Quote:
Originally Posted by youtalkfunny
Never felt better about my game. If I step up to the table with 4-6 wide-open balls left, I'm running out way more often than not. I'm not even consciously deciding where an object ball needs to be struck, my hands and eyes just do all that automatically now.
Joining a new league, starts this week, so excited, hope to compete for MVP...
...oh, this league plays on 9' tables? Better practice on one of those, for a change.
First hour: can't run three balls. Literally. I warm up by rolling out three balls, BIH, and run out in numerical order. Once that's too easy, I go to four balls.that progression usually takes a minute or two. Today it was close to a (very frightening) hour!
I was doing much, much better after the second hour...but dreams of MVP have been put on hold!
Really been struggling on these big tables since jumping over a few weeks ago. Was hapless first night of league play, the lack of confidence brought back the yips (I missed a very simple BIH shot!), exacerbated by the fact that my new team was all friends of mine, and my brain was thinking "Watch THIS, guyz!", instead of focusing on the shot.
The other team was terrible, tho. Seeing I did not need to fear a run-out every time I missed a shot, I stopped worrying, settled down after dropping the first two racks, and won the next two...but with a satisfactory 3-2 record in sight, I Yipped/dogged away the last rack.
I walked away thinking, "Well, at least I left plenty of room for improvement! I'm gonna call that one my preseason game, my first time under fire in a while. I won a couple of racks...we can BUILD on this!"
But I knew it starts with confidence, which requires competence...so I went back to fundamentals. I broke out the Capelle book that helped me so much, and opened up to the "set up these simple shots, and just make 'em over and over" section.
The first shot called for you to put a ball near the second diamond, a few ball-widths away from the rail, and cut it in.
I overcut it.
Set it up again, missed it in the exact same spot.
Then a third time.
After a few minutes of this, I began to see the problem. On a small table, a ball this far from the rail looks like its out in the middle of the table; on the big table, it looks like it's practically hugging the rail!
I wasn't just seeing THAT shot wrong. I was seeing ALL shots wrong!
I adjusted, finished the drill, confidence soared, and shots started falling from EVERYWHERE!
we just played our second league match. I still yipped a few shots, but not nearly as many, and none were gimmes, and none were on the last few balls...and I went 5-0!
I can still get better, too. That's exciting.
Last edited by youtalkfunny; 09-22-2016 at 08:33 PM.