bank the nine

PoolSynergy -- 10 Pool Photographs

2011-08-15T10:00:00.003-04:00

I'm pleased to participate in the August 2011 edition of PoolSynergy, a monthly collection of the best writing about pool on the internet. As longtime readers of this blog know, I lived in New York City from 2000 to 2010, and was an avid pool player the last five of those years. I lived in Lower Manhattan, which probably has the highest concentration of pool bars anywhere. I'm now teaching photography in my hometown of Wichita, Kansas. My wife and I are new parents so I've definitely cut down on my pool playing. So it's with great fondness that I look back on my time spent in the bars playing pool. My contribution to this month's PoolSynergy report is a selection of ten of my favorite pool photographs (click each image to enlarge).

Rivertown Lounge, 2001. This was taken with a Widelux camera, which has a lens that swings from left to right. So that's why my friend Aristide's pool cue looks like a flimsy rope as he's taking a shot. If you look closely you can see the cue ball is in the picture twice.

Soho, 2006. When your subject is to pool bars in NYC, your pictures quickly start to get a bit repetitive. So one afternoon as I was walking by this place called Milady's I noticed the reflections, and I thought it gave the picture some depth, a bit of an abstract dimension.

Grand Billiards and Cafe, 2006. This a pool hall that no longer exists. The funny thing is that I lived only a few blocks away and didn't know about it. I loved that I walked in there one day, told the owner what I was doing, and without hesitation he let me take pictures.

Edge Bar, 2008. This was during a fun Monday night league match at Edge Bar in the East Village. That's William Fuentes on the far right, who had set up his camera on a mini tripod to get a group shot with Jeanette Lee. I captured his flash by setting my camera on bulb, and anticipated his flash. I had a great chat with Jeanette, she even bought me a beer.

Doc Holliday's, 2007. Oh boy, Doc's. I would say that Doc's was my favorite "happy hour" bar. It's in the heart of the East Village, and I would go there and have couple half-price beers before heading over to Sophie's. This is a picture of a nice couple who wanted to play a quick game, even though I was next on the list. I said "Sure, but you have agree to let me take a few pictures." I think I ended up playing them doubles.

Welcome to the Johnson's, 2002. This is from a hole-in-the-wall bar called Welcome to the Johnson's, on Rivington Street in the Lower East Side. I wasn't playing pool back then, but I happened to be seated right next to the table and it just seemed to be a really photogenic scene. This picture is probably the first image that put the idea in my head that pool could be a subject in and of itself. This is a good example of capturing a moment despite it being a very, very dim scene.

Musical Box, 2007. I like this shot because the guy is standing in the doorway of the rear patio of this bar, having a smoke while watching his match.

Sophie's, 2006. This shot, to me, sums up the mystique of "A stranger walks into a bar." I feel like this picture could illustrate an essay about pool hustlers. This is actually a friend of mine, Ludo. I like the way his hat shields his face and gives the image a timeless, classic feel. There's no era-indicative information in the picture, such as the Buck Hunter video game or the juke box, that would hint as to when it was taken. It actually has kind of a 70s vibe.
Whiskey Ward, 2006. This was probably shot at 2 or 3 in the morning, on a night when I was out way later than I should've been. And actually, it was the one of the few times I actually played for money. I played in a doubles game where each player put up $5. My partner and I cleaned up, winning several games in a row.

Sophie's, 2005. This is one of my favorite shots of Sophie's, primarly because it shows the entire bar, or at least the back part. It was taken with a 4x5 camera, using big clunky tripod and everything. It was an intentionally long exposure, probably at least 10 seconds. I was going for a certain type of blur effect. I like all the ambiance around the table. This was taken long before I was a regular there, and I think the fact that I gave them a print of this picture meant something to the owner, Bobby. I grew to really love this bar, and eventually became captain of one of its teams.

RIP

2011-01-05T23:37:00.001-05:00

Hiatus

2010-11-28T22:50:00.004-05:00

I scanned this image recently and I wanted to share it with you. It's from my last match as Sophie's team captain (my last NYC match, period, for that matter). From left it's Arek Banasik, me, Adam Friedstein, Josh Vietze, Peter Leung and Grace Mangum. Missing from the picture is Freddy Molina and Giovanni Rivera.

I am now a proud father to a little boy, Julian Hites Conover, and my wife and I are moving to my hometown of Wichita, KS, where I will begin teaching photojournalism at Andover High School in early 2011. Hopefully I will resume blogging a bit from there, from time to time. But for the most part I am on a pool hiatus. However, I do suspect we'll be getting a much bigger apartment, one with plenty of room to spare for a pool table of my own. To be continued...

(Photo by William Fuentes, September 2010)

Runout to 2nd B&R in consecutive matches

2010-07-29T15:03:00.009-04:00

Here's the end of a runout I had during my match this past Monday night–the second consecutive match in which I completed a Break and Run. It's pretty surprising, considering I've never had one before in my four years in the league. My B&R from two weeks ago was a lot more messy and flukier: after opening with a B&R I then went on to lose the next three games. But this past Monday's was part of a much stronger effort, and I convincingly beat my SL5 opponent 1-4. My only loss in the match was an S8 when I hit a kick shoot too hard and my cue ball followed a pocket-hanging 8-ball into the pocket. But after this runout I went over to where my team was sitting and I overheard an onlooker sitting at the bar complimenting me aloud, "Nice job, looks like you got outta there clean without moving any of the furniture."

Risque Billiards

2010-06-03T18:04:00.004-04:00

In early April I discovered a new poolhall, Risque Billiards in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It's located at 213 McGuinness Blvd. So if you're in Long Island City, you're just a 10 minute walk away across the scenic Pulaski Bridge. If you're in Williamsburg it's between Calyer and Greenpoint Avenue. I'm embarrassed to admit that I only noticed the place because I was sitting in my car across the street eating Taco Bell when I saw the Risque awning with the word "billiards" on it. Alas, my visit to Risque was cut criminally short due to the fact that I needed to get back on the road. But I definitely want to get back and spend a proper hour or so on one of the tables. I counted nine or ten pool tables and about six ping pong tables. There was a nice lounge area up front for watching sports on television, and what looked like a staff of waitresses going around serving drinks. It's a nice and cavernous venue, unassuming, and the manager whose name escapes me (Mike? He's in the photo up top, to the far right) was terrific. He was wearing a necklace that had a golden racking triangle. A real look-you-in-the-eye kinda fellow, I want to thank him for letting me come in announced and allowing me to take some snaps.

Long Kicks

2010-04-16T15:22:00.002-04:00

This is series of shots I made during a solo practice session several weeks ago at SoHo Billiards. For the most part, I'm going to let the diagrams speak for themselves (as always, click to enlarge). Whenever I go in to practice I always find myself practicing safeties. This time was no different, and getting out of this initial safety (shot #1) turned into a really interesting and challenging scenario. I would've loved to have been with another person to discuss this. In my opinion, shot #4 is the best shot of the series. Sure, #2 and #3 were nicely made kick shots (albeit at pocket hangers), but the aim and speed on #4 had to be just right. After #4 is where I went against my own rule that I always tell my teammates, which is "Don't try to be a hero." In #5 the angle on the kick was way too thin and I ended up hitting the 8 first and breaking up the cluster. Instead, before taking #5 would it have made more sense to just pick up the cue ball and hand it over (or, to take it back one step, doing the same after shot number #2)? Or how about about intentionally shooting the cue ball into the 8 and nudging it closer to the 2 ball? Lots of scenarios, lots of outcomes.

M1-5 Lounge

2010-02-03T15:40:00.000-05:00

I would say there are three main kinds of pool bars. One is the kind of place that you try to frequent as often as possible, and perhaps might even do so without any desire to play pool. Those are very rare. Second is the kind of place that you hear about, visit once and never return. Those are pretty common, but still important. Then there's a third kind of place, the kind of venue that stays on your radar for a while, a place you might visit three times in four years. Down in Tribeca, at 52 Walker Street between Church and Broadway, is one such place. It's called M1-5 Lounge. I've been there three times. The first time was probably in 2006 or so to check the place out because I had seen it listed as a venue on an APA league schedule. The second time was soon thereafter when some friends of mine in a band were performing there. Then a few weeks ago I was at a nearby bar, Whiskey Tavern, with my friend Richard Khavkine, when we decided to have a nightcap and a game of pool there.

Walking by M1-5, you could easily pass it. From the sidewalk you can't really see inside because there's enclosed foyer/hallway area. The only thing that might give it away is people smoking outside, or the doorman checking IDs. Upon entering the space you quickly see that it is absolutely cavernous. I'm guessing it's in the range of 4,000 square feet, with super high ceilings to boot. During my recent visit, the place was not very busy. We had the pool table all to ourselves for several games but eventually it filled up and we began to get some challenges for the table, via quarters placed along the rail. Two women in their very early 20s wanted to play pool, but didn't want anything to do with playing doubles with two very old dudes. I did what any gentleman would do and gave them the table to let them deal with whose quarters were whose.

I definitely recommend a visit to M1-5 at lease once. The place is pretty dark but it's spacious and the seating around the pool table is very comfortable. I recommend it for a neighborhood pool tour, perhaps including other nearby bars such as Toad Hall and Tribeca Tavern. A nice review of M1-5 by Ethan Wolff's for NYMag can be read here.

Kick out of safety to (fluked) return safety

2010-01-15T12:01:00.003-05:00

This is one of the more difficult shots I've ever attempted to diagram. A lot of it, in terms of ball routes, is improvised. But the gist is that it was an amazing shot to witness, even if it was somewhat of a lucky roll. This is a shot my teammate Adam made a couple weeks ago during our final match of the winter league session. He was on stripes and his opponent had just played a safe off the 3 ball, leaving Adam blind on his 14. My teammate Josh and I were sort of muttering to one another about what we thought he should do. My idea was that Adam should go for the kick but do it softly so as not to break up the 14 and the 8, so that even if he didn't make contact it would be no big deal. Josh was thinking Adam should be more blatant about it and just pick up the cue ball and hand it to the other player. Adam declined a coach and went for it, missing his ball entirely and scratching into the nearby corner pocket. With ball in hand, his opponent played another safety, effectively giving Adam another chance at the same shot he had just taken. So Adam lined up the shot, hitting it fairly firmly as I recall. I can't remember if the 14 was frozen (I don't think it was) but the cue ball double-kissed off of it and then went two rails–again, hard to diagram from memory. The 14 went somewhere in the middle of the table. All I remember is watching the cue ball roll slowly back to rest more or less where the 14 had been a few seconds earlier. But it actually ended up closer to the 8, leaving his opponent in a far more difficult bind than Adam had been in. So with ball in hand Adam ran the table out to put us up two games to nothing. I had played a strong match earlier, defeating my opponent three games straight. Adam's win gave us the momentum to close it out, and we ended up taking the evening 3-2 in the fourth and final match (we only had four players for the whole night). It felt fantastic. Because not only did they have their entire roster present (playing on their home table, I might add) but they were the top-ranked team. We ended up not getting the postseason wildcard but we did end up with a winning season, 8-6.

Doghouse Saloon

2009-12-24T16:44:00.004-05:00

I've been sitting on this picture of the pool table at Doghouse Saloon since around mid-October or so. The quick back story for you is that I had walked by a week or so earlier, noticed a new sportsbar-type sign posted outside and a couple construction guys standing by the entrance having a smoke. They were in the process of renovating Annex and transforming it into Doghouse. I asked by chance if there was to be a pool table and they confirmed this.

So several days later I was killing time on a Friday night before going out to a party in Williamsburg. As I recall it was quite early, maybe not even 6:30PM, when I went in. The only people there were a couple guys playing beer bong on the ground floor. I was happy to discover the pool table was in an upstairs game room area. I quickly grabbed a beer and played a solo game and that was that. The table was in excellent shape, although it cost two dollars per game to play on it. The space immediately reminded me of a double-wide, frattier version of The Skinny just up the street on Orchard. By the way, Doghouse is at 152 Orchard, a few doors above Rivington Street. Combined with Sixth Ward and Lucky Jack's, I'd definitely say this pretty much cements Orchard Street's status as the most pool-friendly street on the Lower East Side. For a more in-depth breakdown of the Annex-Doghouse transition, check out the excellent neighborhood blog Bowery Boogie. (Note: the image above is an assembled panoramic from two separate photographs)

Kick out of safety to 8-ball bankshot

2009-12-15T15:59:00.004-05:00

I have to hand it to my opponent, Jay Transue, who made this amazing shot last night during our match at O'Hanlons Bar. Neither of us had our own cue, nor teammates, so we were sharing a house cue and marking our own innings. It was a race to three games and I think at this point we were tied one apiece. I was on the 8 ball and could have banked it cross side, but I decided to play a safety instead. So I hit into the 8 softly and had it come off the rail and stop perfectly between the 7 and the cue ball, leaving him no access to his 7 ball. So as I'm taking a sip from my beer thinking I've Got This In The Bag, he's looking over the kick shot. I thought he'd have little difficulty making contact with the 7, so I wasn't quite preparing for ball in hand. But not only did he make contact with the 7, he drilled it into the far corner. The cue ball rolled downtable and stopped across from the 8. My diagram might be off, I think the 8 might've been closer to the rail, but no matter because he made that shot, too. In the next game I had an early 8, losing the match 3-1. He bought me a consolation shot and I toasted something to the effect of "I'll lose like that any day of the week." Nice game, Jay.

40C is now Batista

2009-11-11T13:39:00.003-05:00

Several weeks ago I noticed that a new venue had been added to our fall session APA roster. The name of the bar, Batista, was unfamiliar, but the address, 40 Avenue C (at 3rd Street), definitely rang a bell. That's because the bar located at 40 Avenue C used to be called 40C and had since been renovated and renamed Batista (you can click here to read my brief review of 40C, from nearly three years ago). I'm a few months behind in reporting this, and many thanks to EV Grieve for the information. According to a photo posted on EV Grieve, of a note posted to the front door, here's what the situation at 40 Avenue C was as of August 14, 2009:

"Thank you for coming to 40C....

You may notice some changes over the next few weeks: we are busy transforming 40C into our new vision, "Batista." This new space will become an L.E.S interpretation of a 1950s Havana Cafe & Bar. Batista will retain all of the energy that 40C had, but with a new look, some food and lighter atmosphere.

So there you have it. I learned that the Monday team now playing at Batista is a recently relocated team, from ten or so blocks up Loisaida Avenue, where they used to play at Musical Box. I'm not so sure about the intended "1950s Havana" vibe at Batista, but the atmosphere is definitely lighter now than when it was 40C. Actually, the very first place I was reminded of walking into Batista was Whiskey Ward. The two bars share nearly identical layouts: bar on the right, seating all along the left, high ceilings, exposed brick walls, DJ area and restrooms in the back near the pool table.

Artifacts

2009-10-31T18:12:00.002-04:00

My teammate Jules just sent me these two images of Sophie's, circa 2000 or so. That's her lining up a shot in the bottom picture, and a former teammate of mine, Dave, is shooting up top. I love the couple making out. Other than the cigarette smoke wafting through the air, a new light above the table and perhaps the addition of a few more stickers, not a thing has changed. Enjoy.

Brady's, Upper East Side

2009-10-09T16:45:00.005-04:00

It's been quite a while since I've gone out of my way to check out a bar specifically for its pool table. Brady's on the Upper East Side of Manhattan is one such place I'd been meaning to check out for some time. A few weeks ago I had my chance when I was in the area to check out the Robert Frank exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Walking from the 6 train east toward the Met, the idea popped into my head to do a search on my Blackberry to see if Brady's was nearby. Since the Met is at Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street, it was definitely a "cha-ching" moment when I learned that Brady's is also on 82nd, at Second Avenue. By whatever stroke of fate you want to call it, the UN had taken over the museum for a private event that night and so I did a 180 and went straight to Brady's.

