Saftey to clinch 6-2 season record, a personal best

This is a safety shot I made this past Monday night at Duke's. I was playing in the second match of the night, against a SL3, and was really under pressure to come through with a win because we were only going to have three players total (lots of people out of town). Peter, our SL7, had played first, winning his match six games straight vs a SL3. I won my lag, but as I recall after the break it was one of each down with no real shot on anything. I flubbed a difficult combination, handing an open table over to my opponent. Long story short, I lost the first game with four balls left on the table. Infuriated, I racked the balls and buckled down for the long, hard slog ahead of me (my opponent was on the hill, one win away, whereas I needed four wins). The second game was a little more even, my opponent was on the 8 ball and I still had two solids, but I played a safety and forced her to go for a difficult bank. She ended up making it into the wrong pocket, an S8 tying the match 1-1. At the end of the third game she whiffed on a shot, giving me ball in hand and an easy runout to make it 2-1. I don't remember how I won the fourth game, only that she was on the 8 at one point in it, a fairly easy cut shot but with an awkward reach over the table. She lined up for the shot, then had to back away from the table for a second to recompose herself, nervously fanning herself. She missed it and I ran out to make it 3-1, hill-hill. As I broke to start off the final game, I overheard behind me one of her teammates, who had lost to Peter and was now leaving the bar, say to my opponent (aloud), "Kick his ass." I kind of looked over at my team with a kind of "Was I supposed to hear that?" expression. Needless to say, it fired me up a bit. And so with one stripe left on the table, the 9 ball, I was forced with a dilemma (now you can go to the diagram above). As you can see, from C1, I could have cut the 9 ball into the upper left corner pocket. But that's not my kind of shot. If I was closer to it, then maybe I would have gone for it. But if I had missed she would have likely run out. Since the 8 ball was blocking the opposite corner, I knew that if I could pull off what I like to call a "trading places" safety with my 9 ball–hiding the cue ball behind it and blocking her view of her 7 ball–this would force her to go for that dangerous 5 ball. So I hit the cue ball with some follow and watched as the 9 ball rolled back downtable, perfectly eclipsing the 7 ball from where the cue ball came off the head rail. She looked it over and went for the full-table bank on the 5: a difficult inside angle with a potential double kiss of the cue ball off the side. And she almost made it, missing by only a few inches. So it was a bit of a gamble but it paid off big time, with a cinch of a runout for me. Once I made my 9 ball in the side pocket I heard her mutter to herself "C'est la vie" as I lined up for the easy 8. I wasn't the least bit upset that we lost our third and final match. Sure, it would have been cool to say "We won 3-2 with only three players present." But in the end, for all we brought to the table, we outscored them 11 games to 4. Barring any draw as a Wild Card in the playoffs, we resume league play September 21.

Running out the Season

Just a quick update for the ol' blog, sorry for my lack in posting. The summer session is wrapping up, we've got two more weeks to go. As a team we've kinda hit a rut. We're 4-7 with five of those losses being our last five matches. In other occurrences of the number 5, I got bumped up to a SL5 for the 5th time. And I've had a pretty decent season at 5 wins and 2 losses (this means that I'm guaranteed a winning record even if I lose my last two matches–I'm the only player on the team for whom this is true). Only real low point of the season for me was this week. I was psyched about being a SL5 again, and I wanted to play somebody I was pretty sure I could beat, such as a weak/beginner SL3. But at 7:15 I was the only player on my team present so I absolutely had to play. And it was the opposing team's captain, a former SL6, who went up against me. So I was definitely grumpy about that, shooting and having to mark my own innings, no encouragement, etc. Then it seemed that everybody on my team showed up at once, and it just spiraled downward from there. Oh well, that's being a captain for you. Two more weeks and then we'll get a nice chance to rest up before things pick back up in the fall, which is my favorite time to play pool. These might be the last days of the "Sophie's Crapshot" team-naming mishap, and I'm pretty excited about the new name we've conjured up. Stay tuned. (Above is Peter Leung, our resident SL7, playing at Parkside Lounge on the first match of the season, June 1st. We won the match 4-1)