel apprehensive about tangling with someone who has their own gear, and you are better off just sticking with a house cue (don't worry too much – these players are usually so bad you could beat them with a broom handle). Other than that, you should feel no concern about taking in your cue – if anything take in as much stupid gear as possible if you are looking to entice action in a new environment.