The only thing I knew about Brady's going in is that it's where the Manhattan APA wildcard picks are made. Knowing it was a league-friendly bar, I had somehow put it in my head that Brady's would have at least two pool tables there. Alas, there was only one, but I was impressed to see a couple was playing on it, as it wasn't even 4:30 PM. I overheard them talking about pool and one glance at their game was enough to tell me that they were playing league rules. On a bulletin board nearby there was a poster announcing the National Amateur Pool League (more on this topic some other time). Eventually I went up and asked if I could play the winner, not wasting any time in mentioning that I, too, was a league player. Some polite chit-chat and a few innings later I had won a decidedly lazy game, somehow leaving my opponent with three balls on the table. I let the couple have the table back. I wasn't there to put together a string of wins, I just wanted to get in a quick game and shoot some photos.

I was told Brady's is host to six teams. For this reason, I wouldn't mind going back some Friday night when there's a list to get on the table, just to get more of a feel for the "pool" of players who play there. In terms of the layout of the bar, and number of league teams, it's almost identical to Barfly (sans food and "pole"–curiously, Brady's bills itself as a "no short stick needed" pool bar). Overall, I found Brady's to be a pretty chill place. It had a bit of a time-worn vibe about it, a down-to-Earthness. I'm not surprised to discover, via Brady's website, that a bar has been at this same corner for over 100 years, and that it's been called Brady's for nearly half of that time. I don't really feel at home on the Upper East Side but Brady's is the kind of place I would probably gravitate towards if I lived up there. Beer prices were a little odd, I think I paid $4.50 for a Stella and then $3.25 for a Bud Light (both pints). Regardless, I need up my efforts and check out more Upper East Side bars. Hopefully, there are still more than a handful left that are similar to Brady's. (Editor's note: image above is an assembled panoramic)

Consecutive S-8s

2009-09-30T13:41:00.005-04:00

Talk about a fluky ending to an otherwise well-played match, I had two S-8s in a row on Monday night. I was playing a SL4 so I needed four wins and my opponent needed three. I got ahead two games, then my opponent won the third. I won the fourth game to put myself on the hill, then I blew it two games in a row when going for the 8 ball. In the first one (above), my opponent totally got lucky with this leave. I think he was going for some bank shot and when the balls stopped rolling he had inadvertently gotten a near-safety out of the leave. I should have shot this much more softly than I did. But the gap between the rail and the 15 was pretty narrow and I worried about the ball straying off line if hit too softly. So I rammed it and the cue ball went straight in after the 8. Since I was so close to the head rail I had to hit center-high on the cue ball, plus I think having to hit it rail first, a little left spin was imparted onto the cue ball and it just got sucked into the pocket. In the final game I totally take credit for this horrible cut angle. I had a pretty easy runout but I hit one ball too hard and was left with this severe angle. The 8 ball didn't even go in the pocket. Just awful. So combined with my loss from last week I'm already at 0-2 for the season.

Historic Pool Footage

2009-09-11T16:29:00.005-04:00

I have to give another long-overdue shout out to R. A. "Jake" Dyer, who's been digging up some excellent material over on his blog, Untold Stories: Billiards History. His most recent post is a must-see. It's of Jim McKay from ABC's Wide World of Sports paying a visit to Johnston City, Illinois, home of the storied Jansco Brothers pool hustler tournaments of the 1960s. Just watch it. McKay talks briefly about the history of the region, known as Little Egypt, and in particular a local legend about a gang war that took place in the 1920s. Fascinating stuff. But the real gem is Luther Lassiter's amazing two-ball runout in a game of one-pocket at the end. Priceless.

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

2009-08-26T17:01:00.007-04:00

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

2009-08-14T12:32:00.003-04:00

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)

Charlottesville, VA

2009-07-09T14:22:00.003-04:00

I can't think of any other time I've visited an unfamiliar town for such a short amount of time and seen so many pool tables. Charlottesville, Virginia is one of those places. In just one weekend I was there last month I stumbled across three places with tables. Unfortunately, I wasn't in town to play pool. I was there for the LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph. On the first night of the festival I went to a party at a bar called Rapture (pictured above). Rapture, situated on downtown Charlottesville's pedestrian mall, has full-size tables both on street level as well as on an upstairs level. While I was waiting for some friends to arrive I got in a quick game with two ladies who were playing one another. The next night I ate dinner at a place called West Main, and throughout my meal I could hear people playing pool downstairs. The last night I was in town I met up with my pal Howard Arnn, who was a great teammate of mine at Sophie's last fall and has since relocated to C-ville. We met up at another great bar on the downtown pedestrian mall called Miller's. I was asking him about both places and as it turns Miller's also has pool tables (a pool hall on the third floor). Next time I go back I will definitely venture upstairs at Miller's. From my online searches I've also discovered a place called Orbit Billiards and Cafe that sounds promising. Finally, there is a place on the University of Virginia campus called Newcomb Hall Game Room with pool tables, but unfortunately you have to have a University ID to play, which is a shame because it's only five cents per minute to play (two cents per minute on Thursdays). Click here for more information on the scene in Charlottesville.

Trading Safeties

2009-06-07T16:16:00.003-04:00

Here is a shot I made last Monday night during my match against a SL3. Without going into the details, my opponent had won the first game on an unintentional safety that resulted in him getting ball-in-hand on a pocket-hanging 8 ball. This put him one win away from the match, so I had to play the next two games extremely carefully. Before I knew it we had passed the one-hour mark. This is a shot I played in the final game, a kiss off the 8 ball to have it come off the rail and block my opponent's 15, leaving the cue ball as far away as possible. I was pretty happy with it and regretted that most of my team was out smoking when I made it. My opponent could actually see a little bit of his 15, but he slammed into the cue ball and ended up scratching, leaving me with ball-in-hand on the pocket-hanging 8. We took the evening 4 games to 1 and are headed home to Sophie's tomorrow night.

X Marks The Spot: My Summer '09 Pool Route

2009-05-29T18:11:00.004-04:00

Last night I went and picked up the Summer 2009 schedule for my APA division. The first thing I noticed is that it's a jam-packed division: 14 teams (the last session only had 8 or so). With only 13 weeks of play, that's a lot of criss-crossing the East Village. So just for fun I made this map to visualize all the venues in relation to one another. The big black X in the middle of this map is Sophie's, by far the most centrally located venue, and home court for my beloved team, Sophie's Crapshot. (Note: Originally it was supposed to be Sophie's Crapshoot, a reference to the inconsistent depth of our roster from week to week. But I've actually grown fond of the typo'd Crapshot because it fits in with bank shot, kick shot, etc. At the end of last season we tried to get it changed Mötley Cüe but I our request was ignored). Red arrows pointing away from Sophie's indicate away matches; green arrows pointing to Sophie's indicate home matches. Blue Xs indicate venues where we do not play. We start this session off at a place where I've never played a league match before: Parkside Lounge. And of course all the old regulars are present: Edge Bar, Ace Bar, O'Hanlon's, Identity and Whiskey Ward. But venue variety is the spice of life when it comes to playing pool, especially toward the end of any given session, and so I'm most excited about all the venues added back to our division: Josie Woods, Musical Box, Sixth Ward, Duke's and Mona's. I think for Sophie's our biggest rivalry is going to be Mona's. I say this because Sophie's and Mona's are "sister bars" owned by the same person with a lot of bartenders working at both places (two of which actually play for one of Mona's teams). Unfortunately we don't get to trade home/away games with them, both will be played at Mona's.

I never got around to writing an end-of-session post. But we ended up with an 8-7 record and I'm pleased with that. I've enjoyed the past few weeks off but I'm ready to dive into the summer session. Good luck, everybody.

Hook & Ladder II

2009-04-30T15:15:00.007-04:00

Over the past several years I've taken countless trips up and down Water Street via the M15 bus. As those of you non-New Yorkers might assume, Water Street pretty much hugs the waterline of Manhattan on its southeastern-most edge and runs right past the heart of the Financial District. Riding the M15 is always a pleasure because it goes underneath both the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, past all the old ships docked at the South Street Seaport, and eventually terminates at the Staten Island Ferry terminal. I was on the M15 a few months ago when out of the corner of my eye I spotted the neon signs in the window of an upstairs bar just off Water Street, at 133 John Street, called Hook & Ladder II. There's a banner sign out front that announces the bar is available for private parties and that it has a pool table. It's been quite a while since I've gone to a bar specifically to check out its pool table, and so a few weeks ago I did just that. The place is pretty small and definitely a no-frills zone. The first thing I noticed after walking up the stairs was the mix-matched red pool table with green rails. That, and the empty beer kegs over to the side pretty much sum up the place. But I certainly wasn't complaining. I ordered a beer and started setting up a rack, content to just hit some balls around by myself. But it was a slow Thursday night and before long the bartender came over and asked if he could play me, and so that was very welcome. We played a few games, chatted a bit, and I was impressed he knew about the APA. He pointed to a man asleep down at the other end of the bar and said something to the effect of, "That big guy over there plays on the league and he practices here all the time. I learned league rules by playing him." So of course I found it somewhat refreshing to find a place where pool is appreciated and talked about. I was expecting Hook & Ladder II to be a big cop or firefighter hangout, but I didn't get that impression. It struck me more as a dock worker kind of bar. From the outside, the building is pretty unassuming. The best reviews I could find for Hook & Ladder II were on Yelp. Apparently, and this is total speculation/assumption, there's a sister bar up in Murray Hill that simply goes by the name Hook & Ladder. I'll have to find out for sure if they're owned by the same people or what. The reviews for that bar have indicated the presence of a pool table, however it is mentioned far less frequently than the beer pong table. Stay tuned.

Safety to Forced Scratch-8

2009-04-09T12:34:00.003-04:00

This is a diagram (approximate, as always) from the final game of my match this past Monday night at Identity Bar. At this point we were down 0-1 after losing the first match. I was playing a SL3, who only had to win two games to take the match; I am now playing as a SL4 and therefore needed three games to win it. In this final game of my match I just wasn't getting very good placement and so I was resorting to safeties until I could get a good pattern. I still had four solids on the table and my opponent was going for the 8. It was my turn and I was considering my options when Peter came over and suggested we talk about a safety off my 6 ball. As you can see from the diagram, it was a pretty effective move to go two rails off the 6 and hide behind the 2 ball. The cool thing about the safety was that if I had hit it too softly there was going to be a strong chance my opponent would scratch in the side pocket (or, top center pocket looking at this diagram) if he had gone for the top left corner. He took a coach and they decided to kick into the 8 ball to go into the top right pocket (I think he had a little more room past the 6 ball into that corner than this diagram shows). But clearly they didn't think about "hitting wide" on the 8 because that was also clearly going to scratch. Admittedly, there's a lot of hindsight going on here. Another thing I should mention about this scenario is that my opponent's coach had his finger held to the rail to indicate where he should hit it. As in, finger on the rail even as the cue ball was hit and was well on its way toward the rail. David Ferrara, who was keeping score, immediately called him out on it but as the cue went off the 8 ball into the side pocket, it quickly became a moot point. Yet while it's never any fun to win when an opponent scratches on the 8 ball, I was definitely lucky to escape with the win to tie things up 1-1. Adam won the next match (also on an S8) to put us ahead 2-1. We lost the fourth match but then Josh came through in the end to win it for us in the rubber. A welcome change of pace from losing the past two weeks in a row. As it stands, we are 7-4 for the season.

Identity

2009-04-02T14:04:00.006-04:00

It's been a while since I've written about a specific bar that has a pool table. And one place that I find somewhat intriguing is an East Village bar known as Identity. It's on 6th and Avenue A, right around the corner from Sophie's. But looking in while walking past Identity, one would never know there is a pool table. That's because it's in the basement. And while you'd think Identity would be my kind of hangout because its pool table is somewhat of a secret, I've actually never been there other than league nights. I'm not sure I could go in on a Saturday night and play because whenever there's a party in the basement the pool table gets moved into a recessed storage space (visible at right in the photo above). What I really like about Identity is that when you play a league match there, that's all there is: two teams, a pool table and nothing else. In a lot of bars, league nights can be somewhat of a hassle due to the crowd that inevitably starts forming later on. But on Monday nights at Identity, we are usually the only people in the entire two floors of the bar. We had a stinging defeat there a few months ago when we played in the playoffs as a wildcard team. Josh won and then I followed suit to put us up 2-0, but then we lost the next three matches in a row to end our season. We ended up benefiting from that night, however, when one of Identity's players, Peter Leung (a SL7), expressed interest in playing on our team. I recruited him and we've had a good season so far. We play at Identity this coming Monday night so it'll be interesting to see how we fare this time around.

Winning Beginning

2009-03-17T14:30:00.001-04:00

Sorry to be dwelling so much on stats, numbers and other pool-related data lately. But we just passed the halfway mark of our league season last night and I'm happy to report that our record stands at 6-2 (there are usually 15 matches per season). I did some digging and went back to summer of 2006, when I first started taking team stats. For the first half of that season we had a dismal 1-7 record. Going forward from there we went 2-6 in the fall of 2006 and then we teetered back and forth between 3-5 and 4-4 for the next several seasons until now, when we've finally mustered the momentum to be well within reach of a 10-5, 11-4, 12-3 or (if we really, really focus) an unfathomable 13-2 season. I'm not going to get ahead of myself, as I'm sure we're in for some tough weeks (just two weeks ago we suffered a humiliating 0-5 breakdown). But I can sense something is different with this team. Not only do we have a full 8 players for the first time in I can't remember how long, but even our newest player has been in the league for over a year. In other words, we're a more mature team. I've brought in two veterans of the league (from outside of Sophie's), one is a SL5 and the other is a SL7. I've brought back a former teammate who took some time off recently. I've come to the conclusion that the success of a team is not based merely on the skill rankings of its players. Indeed, it requires week after week, season after season of watching one another play pool. And taking away something beneficial from a loss as much as gaining confidence from a win. I can tell a few of our players are shedding their need to "be a hero" by going for gutsy runouts and are instead taking simple, effective defensive/safety shots. Players are calling for their own timeouts more often, as opposed to the timeouts being initiated from the bench. That is so refreshing. Normally I am reluctant to talk about winning for fear of being too optimistic or that I'll jinx things. But it's become pretty evident that we're a team entirely capable of riding this wave for a while and fending off the usual self-destruction/burnout that comes with the second half of a season (especially during the spring when it gets nice outside). Knock on wood.

Player stats

2009-02-26T15:45:00.002-05:00

I'm pretty stoked about my new system for keeping track of my team's season stats. This image shows the new system on top, the old on the bottom. My old system was pretty much just all about me: who I played, how the games went, total innings, etc. Whereas my for my teammates, I would just scribble their stats in between rows. For example, if my teammate named John Doe who is a SL5 beat a SL3 with a score of 4-1, it would get written "JD5 W 4-1 vs a 3". This is all fine from week to week, but at the end of the season when I want to figure out how everybody did, it's a total pain going back through all that handwriting, line by line, searching for a given player's initials. I end up having to draw a grid on another sheet of paper and do a lot of extra tallying. So for my new system I started out fresh by giving everybody their own column with 15 boxes, one box for each week. And they're simple to fill in: a W or an L, the score of the match, and the opponent's skill level. It's much less writing and therefore much cleaner. Kudos to anybody who can guess what the X's and dashes are at the bottom of each box.

As for mid-season changes in skill level, I've overlooked including a place to make a note of it. Because the ratio of averages of my players' skill levels vs that of their opponents is significant. It's always been important for me to know that if somebody on my team had a bad season I can go in and see how tough their opponents were, and vice versa. Finally, and just as important, will be the total number of games won/lost vs simple match record. Using myself as an example, my match record is 3-0 this season (batting one thousand), but my total games won/lost record during those matches is 11-4 (733).

Sure, with this new system I sacrifice some detail about how I played each of my matches, such as any early 8s, whether I started out weak but rallied to come back for the win, etc. Anyway, I'd be curious to know if any other captains in the league do this end-of-season, highly detailed player stats report. I've heard of captains making photo copies of the scoresheets, or even using carbon paper. But that's mainly just to safeguard against any potential point-keeping errors made by the APA league operator (very rare). There's got to be somebody out there who brings a laptop each week and enters shot-by-shot data into a spreadsheet. Or am I the biggest pool geek in the city?

The Ghosts of Sophie's Past

2009-02-20T13:11:00.005-05:00

I'm not too sure of the details of this picture, when exactly it was taken or how it was acquired. All I know is that it's a picture taken in the storefront at 507 E. 5th Street, in the space that is now Sophie's. This past Monday evening at Sophie's, Jessica the bartender brought this photo out and several of us were gathered around it speculating as to when it was taken. We figured somewhere between 1890 and 1900, most notably because those appear to electric, and not gas, lamps hanging from the ceiling. Apparently the photograph was discovered by the current landlord of the building, who is related to some people who owned the building a few generations ago. Again, I'm sorry I don't know the specifics (and that this is such a poor copy shot taken with my cellphone). But me being the photography/history buff that I am, this image casts a certain spell over me. Never would I have guessed that this space has changed so little over the course of an entire century. I mean, it looks exactly the same as it does today (see below for comparison). The bar is in the same location and places to sit are on the right side as you walk in. Of course there isn't a pool table anywhere in this photo, and the windows in the back haven't been boarded up yet. But I just love the guy seated in the front all the way to the right and how he's holding his playing cards. It's definitely got a bit of a Jacob Riis "Bandits' Roost" feel, straight out of the pages of Luc Sante's "Low Life."

A Night of Pool at Sophie's, Part III

2009-01-29T12:11:00.003-05:00

Long-time readers of this blog might remember my first two forays into motion pictures, my experimentation with the Pure Digital Technologies "Flip" camcorder that resulted in A Night of Pool and Another Night of Pool. Shortly after I made those movies I ditched that camera (as well as iMovie and YouTube). Since then I've become much more enthusiastic about time lapse photography and other DSLR-created movies. This video you are about to watch is black and white still-photograph animation mixed with straightforward time lapse sequences. I've been doing a ton of time lapse lately (hardly any of it pool related) and this month I added a Meade motorized telescope mount to my arsenal. What this mount has allowed me to do is incorporate a slow (glacial, if I choose), planning sweep into my time lapses. But it's hard to set up at a place like Sophie's, I'm limited to whichever out-of-the-way spot I can find to clamp it down. Still, while these are early experiments and I feel that I have a lot of room to improve, I'm excited about the possibilities.

Sophie's Photo Roundup, Part Six

2009-01-13T16:55:00.006-05:00

Sorry for my lapse in posting. Not much to report in the pool world. We just finished our season last night, as a wildcard draw against the first-ranked team in the league. We got two games up but couldn't hold on for the win. So it goes. It's been about 10 months since I last did a photo roundup, so I am definitely long overdue. Enjoy.
Above is a picture of Jeff, who is easily one of the best players never to have played on a Sophie's team. I've tried recruiting him but he's not interested.
This is Josh from a few months ago when we met up for some three-cushion billiards at Space Billiards in Koreatown. This is something that we need to do more often. Josh has become one of the most dependable players I've ever had the honor of playing with. Dependable because he's there every week and also because he's got the chops for when it counts most. He just came off an 11-3 season.
Slima, from a few weeks ago.
This is one of our new players, Howard. I've been very happy to have Howard on our team. Definitely one of the most easy-going people ever, he's got a real genuine southern-Virginia personality. I'm hoping he's able to stick around for at least a few more seasons. This was taken at Whiskey Ward.
My old teammate Freddy from last spring, taken very late one evening. Freddy has a house down in Puerto Rico and is constantly telling me I should come visit. I know he plays quite a bit of pool down there...but at Sophie's, not so much anymore.
Chris and Grace from Sophie's with Julie, our division rep. I have no idea when this was taken, looks like a summer picture.
Caveman, who I haven't seen in quite a while. Still shoots a pretty good game of pool.
My current teammate Freddy from Colombia, left, who has been at Sophie's for quite some time, and Abdi, who is in his second season with us.
Finally, a duo of Englishmen with an Irish guy in the middle. These guys were batting me around like a pinball several weeks ago. Three great players with wonderful personalities to boot. From left it's Jason, Conor and Dave.

New View

2008-12-26T17:07:00.006-05:00

For Christmas, my sister-in-law got me a small spotting telescope and it's sweet. Where I usually live, the view outside my window is relatively mundane. So it's a good thing we are house-sitting this week for some friends who happen to live across the street from Soho Billiards. I was practicing focusing the scope last night and discovered that pool balls are excellent targets for this. Once I found a good angle, I tried taking a few pictures through the scope using the camera on my Blackberry. I was surprised it even came close to registering. The results with and without the scope are above. Definitely due for a visit to Soho Billiards this week, maybe I'll try a timelapse there. Happy Holidays to you all.

3D Pool: High Roller

2008-12-20T12:32:00.004-05:00

In July, Yvonne and I got ourselves some BlackBerry 8130 phones. She had been on a month-to-month plan using a phone she hated, and my plan was charging me 20 cents per text over my 100-per-month limit. So we signed up for a new joint plan, charged up our new Blackberries and haven't looked back since. In addition to having all my emails forwarded to my phone (a luxury I can't imagine ever living without again), I've spruced up my device by adding a 4GB media card, switching to an iBerry theme and downloading a couple useful applications. TwitterBerry is my current favorite, but before that it was a pool game called 3D Pool: High Roller. The game features a couple different modes of playing to choose from, Career or Practice. Career is the one that allows you to play other people and unlock the rest of the game. In Career you start out in Monaco, then go to New Orleans and finally end up in Las Vegas. Throughout the Career mode, the opponents get harder and harder to beat as you advance. Same is true with the trick shots, which include jumping, swerving, making two balls in one shot, etc. Now that I have beaten every level and unlocked the entire game, I seem to have more options when I start up. So in addition to Career and Practice, I now get to choose Trick Shots (which is a collection of all 15 trick shots that are featured on all the levels of the game) and just simple Shoot Pool. This final choice is my favorite because it allows you to choose between one and two player, so you could theoretically play a friend sitting next to you at the bar. It also lets you choose the type of pool game (15 balls numbered, 15 balls red and yellow, or just 9 ball). And finally, it allows you to scroll through various shapes of pool table, from hexagon (as seen in the screen shot above), to L-shaped, to Z-shaped, etc. From what I can tell, the new version of 3D Pool: High Roller (updated October 21, 2008) features animated characters that you play against, as opposed to a still photograph of some model holding a pool cue. In my version of the game, I'd always be straight-in on an easy shot on the 8 ball when my opponent's picture would appear and I'd be taunted and challenged to go for a totally different pocket (of the opponent's choosing) for extra cash. I never once made any of these challenges to earn extra money, but by the time I played my last match in Las Vegas I had still amassed over $1 million. 3D Pool: High Roller is certainly a nice way to spend a long subway ride. And it's a game that's fun to put away and come back to, especially when it comes to trying to make a few of the more difficult trick shots.

Damn Right Your Dad Drank It

2008-12-06T18:27:00.003-05:00

I was flipping through an old issue of Rolling Stone today and this ad for Canadian Club Whisky jumped out at me. The headline reads "Your Dad Never Used a Bridge." The text of the ad goes on: "He didn't wheel his luggage. Drive an automatic. Or drink anything rimmed with sugar. He drank whisky cocktails. Made with Canadian Club. In a rocks glass. And if there was a cue around, he didn't have to pay for them." Well, then. I can see where they're going with the demographic they're trying to reach. I looked up the Canadian Club Whisky website and was impressed to find a kind of do-it-yourself advertisement maker that allows you to upload your own photos. However, it only allows you to pick from one of three template ads. And beyond uploading the main photo, it doesn't allow you to customize it too much. But it's still pretty cool. I tore the page out of Rolling Stone and will put it in one of the books in my small billiards library. This ad makes me think of the brilliant Errol Morris Miller High Life ads. Click here to view one of my favorites.

Recent Memorable Runout #2

2008-12-03T14:38:00.003-05:00

This is probably a bit of a stretch, but I'm going to throw this out there in case anybody wants to click on the image at left to see if they can follow a 6-ball runout I made Monday night. My attempt at panoramic timelapse was a disaster, so I just put the camera up high with the c-clamp and got the whole evening captured at one frame every 20 seconds. This is from the third game I played, against a SL3. We were tied 1-1 at this point and this runout put me one win away from taking the match, which I won. In the very top photo you can see the cue ball is very close to the orange 5 ball. That was my first shot of the runout, the 5 into the corner pocket. You can see that I hit it with follow and got straight-in on the blue 2 ball. Before taking my shot on the 2 into the other corner you can see me lining up the yellow 1 ball (third picture from the top). That's not a very high percentage shot, I'm not sure what I was thinking, but I felt unusually confident Monday night and had made a killer shot in my first match, so I guess I was on a roll. I pocketed the 2 and then cut the 1 across the table into the corner pocket and left myself perfect on the red 3, "threading the needle" and not disturbing my opponent's stripes. With the 3 ball it was a simple draw shot to get back in position on the maroon 7 ball. I hit the 7 softly and managed to nudge the 8 a little closer to the same pocket for a little last-pocket win. It felt great throwing my wallet onto the table to mark my pocket.

I've had a pretty crummy season and this was my first win in what feels like an eternity. And it was a continuation of our success from last week, putting us at 5-6 for the season with four matches left, three of which are at Sophie's. Here's to a nice home stretch finish.

Time Lapse Experiment

2008-12-01T14:05:00.003-05:00

Just a quick video showing about three hours of time lapse I shot a few Friday nights ago at Doc Holliday's. I had a pretty decent run toward the end, almost winning 8 in a row before my camera's battery died right after I had snookered myself behind my opponent's ball with my 8 hanging in the pocket. There's an unused cue rack at Doc's that works perfectly as a bracket for the C-clamp mount that I use. It's perfectly aligned with the pool table is up high and out of the way. I'm definitely going to be giving this another try, perhaps tonight during our match at Sophie's. I'm anxious to incorporate a slow, panning motion into the sequence as opposed to this type of static perspective. Stay tuned.

Port 41

2008-11-24T14:50:00.005-05:00

Alright, so a little bit of a false alarm regarding the sitch at Port 41. I wanted to set the record straight. I made the trek up there Saturday night to meet my friends Richard and Amy. I got there early and was a little bummed to discover that there was only one pool table, as opposed to the three I was expecting. And it wasn't a full-size regulation table, it was a coin-operated bar table set up for bills only ($2 per game). Whatever, with $4.00 Budweiser pints it basically evened itself out. The pool table is in the back room, which is cavernous to say the least. So that was nice. We actually spent more time playing darts way in the back, albeit with only two darts. And we had a somewhat inebriated fellow playing along with us, both on the pool table and at the dart board, so we were always kind of watching our backs with him around.

Port 41 is in the shadow of the Port Authority Bus Terminal and so there is a slight sketch factor, and I mean that in the best way possible–a toast in the vein of "I Miss The Old New York". Ninth Avenue/Hell's Kitchen is always interesting, especially at night. But it was fun. After darts I played the inebriated fellow in pool and I suggested we play for some money. I did catch somewhat of a lucky break when he miscued on a shot, leaving me with an easy three-ball runout. As modestly as I could muster, I shook his hand, shrugged as I reached up to grab the 10 singles above the table and told him I'd be back in the future. Then we were all off to Dave's Tavern around the corner, which I'll get into some other time.

Best NYC Pool Bar I've Never Heard Of Before

2008-11-21T16:25:00.004-05:00

My friend Richard Khavkine just told me about a place he visited recently in Hell's Kitchen, a bar called Port 41. I took one look at the pictures I found online and thought to myself, "I am totally there." I think this place has a lot of potential. Port 41 is located at 355 W 41st Street, on the corner of 9th Avenue. According to the Port 41 website, www.port41.biz, "The back room is loaded with free darts, three free regulation-size pool tables, which gives us the opportunity to organize a pool tournament every Thursday night. $10.00 entrance fee, last man standing." How cool is that? Did they say three free regulation pool tables? Green, red and black? I love New York City. Stay tuned for more details.

Stonewall Inn

2008-11-19T16:59:00.005-05:00

Back in May I had an assignment to photograph an DJ spinning at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. I was told by the promoter that the party wouldn't get going until 11PM. But because I had some photographer friends who were in town for only that night, I took my chances and showed up at the Stonewall a bit early in the hopes that I would be done by 11. I got there a little after 10 and as I entered the bar my eyes went straight to the pool table. I got some quarters, racked the balls and went over to two guys standing nearby and asked if either one or both of them would like to play. One guy readily agreed and so I gave him the break. There was no chalk anywhere to be seen, and by the look of the house cues' tips, there hadn't been any in a long time. Knowing it was going to be my only game, I just went ahead and played without asking the bartender for any chalk, and won fairly handily. Then I went upstairs and was pleased to see a large group of people, mostly men, dancing. About half an hour later I had gotten plenty of pictures and so I left. Walking back down the stairs I saw the same two guys from earlier were seated on the pool table. I told them to sit still as I grabbed a quick shot on my way out the door.

A Waste of a Pool Table

2008-11-18T15:43:00.003-05:00

I have been playing like total crap lately, haven't won a match in ages. But I don't want to dwell on the negative (or bore you to death), so I've got lots of loose ends and random pictures that I will publish instead. I'll start off with a slightly blurry cell phone camera shot taken a few weeks ago inside the John Varvatos store on Bowery, site of the former CBGB's. I'm not going to get into a rant about Bowery's ongoing facelift, but I thought this unused pool table was a bit sad. Granted, they probably don't want just anybody coming in off the street and playing free pool. But it makes me wonder if they even have the rest of the equipment–balls, cue sticks, etc.–like in some storage room in the back. Surely they must. It's not hard to imagine them playing a little pool after hours. Because Mr. Varvatos has been known to feature pool in at least one of his ads, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Congrats to Obama

2008-11-08T17:54:00.006-05:00

Clearly I've been spending more time following the election online than blogging about my pool exploits. Now that we've got a new president-elect, I'm ready to get back into pool-blogging mode. I recently revisted a post I wrote back in May, when Obama played pool at Schultzie's in South Charleston, West Virginia. Back then there was no video of the event on YouTube. But tonight I checked and was delighted to watch Mr. Obama make a few shots. What really adds to the video is the commentary. Listen for the female anchor to be shocked when Obama makes the cross-corner bank. The man introducuing the clip, who clearly knows poolspeak, erroneously calls a ball in hand on Obama, when in actuality it was just a missed bank. If you look closely, the best shot of the video–the one that really shows his skill–is when Obama has no shot and avoids ball in hand when kicking a full table length and back into his ball without scratching, leaving his opponent with little to no shot at all. It's about 35 seconds into the video. Pretty damn impressive. The video is embedded below, but I recommend that you click this link and watch it on YouTube in order to give the person who posted it an increase in video views. The photo up top was taken by Polaris photographer Scout Tufankjian, who spent nearly two years on the campaign trail with Obama. Way to bring it on home, Barack!

Recent Memorable Runout

2008-10-22T16:20:00.005-04:00

I haven't been playing very much the past few weeks. I played a SL7 in my match last Monday the 13th and got shut out five games to zip. That sort of rattled my confidence a bit. But can I just say that the guy I played had an APA player number HALF his age (00028, whereas mine is 09781)? I would guess that makes him close to a 20-year veteran of the league. It was my first time playing a SL7. This makes me wonder how much longer I'll be a SL5. I don't think SL6 is anywhere in my near future. In fact, I feel that I might be in danger of getting bumped down to a SL4 again.

Determined to get in as many games as possible over the weekend, I set out on Friday night with a vengeance, looking into every pool bar along the way up into the East Village. I ended up Doc Holliday's, pleased to see a few people I know playing each other. I got beat in my first game on an obscure house rule technicality that involves spotting your opponent's last ball if it's behind the line on a scratch (in general, I am opposed to picking up and moving any ball other than the cue ball). A little later on I played the doorman Brad and played miserably. Then I reracked and toward the middle of the third game I was feeling good. Brad had found a filthy penny on the floor and picked it up and threw it into a nearby trash can. I quipped something along the lines of "Doc Holliday's doorman exposed for throwing money away during financial crisis," to which he responded "Yeah, probably gonna have bad luck now." He shot and missed and this was the table layout I faced. I could have just pocketed the 10 but stopping the cue ball for the 14 would've been tricky. Instinctively, I noticed the cue ball angle coming off the 10 looked good going into the 14. So I called it "Cue ball off the 10, into the 14." Brad said "Uh oh, watch out for the 8!" I said "Nah, it ain't going anywhere." So I slammed into the cue ball with a little top left it went squarely into the 14. I was totally stoked when the 10 also dropped (it might have rattled in the pocket a bit, my eye was following the 14). And of course the icing on the cake was watching the cue ball travel three rails leaving me perfect on the 8. I made it and went over and shook the hand of a head-wagging Brad, especially pleased that a couple nearby had witnessed the runout.

One Foot on the Floor

2008-10-10T16:09:00.005-04:00

One of the funnier moments I can recall from late last season was when a dispute came about regarding the "one foot on the floor" rule. We were playing a team at Sophie's and a female shooter from the other team could not reach her shot. Since we don't have a bridge at Sophie's, Chris said something aloud, something along the lines of "The rules state that if the bar where you're playing doesn't have a bridge, then you can get onto the table to reach your shot." Effectively, he was saying, that the one foot rule goes out the window if there's not a bridge available. Our captain Marc mumbled something about how ridiculous that was, how Chris was stretching the real meaning of the rule, etc.

A few weeks later, at The Sixth Ward, the same situation came up and Chris offered his same interpretation of the rule. As you can see (above), this woman had no hesitation climbing onto the table to reach her shot. This was when Marc had had enough. I can't remember his words exactly, but basically he said "Chris, you're saying the one foot rule is waived if there's no bridge in the house. But the message you're sending to people is that if there's no bridge in the house then, by all means, go on and hop up onto the table and make yourself totally comfortable. You can even sit Indian style if you'd like." I hadn't laughed that hard in a long time.

Just for the record, here is what the APA team manual says regarding the rule: "At least one foot must be on the floor at all times while shooting if a bridge is present. There is no foul—simply stop the shooter and hand him the bridge. League Management cannot guarantee the presence of bridges, and some Host Locations do not have them. If a bridge is not available, house rules prevail. Exception: Players shooting from a wheelchair must remain seated in their wheelchair while shooting."

So it really boils down to that line above, which I italicized for emphasis. This is one of those grey areas that almost has less to do with rules than the etiquette of the game. Like no drinks on the table, don't leave quarters on the rail, etc. To be continued...

Paul Newman 1925-2008

2008-09-27T12:10:00.001-04:00

First Night Jitters

2008-09-23T15:57:00.009-04:00

I am pleased with our team's performance last night. We didn't win, but that's not the important thing. We lost 2-3 to a team from Ace Bar, playing at Ace Bar, on the most embarrassingly, atrociously imbalanced table in the world that ruled out any kind of soft, slow shots. The arc of some of the rolls was actually pretty sickening. We had a hard time adjusting and got off to a poor 0-2 start. Then Josh played third and won in a somewhat lucky fashion when his opponent, a very green new player, had ball in hand on the 8 ball and flubbed a straight-in shot. Josh then went on to do something that impressed me. He asked aloud how many timeouts his opponent had left. And when somebody said all timeouts had been used, he went on to play a pretty risky yet effective safety (the thinking being a gamble that she wouldn't know how to get out of the safety). And it paid off as she went for an unnecessarily hard kick shot out of the safety while her captain was forced to keep quiet. He got ball in hand and won to put us at 1-2.

Then it was my turn to play. Thinking we were going to be forfeiting the fifth and final game because we only had four players at that point, I was bound and determined to do my best to give us at least two points for the evening. I went up against a SL5, won the lag by the narrowest of margins, then lost the first game. I won the next two, then he came back to win the fourth and the fifth. Then I caught on fire and came back to win the last two to win the match 4-3. Their captain came over a few mintues after my opponent and I had shaken hands and said "We have it that you still need another game to win." I was almost furious. They had neglected to assign somebody the scoresheet and were instead playing on the other pool table. I was a little fearful that the mistake was ours. But then he said "You know what, it's not a big deal. I was over on the other table toward the end." Me being a little miffed that their scorekeeping error had killed the post-win buzz I'd been enjoying, I said "Look, I came here tonight with three dollars in quarters. I ran out and got one more dollar in quarters..." and then slapped the remaining fifty cents down onto the table. Three-fifty spent on pool is half of seven dollars with each game costing a dollar and split between both players. That ended that discussion.

By then Abdi had showed up so we knew we wouldn't have to forfeit the final match. Indeed, we were well within reach of a win. Abdi went up against a SL4 so he only had to win two games to his opponent's three. Abdi got off to a rickety start and found himslf down two games to none. But in the third he was dead-on for a cross-corner bank on the 8. I was coaching him and I could tell he didn't feel comfortable banking. But it lined up perfectly and I told him "Just use the force." He went on to nail it. I congratulated him on avoiding a shutout and told him he only needed one more to win it for him and for us. With the overall score of the night tied 2-2 and their match being tied hill-hill, I was impressed how he seemed to play with a lot more confidence under the pressure. Eventually he found himself with a two-ball runout for the win, with both balls close to side pockets. He made the first ball but then missed what normally would be a fairly easy cut on the 8 ball into the opposite side pocket.

After signing the sheets and walking down 5th Street back to Sophie's we had a chance to unwind at the bar. He was obviously still livid with himself, but I couldn't find myself thinking anything other than this: I was kind of glad he had missed it. I tried to explain to him how we had just come off like three or four consecutive 1-4 losses last season. And putting together a new team and starting out the first match of the season is always somewhat of a crap shoot. But we had come back from being down 0-2 and damn near won the match. Being able to say "We were an 8 ball away from the win," has a real nice ring to it. Him being so distraught, I told him "Hey man, I can only say 'What won't kill you will only make you stronger.' Look at how humbled you are. I am actually sort of glad you missed it. Because you are going to think about that shot for weeks. But next time you'll totally take your time on the 8, you'll ask for a time out, whatever. You're never going to miss that shot again in your life. You got it out of your system tonight." I think he understood what I was saying and agreed.

Post-break, back at home

2008-09-15T15:58:00.012-04:00

Wow, an entire month has passed since my last post. All I can say is that the end of the APA summer session has dovetailed perfectly with a two-week jaunt I just made through Europe. Most of my trip was spent with Yvonne in Warsaw, Poland, where she is from. But before our rendezvous in Warsaw I had traveled solo to spend a few days in Perpignan, France to check out a photography festival.

Needless to say, pool has been on the back burner the past two weeks. The only bar pool table that I saw my whole trip was in Perpignan. Unfortunately, there was what appeared to be a large stack of lumber on top of the table. Once I got to Warsaw I had a lot more time on my hands. One night Yvonne and her sister, Joanna, and I went to check out "Blue Club Billiards" (above). Basically it's a pool hall combined with a bowling alley in the basement of the library building at the University of Warsaw. As Yvonne and Joanna were getting us some drinks I racked all the balls in the triangle and moved the head ball over to the side of the rack several inches and set myself up behind the string for a straight pool break shot. I nailed it and got a nice scattering of the pile. The only other memorable shot I made was during a game of league rules 8 ball, me vs them, in which I gave myself the handicap of double banking into my last pocket. On the far left side of the photo you can see that I had come really close in an earlier shot, leaving my 8 ball hanging in its pocket. At some point soon after this photo was taken I made a sweet two-rails-around-the-table kick shot (approximately from where the purple 4 ball is in the photo) and pocketed the 8, albeit on a double kiss.

On my last day of the trip we went to Warsaw's equivalent of the Empire State Building, the Palace of Culture and Science. Inside, there was an exhibition on Albert Einstein that had some cool physics displays. My eye immediately went toward one in particular, a model of Newton's Cradle that utilized cue balls instead of the usual steel marbles. It's the image that will stay in my head this week as I try to get myself back into the game before league play resumes next Monday.

Team Names

2008-08-14T13:56:00.005-04:00

Last night I was walking along St. Mark's Place and noticed that nobody was sitting in my All-Time Favorite Spot To Read In A Bar, which is by the lone window at Grassroots Tavern. So I ducked in with a crossword puzzle for a couple pints. Grassroots does not have a pool table, but rather an exquisitely worn-down dart area in the back. Next to one of the dart boards was a sheet that had schedules, standings and a list of names of the teams in the New York Dart Organization. I found myself laughing out loud when I read some of the names, which I'll get to in a second.

It got me thinking about how for some reason Sophie's does not participate in the tradition of giving its pool teams names. In fact, the names of the teams I've played on at Sophie's are purely perfunctory: Sophies III, which was later changed to just Sophies and now I'm playing on Sophies 2. It would seem that with the correct inclusion of an apostrophe, along with a word from a billiards glossary, there would be a ripe scenario for a possessive team name like Sophie's Strokers, or Sophie's Scratchers. But I've never really been a fan of this cuteness. Maybe next season we'll just call a spade a spade and name our team what it is, Outdated Team Roster.

I downloaded all the PDFs from the NYC APA website and came up with a nice variety of my favorite names for pool teams. Here they are in no real order: Chalk is Cheap, Poolhall Drunkies, R U Kidding Me?, Tap Diss, Tap That, DV-8, Based on a True Story, ESL, Of Course We're Drunk, That Guy, Pigs Might Fly, What Ball Am I?, Can I Play First?, Amphibious Assault, Highs and Lows and Warriors of the Glen. The last one makes me chuckle the most. But I detect a slightly more irreverent sense of humor from the dart throwers than I do from the pool players. As for their team names, here goes.

Some dealt directly with the word dart:

Dartbags
Poison Dart Frogs
Dartles and Jaymes
Starving Dartists
Britney's Spears

Others dealt with hitting the bulls eye:

Bullistics
Shootin' the Bull
The Big Lebullskis

Some dealt with double and triple scores:

The Double-Inners
Big Triple Hunters
The Dirty Trees

Others dealt with the booze factor:

Bailey's Total Fitness
Armed and Hammered
The Wasted Mondays

Some had a hint of self-deprecation:

Nothing But Wire
No Clue
The Cork Suckers
Flight Risk
Blinded Sniper
Abusement Park

Apparently, a couple teams came up with names in the wake of the scandal involving our ex-governor:

Client #9
Spitzer Swallows

In the end, here are the ones that I think are funniest:

No. 1, No Onions
SweepTheLegJohnny
The Rabbi's Sons
The Taint
Mud on the Helmet
This is Why I'm Hot
Operation Bear Catch
Conker Hill Has Eyes

Vasmay Lounge has moved

2008-08-07T13:03:00.005-04:00

It's funny how every July when I go away to Kansas for ten days I come back feeling like I've been gone three weeks. I guess by now it's old news to report that Vasmay Lounge has moved two blocks west and now occupies the space formerly known as Essex Ale House (which was formerly 12" Bar, which was formerly Filthy McNasty's and on and on). I didn't know anything was up until a few days ago as I was walking up Essex Street and noticed a pool table inside the bar where there hadn't been one before. Yesterday I walked by again and stopped in to play a quick game. Something about the table felt familiar, I could tell that it was the exact same size and kind as the table at Sophie's. As I was leaving I noticed the chalkboard outside the bar said "Vasmay Style." Hmmm. So today as I sat down and started googling it wasn't hard to find out what had happened. I teeter between thinking "This bar is way too small for a pool table," and "Wow, that's cool they'd put a pool table in such a small bar." Of all the pool tables I can think of, this one takes the cake in terms of the space it occupies in relation to total floorspace of the bar it's in. But the fact that they have 2-for-1 until 9PM is quite nice. I figure it could very well go onto my list of places for night capper games. Although I haven't been by at night yet, when it's possibly too crowded to play, so the verdict is still out on the new Vasmay Lounge. Check out Mike Elwood's blog to get one insider's perspective on the transition. He's an avid pool player so I'd be curious to get his take.

R.I.P

2008-07-27T17:37:00.003-04:00

I was saddened to learn this weekend about the passing of one of Sophie's regulars, Ernesto Mendez. He was a Monday night league player, and a mighty fine one at that. I had been getting to know him a little better this summer as a member of his team, and I'd become fond of his pep talks to me during my matches. I'll remember his thick Honduran accent and the way he pronounced my name "Keddy." The last conversation I had with him was him advising me, "Just play your game, don't play his" (referring to my opponent). He will be missed.

Kansas in July

2008-07-25T15:00:00.010-04:00

I am sitting in a cafe right now in Wichita, Kansas, across the street from a place where last summer I wrote about my pool adventures in my home state. I've been up in Manhattan, Kansas all week doing the Flint Hills Publications Workshop. It's been a bit of a stressful week for me-it always is–but also very rewarding in the end. I haven't played a ton of pool, nowhere near as much as last year (click here, here, here, and here to read those posts). And I haven't been carrying my digital camera around at all (instead I've been relying on my new Blackberry to take some snaps of the places I've played). But it's been nice to find a couple new places to add to my Kansas pool repertoire.

Needless to say, my visit started out with some great pool with dad last weekend before the workshop began. The first night we played a few games of 8 ball, banking out, and some 9 ball. One of the best things about playing my dad is that whenever we change from one format to another he'll set us up for a lag to determine who gets the opening break. And of course his berating of himself whenever he misses a makeable shot is hilarious. The second day I was here I went to practice three-cushion at Sang Billiards. I was impressed that they remembered me (last summer I had given them my blog address and they had gone on to check it out and saw my pics from their place). Since then they've taken out three of their six tables to expand for their restaurant. But it still has the same calm and quiet, the same anti-poolhall vibe, and is very much a place I plan to visit again next time I'm back. That night my dad and I ended with a race-to-50 game of straight pool. I caught on fire with a several-ball run and was straight-in on my winning point (he was at 44 or so) when I showed some mercy and suggested we bank out. But doing so nearly cost me the game as I missed my bank and he went on to make a run that included an awesome break shot off the 15th ball. I had made a nice break shot earlier and was proud of him for his, almost as if it was his way of saying to me, "Back at ya." But he scratched a shot or two later, and we play ball-in-hand on a scratch, so I had an easy ball-in-hand cross-side on, appropriately, the 9 ball. The next day it was up to Manhattan, where I knew of at least one bar with a pool table, Mel's Tavern, near the hotel where I was staying. And I found a different bar nearby that has three tables, Finn's Pub, but I didn't take any digital pics of that. I will post the black and whites as soon as I have them scanned. I didn't play there, either, but I did see two people walk in with pool cues. My goal this year was to try to put in some time in the basement poolroom of the Kansas State University Student Union and I'm super glad I that I did because I discovered one of the best deals in Kansas. I just so happened to walk in on a Monday night after eating dinner, ten minutes before 6PM (no doubt the result of my internal pool clock synching in oneness with those of my teammates at Sophie's at the exact same moment) and was floored when the counter man said they had a Monday night special: DOLLAR HALF HOURS. And it just so happened that was exactly how long I wanted to play. So I went to a table in the back and just knocked some balls around. But about fifteen minutes later, my mind starting drifting away from pool and back to the realities of the workshop and so I gathered everything up and went to check out. Shaking his head in a you're-killing-me kind of way, he rang me up and said, "That'll be fifty four cents." Definitely something to remember next year.

Last night, however, was my first night back in Wichita. With the relief of having the workshop behind me and the incredibly comforting knowledge that I was going to be able to sleep in this morning, I went out for some pool against some Wichitans. I went downtown to Blue Lounge, which I think I've decided to designate as my new "Hometown Sophie's." I played two guys who had their own cues. I won my first game fairly easily against one guy whose name was Matt. Then I went up against Chris and lost when I scratched on the 8. Matt and Chris played and Chris won. I went up against Chris and lost with four balls left on the table. Matt didn't want to play so I played Chris again and nailed a cross-side to win it. Then I played Matt, messed up an easy runout and let him win it. That's when I left and was just sort of driving around when I decided to check out Walt's for a nightcapper. Walt's is not a pool table place. It's more of a cigar bar. But it's been a few years since I've been there, and so when I pulled up I saw what I thought to be a new bar next door to Walt's. It turns out that Walt's has expanded and converted an old private board room next door into a game area with two pool tables. This annex is called The Oak Room. I played a few games of straight pool by myself because nobody in the room wanted to play. While the ambience there comes nowhere close to that of the Blue Lounge and other cavernous downtown venues in buildings with 20-foot ceilings, Walt's has these killer smoke-removal fans that are simply brilliant. In fact, I wonder if Mayor Bloomberg was even aware of them when he pushed his smoking ban through NYC in 2003. Oddly, I can't find these fans anywhere online. At any rate, my dad is out of town this weekend so I'm thinking tonight another visit to Walt's is definitely in order.

Jeanette Lee bought me a beer

2008-07-08T18:50:00.006-04:00

It was a total treat to meet Jeanette Lee last night during our match at Edge Bar. At the beginning of the match, the other team's captain, William Fuentes, came over and asked me if I had my camera with me. I said I did and he went on to tell me that Lee would be stopping by a little later in the evening. Sure enough, about a half hour later, Lee arrived and casually began introducing herself to everybody. Eventually she walked over toward me. I extended my hand and said "What's up, Jeanette Lee?" We chatted briefly. I told her I had read through her book at Barnes and Noble a few times. The most memorable line from the few chapters I read was one where she talked about the importance of developing a smooth, consistent stroke. She wrote that she wished she had spent more time developing a slow backswing and perfect timing, "instead of practicing goofy bank shots." So funny (and true). She was very nice, very down to earth, and it made my evening when she asked if she could buy me a beer. Practically a household name, Lee is an icon. She's instantly recognizable to anybody who's ever watched professional pool on TV over the last 15 years. She's a consummate professional and one of the sport's most cherished celebrities. And she's a native New Yorker. Now living in Indianapolis, she was in town yesterday to do something for ESPN. Which is why she had some leftover headshots and was giving them away. Below is a copy of my souvenir shot. She is friend of many players in the NYC area, including Fuentes. Special thanks to Fuentes (in triptych at right and pictured above with his team, "Get In The Hole"), a very keen lensman in his own right, for being so generous and allowing me to piggy back on his group shot. Click here to check out his blog.

I beat Billy Idol in pool

2008-06-30T10:53:00.006-04:00

I am sitting here using some anonymous neighbor's WiFi while waiting for a technician from Verizon to come check the DSL. Since Saturday afternoon we've been without our regular service and it's gotten old real fast. I do see that the blog here is in desparate need of an update, so I'm going with a quick visit I made to Two by Four a few weeks ago. It was around 11pm on a Saturday night and I was killing some time before I was to go to National Underground to watch a couple of my old neighbors play a live set as part of their new trio called The Pleasure Model. Long story short, the trip to Two by Four was was an impulse decision, likely because my bank is right across the street and I had gone to get some cash. There was nothing too memorable about the inside of Two by Four, with the exception of the guy I played (above), who had an uncanny resemblance to Billy Idol. He even had a bit of the lip curl thing going on. He had requested a bunch of Iron Maiden on the jukebox and it was amusing to watch him rock out as he was playing his friend. It was easy to see he was a bit of a wreckless shooter, hitting the ball too hard, not calling caroms, going for low-percentage banks, etc. Once it was my turn to play him he didn't slow down one bit, especially not when "Run to the Hills" started kicking in. At one point he made an incredible masse shot that I would never have tried. Slowly but surely I wore him down by shooting and ducking, never leaving him a shot on his one solid at the other end of the table. At the very end of it all I made an extremely thin cut on the 8 ball. His friend came over to compliment me on the shot and I said "Thanks, are you next?" He said "Nah, we gotta go put coins in the parking meter outside." A few minutes later I went outside to see what was taking them so long, and of course they were nowhere to be seen.

Nuances

2008-06-18T13:36:00.010-04:00

I want to clear up a few things regarding an argument I had with a player this week at Sophie's. It was during the third match of the night and we were down 0-2. I had lost earlier, in the first match, and had been replaying scenarios in my head from my match and was pretty pissed at myself for some of my poor decisions. My apologies to everybody for the temper tantrum. But what I want to write about is infinitely more interesting than anything else I've got lined up for the blog this week, so here goes.

Basically we're dealing with a post-safety situation. Like I said, it wasn't my match, so the details of ball placement, table layout, etc. are a little sketchy. All I remember and took note of is where the opponent's two stripes were. I got out of my seat just to see what all was frozen. I saw that the 10 ball was frozen and that the 9 ball clearly was not. In hindsight, I should have announced this to both players. But doing so didn't really feel like any of my business, as it wasn't my match--I was simply curious. The opposing player lined up for a long kick shot into the 9 ball. But he missed the 9 entirely and the cue ball came rolling back up the table and rubbed off the 10. I said something like, "Shouldn't that be ball in hand?" Apparently, because I hadn't declared it frozen earlier, it was a mute point.

Here's what the APA rulebooks says about frozen balls:

"The ball-in-hand fouls are as follows: ...

c. Failure to hit a rail after contact. A rail must be hit by either the cue ball or any other ball after the cue ball and the object ball contact ... A sentence that should answer many questions is: ANY ball must go to a rail AFTER LEGAL contact. [capital letters not mine]

d. The object ball is frozen to a rail and the player is contemplating playing a safety. In order for the following frozen ball rule to be in effect, the opponent must declare that the ball is frozen and the player should verify. Once it is agreed that the ball is frozen, then the player must either drive the object ball to another rail (of course, it could hit another ball, which in turn hits a rail), or drive the cue ball to the rail after it touches the object ball. If the latter method of safety is chosen then the player should take care that he quite obviously strikes the object ball first. If the cue ball strikes the rail first or appears to hit both the rail and ball simultaneously, then it would be a foul unless either the cue ball or object ball went to some other rail."

Reading the wording of that rule bores me to death. And it gets murky, especially in the case of this shot, when one tries to define the term "object ball." Intended object ball or incidental/accidental object ball? Long story short, I got into it with this player, self-righteously calling myself the only one in the room who was "hyperobservant" enough to check beforehand. He admitted that he was going for the unfrozen 9 ball, but he kept countering my argument by saying that my lack of audibly declaring the 10 ball as frozen was a negation of any right to claim ball in hand. Whatever, it's probably one of those "you had to be there moments." At any rate, we lost that night 1-4. So one lousy ball in hand dispute probably doesn't sound like it would have made any difference. But it would have. This match I'm describing was close, it went hill-hill. In fact, each of the first three matches we played that night all went hill-hill. And during my own match, I begrudgingly gave up a ball in hand, against my instincts, when nobody came to my defense. It seems like the whole match hinged on these kinds of small, tiny nuances of the rules of the game.

Week 2

2008-06-10T14:40:00.003-04:00

Lots of good thoughts running through my mind today. I'm still feeling really good about the summer APA session, my new teammates and playing on Monday nights. We had our first away match last night and we won 4-1 (the team we played, from Identity, only had four players show up, so one of our wins was by forfeit). When I picked up the sheet on Sunday I must say I was a little humbled to see that I had gotten bumped down to a SL4. But it is certainly fair and much deserved, as I simply have not been keeping up any sort of regular practice regimen. It was no surprise considering my dismal 3-7 record last season. On the other hand, it was a little bit of a relief last night to only have to win three games, against another SL4.

My opponent said he had played in the league before, but that it was a long time ago. This made me skeptical, but I didn't ask him what his skill level had been. I couldn't help but overhear, however, as I was taking a few practice lags, him going over the basic rules of the league with his captain. I lost the lag by about an inch and it was a stinger as he stayed put at the head of the table chalking up as I racked. But halfway through the first game I was on a three-ball run and I nailed a cross-side bank and intentionally didn't look to see if it went in. It did, and in my peripheral vision I could see him sort of shake his head and adjust his stance in slight discomfort. Little by little, small clues kept coming into my head as to this guy's true league experience. At one point in the first game he missed his ball entirely and the cue ball went whipping around the table, hitting no balls at all. Just to be courteous and safe, I asked out loud to anybody, "Ball in hand?" That's when I heard my opponent say to his captain, "I thought if you hit three rails it wasn't ball in hand." I don't care how long ago it was he played on the league, but I certainly think that's one rule he would have remembered.

I won the first game with a soft shot into the side pocket. Pretty soon we were nearing the end of the second game and I only had the 8 ball left on the table when he hit a shot too softly and nothing hit a rail. He seemed a little confused and annoyed when he realized that meant ball in hand for me. As I made the no-brainer shot on my 8 to go up 2-0, he said something like, "It usually takes me two games to warm up." Then, as I was putting my final dollar into the table he asked me, "Do you mind if I just hit these last few balls in?" I gave him a sort of "Hello?!" look and said, "Well we're sort of in the middle of a match right now." His captain chimed in and said it was too late to be taking warm-up shots.

Now, many times I've admonished my teammates, when they're playing a weak opponent, "This is easily going to be the easiest match of the season for you." But I refused to let myself think that about this match. Because at any point I could have lost a game and that certainly would have affected me mentally. His best shot of the night was a safety and it was suggested to him by a coach during a time out. I tried to kick out of it and the cue ball went flying off the table. We went back and forth an inning or two when he left me with a fairly easy runout scenario. After sinking my final 8 ball I went over to shake his hand and then went to sit down. That's when, as they were trying to figure out who to put up next, I heard the captain murmur something to the effect of "That guy's a 4?" It was my first win in over two months, since April 8th. And it immediately called to mind my most convincing win ever, which was my first league match ever, in February of 2006, when I crushed another weak SL4 three games straight in less than ten innings. Doing so must have raised a few flags at the APA office, because the next week I found myself ranked a SL6. Even though that only lasted a week, it was still kind of fun to brag about. I do wonder how long I'll get to be a SL4. Hopefully it'll last more than one week.

Should have seen it coming

2008-06-04T15:14:00.008-04:00

This past Monday night was my first time playing for the Monday night Sophie's team. I won't get into the specifics of the team's dynamics just yet. It's very early on and I just want to see how things play out. But I have to say, I feel pretty good about this season. We won our match, 3-2, at home against a team from Sixth Ward. I played second, after AJ had won his match decisively against a SL4. We all decided that I should play, just to get my name officially onto the roster. I was not pleased when they countered by putting up their captain, also a SL5, who I would venture to say was by far the best player on their team. In a race to four games, he got up to a quick 2-0 lead. In the third, he got an early 8. I won the 4th game to tie it up 2-2. He won the 5th, I came back to win the 6th, tying it yet again and taking it to the rubber match. Long story short, the above diagram was my last shot of the match, an unfortunate scratch on the 8 ball. I had marked the pocket in the bottom left corner and was sizing up the angle for this difficult reverse cross-corner bank. I kept eyeing the other corner pocket, worrying about where the cue ball would end up. I put bottom right english on it, and just hoped for the best. Unfortunately, not only did the 8 ball not even come close to going in, but the cue ball caromed off the 5 ball straight into the corner pocket. I most certainly should have hit the ball softer. Doing so would have likely increased the rebound angle of the cue ball coming off the rail and probably have sent it straight into the 5. The same with the 8, it probably would have come off the rail with a much less severe angle and gone more toward the corner pocket. It was frustrating, of course, but I don't feel that I played poorly overall. I made what I thought were some pretty good shots, one killer kick shot and another kick-to-safety that ended up sinking two of my stripes. In each of the two games that I did win outright, I ran out the table on three-ball runs, one of which required precision stop shots with that lumbering, massively oversized cue ball. All told, I felt it was pretty good pool: seven games where the lead went back and forth throughout an efficient 20-inning match.

New Sophie's listing in NYM

2008-05-26T14:46:00.004-04:00

I had forgotten about a slow, non-league night this past winter at Sophie's when a photographer came in and started taking some pictures. I quickly learned that the photographer, Shanna Ravindra, was shooting pictures for New York Magazine's online bar/nightlife listings. I chatted with her only briefly, but once she told me her name I soon realized that I had used a few of her shots on this blog in the past, most recently in posts about Musical Box and Julep. For whatever reason, it wasn't until just the other day that I thought to look and see if anything had been posted. Sure enough, Sophie's newest listing was online. I was happily surprised to see that I'm in a few of her shots. Sophie's is a no-frills bar, and she definitely did the best with what she was given to work with. Bruce Bennett offers an apt description of waiting to play pool:

Sophie's has made no concessions to the surrounding neighborhood's nightlife boom. No poetry slams, couches or cappuccino here—just split shifts of professional drinkers and Bukowski wannabes by day and dressed-down locals staring and pairing by night. In this narrow, immaculately decrepit space the only stick of furniture you can trust is the pool table, though if you come during the night shift you'll go through quite a few Yuengling Darks (the cheapest pint east of First Avenue) waiting for your turn to play.

The Skinny

2008-05-22T12:26:00.004-04:00

Just a quick post from the "Wow, I've walked by that bar a million times and never noticed a pool table before" department. This is a bar called The Skinny, and it's on Orchard right near Stanton Street. That block of Orchard just below Houston has been a big construction mess for as long as I can remember. Keen readers of this blog will remember me writing about that block and the long-demolished Rivertown Lounge here and here. A couple weeks ago Yvonne and I took Aris to dinner at our new favorite Mexican restaurant, El Nuevo Amanecer, on Stanton and Essex. Afterwards, before Aris went back to his car to go back to New Jersey, he and I decided to grab a quick beer somewhere (not to play pool). So we stepped into the nearest place, which was The Skinny.

Yes, the bar obviously gets its name from the dimensions of the space: it's long and narrow. But the first thing I noticed is the lofty 20-foot ceilings. And the reason I'd never noticed a pool table before is because it's way up in its own little loft area at the back of the bar. If there hadn't been a couple up there playing when Aris and I walked in I probably wouldn't have thought to check. Needless to say we played a couple games, more or less so I could get some pictures for the blog. It's a little cramped up there around the pool table, but at least they have a couple short cues for when you're up against a rail. By far, the biggest draw is the cost, at $2 per game (bills only). I think I saw something, however, where it gives you an option of getting three games for five bucks. I'm pretty sure it was a Sunday night, so it was by no means crowded. The DJ was playing some excellent tunes (in particular, some old Rush) in a loft at the front of the bar, above the entrance. I don't see myself ever going back to The Skinny, solo, to challenge people at the pool table. But for when I'm with somebody else and we want to play pool without having to go onto some long list, The Skinny is a good bet.

A Presidential Candidate Walks Into A Bar...

2008-05-13T11:13:00.004-04:00

While checking out the headlines this morning, this photo of Barack Obama playing pool grabbed my attention. The photo, taken by Jae C. Hong, is from a place called Schultzie's in South Charleston, WV. It was fun to try to track down some details about his game. Apparently, his pool game isn't too shabby. I can tell as much from this photo: he looks comfortable with a pool cue in his hand, he's got a nice bridge. I had long known Obama was a lefty, from this great video interview with is brother-in-law Craig Robinson, who attests to Obama's sportsmanship on the basketball court.

At Schultzie's, Obama played a 24-year-old Iraq war veteran named Paul Scott, who is a supporter of Obama's. Apparently Obama lost the game by knocking in the 8 ball prematurely. A crowd had gathered to watch him play. By his third consecutive good shot Obama had the crowd oohing and ahhing. At one point he even made a combination shot. "That's the sign of a misspent youth," Obama said with a smile. "Obviously, I wasn't doing wholesome things like bowling." (Apparently Obama's basketball and his pool are much better than his bowling.)

Playing Last

2008-05-09T15:12:00.008-04:00

Even though I've only been in the league two years, I think I have a fairly good grasp of every imaginable league-night scenario. There are so many ways of looking at wins and losses. For my Tuesday night team at Sophie's this season, it's most often been a matter of looking at how bad we got beat. Certain kinds of matches feel certain ways. For example, there's the feeling of being the only winner on your team on a night when your team loses 1-4. Then there's the opposite, the feeling of losing when everybody else on the team wins. My text messages to Yvonne afterwards are always some variation of "I won but we lost" or "We won but I lost." This past Tuesday my text message read "We lost, thanks to me."

It was a roller coaster night. Grace won the first match decisively, beating a SL5 2-1. Then the second and third matches went way south, with a combined score of 1-7 (via our SL3 getting whupped 0-2 by another SL3, followed by one of our SL4s losing 1-5 to their SL6). In the fourth Chris came back to tie it, setting up a rubber match showdown.

Now, this is where the title of this post is relevant. It would have been easy for me to sit out the evening and put up an iffy SL3 against the SL5 they had put up. But since I had sat out the previous week, I wanted to play. And I had a really long and productive practice session the night before so I felt good. I decided to put myself up. Somehow after nailing a nice cross-corner bank on the 8 I found myself ahead 3-0. But I'm not sure what happened after that. Obviously it was something to do with my will/nerve/resolve being stretched to the limit. Because at one point I overheard Chris say to somebody "Cary's ahead 3-0 and only needs one more," and I remember wishing he hadn't sounded so confident, it felt like a jinx. Then, somebody I hadn't seen in a long time had come in and was wanting to ask me photography questions. So I had to do one of those pretentious "not right now" stiff-arm gestures in the fourth game as I was trying to close the deal. Of course I lost that game and felt like a total ass. And I kept allowing myself to get distracted by looking over at the television to follow the shrinking percentage by which Obama was losing Indiana.

A couple games later on I overheard Chris tell somebody else "Cary won the first three and the other guy still needs two more." I cringed, not wanting an announcement of the score. Looking back, I remember playing some remarkable safeties that elicited some encouraging cheers from my teammates. One time after one of these safeties, my opponent picked up the cue ball and handed it to me. At which point I played another safety right back at him. I don't remember making any gigantic mistakes. No repeated gaffes when down on the 8 ball, not really any scratches that I can think of. In fact, I felt it was one of my best matches of the season. The games were all pretty short and I have to say the match had a nice, efficient rhythm to it: games alternated between exactly three and five innings throughout the entire match.

But my opponent just bore through it, eeking out wins, chipping away at my lead and confidence the entire time. Never once did I get a real opening to bring it home. I have to hand it to him, he exhibited tremendous do-or-die poise to be able to come back from such a deficit. The last game was a blur, I don't remember much other than praying he'd miss the final 8 ball (it went in for the win). In a shake-it-off lighthearted moment afterwards I made a joke to somebody, saying how intimidating his British-sounding accent was (hands down, the best players I face in bars are consistently from either England or Ireland.) I apologized to the guy who I had stiff-armed earlier, and was happy to hear him say he totally understood. I pleaded my case to him what a seemingly airtight win I had just blown. He, and fortunately others on my team, were of the thinking that "it happens," and I got some nice compliments along the lines of my matches being enjoyable to watch.

Still, it's been three weeks in a row now where we've lost in the final match. If the past three weeks had each gone just a little differently in the end we'd be at 6-7 instead of 3-10. Hardest of all is that in two of the last three weeks I've been the one to play last. Lesson learned? Perhaps make some other people play last. It just seems like our team has gotten into a routine where certain people always need to play first or second, whereas on average I play far later than everybody else. This season alone, I've played last six times, fourth twice, third and second once apiece (never played first). Then there's the whole "Well Cary, maybe you should drink less beer during league nights." But I do truly pace myself before I play, and usually just nurse an entire beer or seltzer water throughout my match (unlike some people I've played with who pull out cash and bark out drink orders when things aren't going their way).

I think I just have a limit on how much pressure I can take before I get tired of playing and start losing my focus/determination. Seven games of league pool under the pressure of the rubber match is a long time, it's not uncommon to go over an hour. This week I often found myself thinking about how tense it must've been for my teammates to sit there on the edge for so long. This is all something I need to work on, especially as a SL5 playing other SL5s or higher. I hope in the next season, under a different captain (I'm 99 percent sure I'll be switching to Monday nights at Sophie's), things will be different. Then again, we're looking at a roster comprised of the following Skill Levels: 6555443 plus room for one more (compared to my current team's roster of 54444333). There's going to be some late, late nights. Hopefully the outcome of some of those late nights I'll just wait to find out the next day.

Countdown

2008-05-06T15:42:00.002-04:00

In about an hour I'm heading over to Sophie's for the last match of the winter/spring 2008 APA season. We began this season three long months ago, February 5th, which was Super Tuesday. I can't say it's been a pretty season for us: we're currently sitting at the bottom of our division with a dismal 3-9 record. All I can muster is a ho-hum "Oh Well." Based on private conversations with each of my teammates, I can tell this Tuesday night team is likely going to be going into a forced sabbatical for the summer. I'm estimating at least four or five of our members are not going to re-enlist on Tuesdays. Captain Caveman has already filled out the summer registration form, but I don't think he sees the reality of the situation. I think people have been too nice to tell him they're not coming back. There's going to need to be a massive recruitment effort to fill those slots.

Personally, it's looking more and more like I'm going to a.) either start a new team somewhere else or b.) get on the Monday night team at Sophie's. I have been talking people up at my potential new location (TBA) and it's reassuring to know I have the blessing of the management there. My only issue with starting a whole new team at an entirely new venue is that it puts a lot more responsibility on my shoulders. I would hopefully enlist the help of some experienced players who already know the routine of league nights (mainly picking up and dropping of the sheet and collecting everybody's dues, etc.) That way if I had to work or something it wouldn't be leaving an entire team of first-timers in the dark. It's really tempting to join the Monday night team at Sophie's, where I could just show up and not have to worry about coaching/captaining/management decisions. Only issue with Monday at Sophie's is they are pushing the 23-rule. They're a little heavy on SL 65&4s.

After tonight I think I'll have a better idea of what's going to happen in late May. To be continued...

Disgusted with myself

2008-04-23T15:55:00.008-04:00

Yesterday was a stressful day for me. I had an important assignment lined up last night in Long Island City and I knew that I might have to miss our match (at Musical Box). Our team was short-handed as it was so and it was looking more and more like we'd be forfeiting the fifth match. After getting the sheet over to Sophie's around 4PM, I headed home to get ready for my trek to LIC. Then my phone rang and I decided to take a last-minute assignment that, if I was lucky, would only take 30 or 45 minutes. So I ran off to shoot that and very fortunately the timing was perfect, such that I got my shots and was able to walk back home and still have plenty of time to transmit before leaving for the second assignment. The trip to LIC went smoothly and the assignment there went very well (I even walked out of there with check in hand!). But it was 9:30 by the time I got to the 7 train and I was worried I might not get back in time to play. Fortunately, the trains were running on time and I made it to 13th and B just after 10. When I got there I was stoked to discover Abdi and Slima had convincingly won their matches; both had shut out their opponents. Chris was well on the way to winning his match, ahead 2-0 against a SL5, only one game away from winning it for us. But stuff went south and the SL5 caught fire and came back to win four games in a row. It was tough to watch.

Needless to say, that put the pressure on me to do well in the rubber match. It was their turn to put up, and they put up a SL3. I lost to a SL3 last week and it wasn't pretty. Since I am a SL5, I had to win four games whereas my opponent only had to win two. Somehow I lost my grip and my opponent won the first game, putting him one away from the win. But I hung on to win the next three games in a row and was in the final game of the night when I got to this seemingly simple runout (above). I wasn't quite straight-in on the 2, and I wanted to be sure the cue ball came off the rail and back toward me slightly so that I would have an easy shot on the 8 into the upper left corner pocket. I decided on some bottom left english. But as the title of this post suggests, I flubbed it horribly and hit it with a hard/jerky/pokey stroke and the cue ball drifted forward and to the right. I was left with a horrible angle on the 8. It was makeable but I was afraid of scratching into the top center pocket. I ended up under-cutting the 8, and put stupid right english on it (I think bottom english would have been okay to just pull it away from the long rail). My opponent went on to make two pretty nice shots to win the match. And I have to hand it to him, he stayed focused on the 8 where it would have been easy to collapse under pressure. Still, all day I've been thinking about how much I would have preferred to have sunk that 8 and scratched into the side, as opposed to just plain missing it and having to go back to my seat and watch him run the table. One way would have just been bad a roll, but the way it ended up played out was just a slow, painful death.

Turn the River

2008-04-21T15:13:00.008-04:00

News of an upcoming pool-related movie arrived in my inbox today, thanks to fellow league player Sui Ming Louie. "Turn the River" is the name of the movie and now that I've seen the trailer I will definitely being going to see it. Famke Janssen plays the main character, Kailey Sullivan, who is struggling to get custody of her son. I will post the full review below, from Variety. Here is the website for the movie. And a lot of other stuff can be found on this facebook site. Make sure to look at the behind-the-scenes pictures.

Unfortunately I missed an advance screening of the movie last night at MoMA, which would have been fun to attend. But I see that it opens in New York on May 9th. I sent an email to the movie's producer, Ami Armstrong, who got right back to me. She said they're still waiting to get a full rundown of all the theaters that will be playing Turn the River, but she said that Village East will definitely be one of them.

I immediately recognized Brooklyn Billiards in many of the scenes from the trailer. In fact, when I went to Brooklyn Billiards last year there was a print on the wall from the movie (above), but I mistakenly thought it was a scene from one of the "Men in Black" movies. There's a different pool hall that I didn't recognize, featuring tan-colored pool tables, that looks like a nice place to play. Armstrong said it's Break Bar and Billiards in Astoria, Queens.

Sui Ming mentioned that Tony Robles makes an appearance in the movie, playing a character named Ralphie. Robles was also the technical consultant for the movie. There was an interesting shot on the facebook page that shows some thought went into filming of the shots:Finally, here is the review from Variety:

By RONNIE SCHEIB
Chris Eigeman's highly accomplished writing-directing debut, "Turn the River," is a meller/thriller about a poker-playing pool hustler trying to score enough money to run away with the son she was forced to abandon at birth. Down-and-dirty character study seems a stretch for Eigeman, who, as an actor, practically patented rich and smug, and a curious starring-role choice for elegant Famke Janssen. But atmospheric pic positively vibrates with authenticity, and Janssen's intense, febrile perf earned a special jury prize at the Hamptons fest, where pic also garnered screenwriting laurels. Taut femme "sports noir" could build an enthusiastic indie following.

Hanging out with the guys in a small town in upstate New York, Kailey (Janssen) ekes out a living playing poker, periodically driving into Gotham to hustle pool games and check up on her gruffly protective mentor, Quinn (a wonderfully world-weary Rip Torn), who runs a hardcore hall.

Quinn also serves as a mail drop for Kailey's secret correspondence with 11-year-old son Gulley (Jaymie Dornan), their exchanged letters unbeknownst to Kailey's rich, mama's-boy former husband (Matt Ross). Kailey is determined to wrest her son from the toxic clutches of her alcoholic ex-hubby and his domineering mother (Lois Smith, in fine, steely form). Kailey's quest to raise $50,000 for fake passports that will allow them to head to Canada provides the impetus for the bulk of the film.

In casting a woman in a traditionally male role, Eigeman subtly shifts both genre and gender. His heroine adopts the iconography of the hustler movie, but feminizes it: The image of a woman camping out on a pool table reads less as rugged than vulnerable. When Kailey gets beaten up, it's not for being a hustler but for being a woman, as male rage explodes on the barest pretext.

On the domestic sudser side, even at her most radiantly maternal, Kailey's mannerisms have a somewhat masculine directness as she instantly drops to her knees to welcome her enthusiastically running son, or brusquely engages him in escape mode. Janssen's Kailey exudes a survivalist energy and wrong-side-of-the-tracks physicality quite distinct from the fetishized superheroine the actress embodies in the "X-Men" movies.

Janssen effortlessly carries "Turn the River," interacting with barmaids and waitresses and scoping out poker bluffs and pool marks. But unlike alpha-male hustler films (like "The Color of Money"), there is little virtuoso shot-making on display. Instead, Kailey relies on Quinn to gauge potential opponents based on her talent. Sometimes strung-out, brittle and rash, and sometimes vibrant, confident and in control, her game mirrors her ability to cope with an environment that reveals itself as alternately feral and protective.

Tech credits are aces. Hernan Michael Otano's lensing ups the contrast between Kailey's naturally nocturnal environment and a daylight so unforgiving it actually makes her vomit from sheer stress.

Camera (color, widescreen, 16mm-to-HD), Hernan Michael Otano; editor, Michael Lahaie; music, Bryce Dessner, Padma Newsome; production designer, Paola Ridolfi; costume designer, Erika Munro; sound, Chen Harpaz; casting, Todd Thaler. Reviewed at Hamptons Film Festival (competing), Oct. 20, 2007. Running time: 92 MIN.

Sophie's photo roundup, part five

2008-04-18T12:13:00.013-04:00

It's about time to post some recent photos from Sophie's. Regular visitors to the blog know the routine, there's no real rhyme or reason to any of these, they're just pictures I've taken at Sophie's recently. Our team has pretty much been in last place most of the season, but I hope these pictures reflect our laid-back attitude. Above is Adam (far left), then one of his friends smoking (can't remember the name), then Chris in the middle and then of course Caveman. Off in the background you can see Grace.
This is Abdi, our newest player. He joined our team on the fourth week of this season to replace Freddy, who has been in Puerto Rico all season. I heard Caveman say that he has given Freddy his word that there'll be a spot for Freddy when he gets back. I don't know who is going to step aside so that Freddy can just walk back on. Sure, longevity is one thing. But in my book, if you snooze you lose.
Just a "copy shot" of Caveman from an old print that was laying around the bar. I took the print over to the pool table and propped it up against a cue ball so I could get a steady close-up. If I had to guess I'd say that print is easily 10 years old. Looking at some of the others from the same stack of prints, one definitely gets the impression time stands still at Sophie's.
Here is a picture of Johnny contemplating a ball in hand. He's a friend of many at Sophie's but teammate to none. I decided to leave this picture full frame, uncropped, just because there's something about the light at the top of the frame that I like. Cropping out the light cuts into his hat. And I like how the bottom of the frame is totally parallel with long rail on the table.
This is Josh, as usual, being the silent sniper that he is. On this picture I cropped the white edges off because I thought the blackness of the picture would look good bleeding into the black background of this site.
Finally a shot of Slima, waiting for a busy Friday night crowd to subside so he can take his shot.

Forced E8

2008-04-09T13:14:00.005-04:00

I am so glad I won my match last night. Our team lost 2-3 but at least we made it to the rubber match. I played fourth, and with my win I evened things out 2-2. This was the last play of my match, against a SL5. At this point I was ahead three games to one (WWWL, in that order) and only needed one more. In this final game my opponent had almost lost when he hit a shot too hard, causing the 8 to roll straight toward the corner pocket. Fortunately for him, the cue ball was rolling alongside it and nudged it off course a few degrees, preventing an E8 (APA term for "early 8," as opposed to S8 for a "scratch on the 8"). I muttered something to myself about how lucky he had gotten, and went on to run a few balls. Then I got to this scenario.

I called a timeout with Chris just to think things over out loud. (A quick note about Chris. He had just lost his match, stringing together, incredulously, consecutive losses via E8, S8, E8. Whereas a few weeks ago he won his match with two consecutive 8BRs--8 on the break--so he can be hit or miss, so to speak). My idea was to force my opponent to go for his 14. Sure, I could have banked the 6 ball cross-side. But I wasn't crazy about the reverse angle on it and I didn't want to leave him access to his 11-15 mess if I missed. Plus, the payoff for my plan was much better: by deliberately caroming the cue ball off my 6 into the 13 (from C1, in the highlighted area), leaving the cue ball right there, it would force him to go for the 14. And I just knew that the angle for the 14 was such that, in order for him to make it, he'd have to hit it at a speed that would make the cue ball come back downtable toward the pocket with the 8 in front of it. So you could say it was a trap I set for him, and he totally went for it. I was almost giddy as he got in position to shoot the 14. As I had hoped, he hit it firmly and the ball came rolling back exactly where I had wanted it, pocketing the 8. Before it even touched the 8 I elbowed Chris as if to say "told ya so."

Taking a Step Back

2008-04-02T17:28:00.007-04:00

When I say that I am 2-4 for the season, it just sounds like a run-of-the-mill losing record. But when I think about how all four of those losses have come one after the other (spread out over several weeks), it's pretty painful. I've lost to two SL4s and two SL6s. In all four matches I played a combined total of 23 games of pool--seven wins and sixteen losses. I reached the hill in only one of those matches, against a SL6. In that match I had a comfortable lead and was one 8 ball away from winning before I gave up two games for him to win (our team ended up winning 4-1 that night so I wasn't too mad the next day). But my most recent match a couple weeks ago was the most painful. It was a pathetic 1-3 whupping from a killer SL4. It was a match where tiny mistakes cost me big. The final nail in the coffin was when I erroneously thought I had ball in hand and picked up the cue ball without asking. Also, it was the third loss of the night, officially ruling out a win for our team (fortunately, Grace stepped in at the end and won her match, giving us at least a point).

With all this bad pool in my head, I needed to take a step back and get my mind off my slump. I decided to go up to Space Billiards Cafe (above) on 32nd Street to practice some three cushion. Practicing billiards gives me a lot of confidence, and when I play by myself it's not a win/loss thing. There, the only stress is the cost ($15/hour). Conversely, I was in Kansas all of last week and spent a mere $2.35 at Billiards Sports Plaza in a quick session that I called quits when I reached 10 points. Refreshed, that night I finally got to play one-on-one pool with my Dad. I think the change of mindset/pace that I gained from practicing billiards was most apparent to him. He was unable to touch me in the four games of 9 ball that we played. In fact, I'd estimate that he took no more than 10 shots in those games. It started as a race to three but I just kept on winning. Eventually he said "I think it's time for you to pack and head home." That was my last night in Kansas. I hope the good playing sticks, because I've got to stay in shape when I return to league play next week. And, more immediately, for the pool tournament at the Hamilton Fish Rec Center this coming Saturday.

HiFi

2008-03-19T15:49:00.006-04:00

If nearby Doc Holliday's is empty and I'm not in the mood for Sophie's, then it's up to HiFi Bar on Avenue A at 11th. HiFi has quickly become one of my new favorite places to play pool in the East Village. I haven't been there often, maybe five or so times since I discovered it over a year ago. In its former life as a live music venue it was called Brownies. It became HiFi in 2002. Thank God I found the above picture on their website, because my only picture from HiFi has very little context:But I have some unique stories to tell about playing at HiFi. The first time I remember playing there it was against a guy from Germany. We were talking about playing last pocket, and he countered with a similar game, apparently common in Germany, where you can only call the 8 ball in one pocket. For example, if you call the 8 in one of the side pockets and botch your shot and the 8 ball ends up near a different pocket on the other side of the table, you're stuck with the pocket you called initially.

The last time I had any sort of significant multi-game winning streak was at HiFi, a few months ago. It was like nine or ten games in a row that I won. I remember it was a Friday night and I had a steady stream of opponents, none of which were particularly strong players. In fact, one guy I beat still had all seven of his balls on the table at the end. But there was one guy I was playing and when I didn't have any shot I said the word "Safe." He looked at me and asked "Are we playing that way? Are you allowed to play safe?" So I sorta shrugged and went ahead and called what I thought was going to be a Hail Mary fluke shot (diagrammed below). Amazingly, it went in. Saying nothing, he came over to shake my hand just on the merit of that shot alone.

Studio One Hundred

2008-03-10T15:51:00.005-04:00

A few Sundays ago, Yvonne and I were riding the F train uptown. We must've been talking about something important because we missed our intended stop at 34th Street. So we got off at the next stop, exiting at the rear of the station at 40th and Sixth Avenue, and backtracked from there. A block later I spotted a banner hanging from a Marriott Residence Inn with the words "Studio One Hundred Bar and Billiards" on it. I said to her "Do you mind if I go take a look? Just to look, not to play." We went in and I talked to somebody at the front desk who directed us to the third floor. Once on the third floor it felt like we were in the study room of some college campus, as people were scattered around sitting in big lounge chairs reading and working on their laptops. There was a neon "Studio One Hundred" sign lit up that clearly indicated the bar, but the door to the bar was locked. I looked in and didn't see any pool tables. So we sort of circled around the third floor, I even asked somebody who worked there but he was new and didn't know. Eventually we found a door with a bronze plaque by it that read "Billiards Hall." I slowly pushed the door open and there was a pool table. It was a small room, it was adjacent to the main bar area. The table appeared to be a smaller 4x8 table, not a full-size one. But the balls were in the pockets and it was ready to go. I'll be anxious to stop back in next time I'm in midtown. The first thing I thought of was the similar free-pool scenario I wrote about at THOR. Below is a picture of the table. It's not much of a photo, it's actually two pictures stitched together. I found an official description of Studio One Hundred here. They write: Studio One Hundred (no children please) is our full service Bar and Billiard Room located on the 3rd floor. The bar offers a special mixed drink menu of standards and unique seasonal cocktails. The billiard table is usually the center of spirited challenges and energetic fun. Flat screen TV's, free high speed internet, all in a smoke free environment provide guests room to relax and unwind after a busy New York City day.

Max Fish

2008-03-01T14:31:00.013-05:00

I've been meaning to write about Max Fish for a long time. But I can never figure out where to begin. Back when I first moved to New York in the summer of 2000, I'd go there fairly often with friends. It was always crowded and I remember thinking "Who are these people? Where did they come from?" I had just spent the previous four years in a small town in Michigan, so New York was a big eye-opener. I can recall hot August nights at Max Fish and labels sliding down the side of Amstel Light bottles. While I have stepped in a couple of times in the past few years to play pool, it was probably 2001 when I last went there with any regularity. I came across an old picture the other day (right), taken just days after I had moved to NYC. I hadn't even been to B&H to buy black and white film yet (it's a color neg picture, but it was very underexposed and looked better in black and white). I had several thousand dollars saved up and no real plan or any idea of how to freelance. Those were the salad days.

Recently, Max Fish has come to represent something entirely different to me. Actually, I am referring more to the street it's on, Ludlow, than the bar itself. Whenever I am coming back from the East Village, I always find myself drawn to walk down Ludlow. Most nights, especially on the weekend, it's got a kind of carnival atmosphere. It's probably because you can't smoke indoors anymore, and so the sidewalks are much more congested. Plus, the streets themselves are more congested, the grid is more dense than in the East Village. But there's something about all this congestion that allows you to blend in a little. As a photographer, this is crucial. Even when people notice me taking pictures they don't seem to mind.

As for pool, I don't have much to say. The last time I was at Max Fish was mid-December. There was a guy playing who was wearing a pig nose as a mask. If you click on the photo up top, you should be able to see it. But the guy played pretty well. As you can see, he's down to one solid and his opponent still has seven stripes left. I motioned to my camera, as if to suggest I wanted to take a picture of him. He insisted I pay him a dollar. Normally I'd say forget it, but I knew I'd want to do a blog post about the place and so I agreed. Besides, his pig nose was too good to pass up. He goes by name "Shnizzle Mo Nizzle" or something like that, and he was trying to sell copies of a book he had created.

The pool table is in the middle of the back room. It's surrounded by booths, and the bathrooms are right there as well, so there's a lot of people walking by. If there was a way to put the pool table in one of the corners of the back room, and possibly reconfigure the booths to take up the center area, I think it could be a lot better. I know I'm splitting hairs, but what I really think Max Fish needs is better lighting. The overhead lights are utterly directionless and emit a very low contrast, unflattering light. If they could figure out a way to improve the lighting, or at least hang a lamp over the pool table, it could be a lot better.

Air hockey table at Julep

2008-02-18T16:47:00.006-05:00

Last August I wrote a fairly positive review of the pool table at Julep. The bar had just relocated from across Avenue A and moved its pool table from the very back of the bar up to the front. Fast forward to, oh, about three or four months ago. I was walking by Julep and noticed an air hockey table had taken its place. By no means was I upset, as Julep is so far out of my regular pool playing circuit, its gravitational pull on me is negligible. It was more amusing than anything. I actually thought it made more sense to have the air hockey table because the space was too small for a pool table anyway. And an air hockey table requires way less space surrounding it than a pool table. So cheers to Julep for coming up with a workable solution. Could air hockey be the next big fad? We'll see. I took the bottom photo walking back from Sophie's one blurry night. It was literally the last picture on the roll, so my apologies for not "working it" more.

Recruitment

2008-02-13T15:02:00.005-05:00

Last night my cell phone was blowing up around 7 o'clock. I was getting text messages from my teammate Josh, who was reporting we only had two players present. I had told everybody I would be late, as I was at a photography panel discussion at the Museum of the City of New York. Our captain is still a bit weak to be playing pool, another one of our players is out of the country and a third was home sick with food poisoning. That meant that all five remaining players would have to show up or else we'd be forfeiting games. I showed up just after 8:30 and was relieved to see everybody had shown up. They had just started the third match of the night, so I had some time to unwind from the stress of hurrying back downtown.

Lately I've taken the task of recruitment into my own hands. There is an longstanding but unwritten rule on our team that states: "You must be a regular at Sophie's to play on the team." I've been floating invitations to lots of people I've played at Sophie's, in particular people who have beaten me. But nobody seems to want to commit. If you're reading this, and you're thinking you might like to become a true regular at Sophie's, please come "try out" with us next Tuesday the 19th. It's the last week that we can add new players. I am going to head back to Sophie's this weekend and try to spread the word some more. I have to warn you, we're probably only going to have room for one new player. But as it is, we've basically got six players to do all the work. If we can't get somebody else to join us by 7 o'clock on Tuesday the 19th, that's the way it's going to stay.

Pool lesson

2008-02-07T12:59:00.000-05:00

For my birthday, Yvonne came up with a great gift idea: a pool lesson. It was facilitated by a company called Excitations, which describes itself as being a provider of innovative and memorable life experiences as gifts. My gift was a one-hour session at Amsterdam Billiards. I wasn't sure what to expect, who would give the lesson, etc. Part of the lesson description read "Work with a professional pool player to improve your stroke and refine your technique. From cue ball control to cut shots, breaking to back spins, choose what angles you want to concentrate on." I knew I had some bad habits in my game that I'd have to address, so I went into it with an open mind.

We arrived at Amsterdam on the day I had chosen (January 14th, a Monday). They put me on a corner table, which I was happy about because it meant less interference with players on nearby tables. I started hitting some balls around trying to warm up a little when a guy came up and introduced himself. It was Chris Lynch, who is a house pro at Amsterdam as well as its league director. He told me to continue shooting because he wanted to observe my technique. So I did so and we started talking about some of my weaknesses. He addressed the issue of dominant eye and that led to a discussion about my stance. It was difficult trying to adjust my stance. I had been keeping my legs pretty far apart when shooting, and my lining had been pretty off as well. Another area we worked on was my stroke. I realized I have had a pretty bad tendency to curl/twist my right wrist as I hit the ball, which results in inaccuracy. That's probably the biggest thing I took home from the lesson, that I need to keep my right hand relaxed and keep it almost "limp," as opposed to the death grip I've been using.

For what seemed like an eternity, Chris had me do nothing but straight-in shots into a side pocket. With the adjustment to my stance and my grip, it got a little tiresome after a while. He also had me work on my draw shots, which was especially difficult with my new grip. I popped the cue ball off the table a bunch of times. Yvonne took some photos, which I am thankful for because in the one up top she captured something I had forgotten about. You can clearly see in the photo a big blue smudge in the middle of the table, directly across from the 3 ball (the red one). That's chalk residue from my stick where I hit the cue ball probably 40 times in a row for that straight-in exercise.

At the end we played one game of 8 ball and one game of 9 ball. This would have been the perfect post if I had beaten Chris in either game, but I didn't come anywhere close! In the top shot I am hitting that 9 into the side. Directly after that, laughably, I banked the 13 (the one that's just beside my bridge hand) into the same side pocket. Doing so left me straight in on the corner stripe and no real angle to break out either of my other balls. Eventually my run fizzled out and Chris ran the table.

All this made me think a lot about my upbringing in the sport of golf. I remember how hard it was making adjustments to my swing, remembering to keep my head down and my eye on the ball, etc. Unfortunately, the real end of the story is a sad one because Yvonne's mother passed away less than two days later. Whereas I normally would have practiced some of these things Chris and I went over, pool definitely went on the back burner for a while, rightfully so. Chris really broke down my technicals and it's been hard putting everything back together. But I am slowly working my way back into "league mode" and had an exhilarating 1:30 AM win this week in our team's first match of the season, securing a 3-2 victory for my team. In writing this post I came across how much Yvonne paid for my lesson (!), so that alone is making me want to get more focused on my game again.

Sophie's (hopefully) survives

2008-01-29T15:14:00.000-05:00

I was in Sophie's Friday night when I overheard owner Bob Corton asking where he could pick up a copy of The Villager. Apparently, somebody had written an update on the fate of Sophie's and Mona's. Today I finally remembered to look up the story online. A nice piece by Patrick Hedlund, it can be read here. It inspired me to take a look at some pictures I shot in Sophie's August 16, 2005 (a Tuesday) and I was stoked to come across some pictures of my future teammates playing a match. While I am a relative newbie to Sophie's, I can definitely identify several of the people mentioned in the story. Obviously, there's Caveman (above), about whom the following was written: "Caveman, described as a large, brutish man with full beard, famously slugged pitchers of beer at a time — drinking directly from the source instead of a glass." Lots of other great tidbits. Well worth a read. I thought these two sentences were particularly well crafted:

The stories still hang in the dank ether of the rotting space, seen on the inexplicable tchotchkes adorning Sophie’s faded bar facade, and trapped inside the peeling paint and crumbling brick where the faces of drinkers past hang immortalized in original paintings. The stories are embedded in the wooden bar, which appears not to have seen a coat of lacquer since the Reagan administration, and etched into the well-trodden, chipped cement floor.

Brownstone Brooklyn

2008-01-29T15:12:00.000-05:00

Back in early December I took the B train to 7th Avenue in Brooklyn to photograph the band Electric Six at the live music venue Southpaw. I did a little research online and once I discovered Southpaw had a pool table I purposely set out early to check it out. Because whenever I photograph live music it invariably starts later than announced. I figured I'd have some time to play pool before the band took the stage. Once I got out of the subway I was getting my bearings when I found myself below a sign for a poolhall that vaguely rang a bell: Brownstown Billiards. Or, as I later found out, it's offically called Ocean's 8 at Brownstone Billiards.

So I went in, walked down some steps and found myself staring at a sea of about 30 pool tables. Still eager to get to Southpaw to check out its table, I ruled out renting a table to practice at Brownstone. But I did speak to the person behind the register about taking a picture. Because I only had my 50mm lens with me, I decided to take a few simple pictures that I could stitch together for a panoramic. As I was doing so, somebody else came up to me we started talking. He introduced me to their house pro, a woman by the name of Billie Billing. We chatted briefly, I told her a little bit about myself, that I'm mostly just a bar player but that I consider myself "a student of the game." Even though she was on her way out she asked if I wanted to play some. I told her I was on my way to an assignment, but that I would look her up some other time. After thanking everybody I went back up to street level, ate some tacos at a fast food Mexican place nearby and was at Southpaw in 15 minutes. Sadly, the pool area was roped off as a VIP seating area, apparently some deal sponsored by Camel cigarettes. So I played some Buck Hunter instead and patiently waited for the opening act to finish. Eventually Electric Six came on and got my shots and took off after the fifth song.

In a strange turn of events, a month and a day later I had another assignment at Southpaw, to photograph Kimya Dawson. But this time it was a Sunday matinee performance. I was told doors opened at 1PM, so that's when I arrived. Unfortunately, I quickly learned that there were two opening acts, one at 2PM and the other at 3PM. This meant Kimya wouldn't go on until around 4PM. I took another look at the pool table area, but it was jam packed with kids and parents and the table itself was covered. Perturbed at the prospect of a wasted Sunday afternoon, I quickly thought of heading over to Brownstone. And that is exactly what I did. I played for approximately 35 minutes, and my total was $3.50. There were a ton of kids there for some birthday party, and they seemed to like the air hockey tables more than the pool tables. So it was a cacophany of pucks being slapped around, kids shouting, the works. I discovered a very cool miniature bowling alley there as well. I have to say, next time I go back I'm gonna have to try my hand at bowling. Check out this video, it is pretty well done and definitely gives you an overall sense of the place.

Two good reads from Dyer

2008-01-23T00:55:00.000-05:00

Many apologies for the lack of posts on this blog the past couple weeks. I've tried sitting down at the computer to write some posts but they're just not coming as of late. Then along came an email from Jake Dyer, author of "Hustler Days" and, more recently, "The Hustler and the Champ." He writes with news of two pool stories he's written for his newspaper, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Thanks for the motivation Jake, a kind of bereavement meal for those of us not in the mood to churn out copy.

The first piece is his recent dispatch from the Derby City Classic in Louisville, in particular the happenings in the "action room" there. The Derby City Classic has a reputation for being the "Woodstock of Pool," and there's lots of color in this story. Tens of thousands of dollars in duffel bags, a sixth-degree bodyguard, all-night games of pool that are still going when the cleaning ladies come to work the next morning. He starts and ends the story talking to Grady Matthews, aka The Professor, whose drawl manages to come out even in his quotes.

The second story is an entirely different subject: the ghost of a pool hustler named U.J. Puckett. The story describes a pool hall in southern Fort Worth called Fast Freddy's that is haunted by Puckett. Many of the regulars swear by the ghost's presence: televisions that get turned on by themselves, pool cues falling to the floor from the wall racks, shadowy human forms caught on surveillance tapes. You couldn't make up a more interesting character. He was born Utley J. Puckett in Prattsvile, Arkansas in 1911. His father was killed in a logging train accident, and he dropped out of high school to work as a professional boxer and later as a Hollywood actor. He learned pool as a kid and by his 30s was holding his own among some of the greatest hustlers in the sport. He died in 1992 and has gone on to haunt Fast Freddy's. Supposedly there's a chair in the pool room near table 19 that Puckett still claims as his own.

Ending on a positive note

2008-01-10T12:03:00.000-05:00

On Tuesday I sent a message to four of our txt-savvy players that read: "hope to see you all tonight at sophie's, it's been a while. we are hosting a team from edge that beat us 2-3 in oct. we are 4-9 for season, let's improve to 5-9." I wanted to rally the troops, as opposed to intimidate them, which is why I didn't write "let's not make it 4-10." But coming off a five-week losing streak (the last three of which were all 1-4 losses), followed by a two-week holiday break, I was prepared for the worst. Looking at the sheet Tuesday night, I saw that our team was in last place with 39 points. Thinking about this today I did the math: 39 points divided by 13 weeks we'd played thus far leaves us with an average of 3 points per week. Although, for those not familiar with how the point system works, an extra point is granted to every team when they turn in their sheets on time. For example, even if your team gets beat 0-5 on a given night, you'll still earn a point if you turn in the scoresheet along with player's dues. The winning team in the same situation would get 6 points: 1 point for each win, plus the extra point for turning in the sheet on time. Essentially, our average score for the season was 2-3.

So with nothing to lose, we went to battle. After the third game we had the momentum on our side and were ahead 2 games to 1. I took a gamble and put myself up, hoping to carry the momentum further on toward a win. They put up a 5 who I had never played, so I wasn't sure what to expect. I made some embarrassing mistakes, most notably when going for the 8 ball. My nerves were getting the best of me and I was rushing into shots. Missing the 8 a few times caused some big groans from my teammates, I just couldn't get it to fall. In the end I got my wobbles all straightened out, leaving myself with a straight-in shot on the 8 for the win. It was a race to 4 games and I won the first, third, fifth and sixth games. My opponent's two wins came from my mistakes, a scratch on the 8 and an early 8 in the second and fourth games, respectively. Sloppy as it was, the win gave us a little confidence to end the season on (although one of our departing players ended up losing the final match of the night/season). The next two weeks are devoted to the playoffs, and then the spring season begins for us January 29th. I've included a shot of the sheet that I use to tally everybody's scores. I've blacked out the names of my opponents.

The Great Cue Ball Carom/Timing Controversy

2008-01-04T13:44:00.000-05:00

Every once in a while at the Hamilton Fish Rec Center there always seems to be some new rule that's gone into effect because of some argument that got started about a shot. There are some long-standing rules that are easy to accept and deal with. For instance, under no circumstance is it okay to kiss or carom off your opponent's ball, even if you call it beforehand. Thus, the words "off your ball" are never spoken. Another rule is that if you break and sink, say, a stripe but yet the cue ball scratches (or, even better, flies off the table), you still get to remain stripes. Whenever it's my break and the cue ball scratches, I always insist it's still open no matter what else fell. Probably my biggest pet peeve is the (selectively enforced) rule that says when kicking at a ball, it's not enough to call which pocket you're going for. You have to say how many banks the cue ball is going to touch before it hits the object ball. Invariably, you'll go to kick at a ball in the corner pocket, and you'll say just say "corner pocket." But if the cue ball skims against a second rail just before pocketing the intended ball, somebody might say "Did you call it two rails?" I always loudly contest this rule, explaining that if we don't have to call any rattling in a pocket then we shouldn't have to call any skims either.

I was at the rec center last night playing my least favorite person, who will go unnamed. This guy is the kind of person who, even if he's not playing, will sit like a hawk and watch your game and will sort of "advance announce" to the whole room the outcome of your shot. For example, I'll be lining up to take a shot and loooong before the object ball is anywhere close to its pocket this guy will yell out "Nope!" or "Too soft." The worst is when he yells out "Next!" as his 8 ball is rolling toward its pocket. He's just a tit. I had gotten to the rec center first last night and when he came in several minutes after me I was sorta hoping he'd go downstairs and lift weights before playing pool. No such luck. He comes over and says "You ready?" as he was putting his cue together. Considering I had some warmup time, I was kind enough to give him the break. He said "Last pocket?" I said "Nah, let's just play a quick one straight out, any pocket."

One thing you need to know about this guy is that he's always listening to music via headphones. He's always got this air of superiority about him, as if he's too good to be able to talk to you. And he'll keep you waiting as he's fiddling with his iPod, just a total jackass. More and more I think him listening to music gives him opportunities to say he didn't hear something. So as I was nailing banks and stopping the cue ball on a dime and leaving him with nothing whenever I missed, I think he got a little intimidated. He missed a long shot on the 3 ball in the corner and instead hit the 8, which ended up at the other end of the table clustered with a group of his solids. And then he said, incredulously, as if to make it seem like hitting the 8 first was what he had intended all along, "Because we're playing last pocket." I was like "Nah man, we're not." Then he said "But I broke." I said "No, it was my table, I gave you the break and you asked what we were playing and I said any pocket."

So, annoyed, it was then that I was left with the shot that's diagrammed above. I was shooting stripes and didn't have a direct shot at my 14 in the corner. So I said exactly this: "Okay. Cue ball is gonna go OFF my 11, into the 14." I got down on the shot, put a little top left english on it, and drove the cue ball pretty full into the 11. Then the cue ball caromed directly into the 14, without even hitting a rail first, sinking it. I didn't pay attention to where the 11 went because my eye was glued to the cue ball. But the 11 had gone on to break up his cluster, sinking one of his balls. Then he got ready to shoot. I was like "What are you doing? That shot went exactly as I called it." And then he said "No it didn't. My 1 ball fell in before your 14 did." Dumbfounded, I was like "Come on man, you know that was a great shot I just made. I'm going again." That's when, without saying anything, he picked up his jacket and cue and took it over to the other table to play somebody else. I went on playing the rest of the game by myself, thinking how absurd a rule that was, wishing somebody else was there to also call him out on it. After a minute or so I went over to shake his hand, just because I thought it was childish to have hard feelings. He scoffed, saying "Yeah yeah, good game, whatever. I don't want to talk about it."

So I went on to play some friendly games with a man named Miguel, who is easily one of the top three players at the rec center, a very gracious player win or lose. At the end of our first game, I was straight-in on the 8 into a side pocket, but I said "Let's bank the 8." I went on to win that first game, then he won the second. By the third game two other players had shown up and were watching us, wanting to play the winner. So I said "You know what? Let's just finish this game straight out, no banks, so these people aren't waiting for us." He went on to win it.

I had to make a phone call, making some plans to meet a friend soon nearby. But I wanted one more game before leaving. Turns out it would have to be a rematch against Mr. Ego, over on the loser's table. I could tell he was annoyed by me wanting to play him. Sure, it would have been easier for me to just wait for him to lose so that I wouldn't have to face him again, but this was a challenge I put myself up to. He of course made sure I heard him say "Last pocket." He started strong, going on a three or four ball run after making something on the break. But I was determined to make this last game my best. After a flurry of decisive shotmaking I was down to a perfect setup for a runout that even I was surprised by. Down on the 8, I purposely hit it softly so that if I missed at least it would still be in the vicinity of the right pocket. It rolled straight to the pocket, but stopped on the very edge without falling in. A stinger for him, it locked up the game for me. He went on to miss his next shot, an impossible bank, leaving me with a long reach shot. I should have been safe and gone to get the bridge. But the fact that he wouldn't concede the game, the fact that he was going to make me go over and sink that pathetic little pocket hanger, infuriated me. So I did a little one-armed poke at the cue ball, sinking the 8 for a handshakeless win and a surge of vindication.

Sophie's photo roundup, part four

2007-12-27T13:49:00.000-05:00

It was quite a shock last week when I heard that Sophie's had made the New York Post's "Page Six." Somebody quickly pulled out a copy for me to read:

December 20, 2007 -- It may be the final nail in the shared coffin of East Village dive bars. Two longstanding holes-in-the-wall, Sophie's on East Fifth Street and its sister spot, Mona's on Avenue B, are up for sale. "The neighborhood has changed so much," co-owner Bob Corton told Page Six. "I love both bars, but they're dinosaurs now." Corton plans to sell the low-lit saloons after the holidays. He has run Sophie's, which adopted its name from its original owner, the late Sophie Polny, since 1986. He opened Mona's in '89. Corton assured us he'll stay in the neighborhood but couldn't predict the future of his beloved drink tanks: "Once the places are sold, what happens to them is really out of my hands."

Wow. I've been thinking a lot about this the past week. Obviously, I just hope that whoever buys Sophie's and/or Mona's doesn't strip either place of its essential character. It seems to me there's a real appreciation for these kinds of well-worn gathering places. Spring of 2008 is shaping up to be an interesting time.
But the holiday season is a real down-time for the pool league, the matches are few and far between. Personally, I've had a hard time keeping up any kind of momentum. There were only two times this season where I played matches on back-to-back weeks. Even if I play in our final match on January 8th, I'll be 50/50 in terms of weeks I played vs. weeks I sat out. Next season I want to avoid that. The only person on our team who has played less than me is our official captain, Caveman. Unfortunately, he's been in the hospital a lot lately and thus has only three matches played.
There have been some good times as always, sure. "Definitely," as Slima always says. I just wish I didn't get that little nag of guilt every time I go out for a night of pool. It just seems like it's a little frivolous in times like these, when my workload is very light. Still, I long to get back to Sophie's this weekend. One of the last times I was there I had a great night, stringing eight or nine wins together.
I am trying to wrap up 2007, get caught up on paperwork, take any assignments I can get between the holidays. The biggest thing on my plate is that within the next few days I'm going to find out for sure if I'll be moving to the East Village. A good friend of mine is subleasing her spacious fifth floor walkup on 7th Street close to Avenue A, and it would be a perfect place for Yvonne and I to take care of until late 2009. I have grown fond of the neighborhood in the last few years. But considering the lingering uncertainty about Sophie's, the timing of this move could be bittersweet. We'll see.

Musical Box

2007-12-20T18:50:00.000-05:00

Yet another post from the "my picture doesn't do this bar justice" department (thankfully, I've found two other pictures online). I am talking about Musical Box, a bar up at 13th and Avenue B. The bar is known for being somewhat hard to find. In fact, when we played there last month, my teammates couldn't find it despite having the exact address. But as it turned out, the bar hadn't even opened yet for business that day.

It's all good because Musical Box is a great place to play pool. I know they have at least a couple APA teams, so naturally it's going to be a good breeding ground for pool players. Still, we hosted, and beat, a team from there back in October. I played last that night and got beat 2-3 by a new APA player who got to start as a SL4. He got two games ahead, then I came back with two to tie it, and then he finished me off in the 5th. Admittedly, their captain warned me he was probably more like a SL6-7. One of the more memorable matches for me as a 5.

So I was on somewhat of a vendetta a few weeks ago to play at Musical Box. We were slated to play a different Musical Box team, named "Chuck Jager," which has two players, Darin and Will, who are both non-league regulars at Sophie's. I was hoping to make a strong showing. But we got off to a dreadful 0-3 start. One of our 4s lost 1-3 to a 4. Another one of our 4s got beat 1-2 by a 3. And then one of our 3s got shut out 0-3 vs a 4. By that point I was more than a little determined to try to turn the match around. So I went up against a 4 and played what was arguably my best match ever, winning 4-1. Really my only mistake was when I was jacked up against a rail near a corner pocket going for a pocket-hanging 8 ball deep in the opposite corner. I tried to cheat the pocket in order to avoid a cue ball follow-in scratch, but I missed the 8 ball altogether, giving my opponent ball in hand and his sole win. Two games later I nailed a tough reverse-angle cross-corner full-table bank for a win. The real triumph of that evening, however, was when our beloved Slima went up in the final match and shut out his opponent to salvage the night for us, 2-3. And we certainly celebrated once we were back home at Sophie's.

As I said, the place is a fine place to play, great for league nights. I seem to recall that the light above the table was a tad too close to the playing surface. But the more I think about it, it could just be the fact that it's a black-felted table and so it soaks up the light and heat more than a green table? At any rate, a very nicely lit table (see my photo above, which appears to be somewhat blown out even though it's a black surface). The table is pretty tight on one side, mainly due to the stools that can get in the way. But it's pretty much the exact same way at Sophie's. The very first time I went to Musical Box was on a super-crowded weekend night. There were actually people leaning against the table as people were playing. But on a Monday or Tuesday night, Musical Box is going to be slow enough that you can move the stools altogether if want to. There's something about the fact that the bar is so non-descript on the outside. And even then, once you walk inside, you don't immediately see the pool table. So the presence of the pool table is very understated, even sophisticated. Some online reviewers made very specific mentions of the pool table when describing the bar overall. One writes, "There is quite a nice pool table in the back room that is often occupied by pool league teams, but if you can snag it you can enjoy a few games on it before some sharks challenge you and win the table." Another warns patrons to expect "to get some cue in your face." (Additional color photos by Shanna Rivindra, middle, and Shecky's, bottom)

Astoria

2007-12-13T12:22:00.000-05:00

Have you ever walked by a bar and, without looking inside, thought to yourself "I bet anything there's a pool table in there." That happened to me twice one night several weeks ago when I was in Astoria for an assignment to photoraph a Moroccan restaurant. I had taken the V train to the Steinway stop. Once I got to street level I was walking along when I spotted a bar called Doyle's Corner. I made a mental note to check it out on my way back. I got to the restaurant right on time, forged my way through an awkward "no patrons present" situation and was out of there, tummy filled with couscous, in about 45 minutes. On my way back to Doyle's I approached a bar called Crehan's Pub. It looked promising. The front door was propped open and I could see a pool table (right) way in the back. So I went in and introduced myself to the bartender, who I think was happy to see me pull out a business card and not an NYPD badge (I didn't dare show her my NYPD-issued press credential). I told her I play a lot of pool and that I just wanted to check out the pool table. To my surprise she said "Sure, take a picture of it!" So I went back to take a look. Nobody was playing. It was a typical bar table, I don't remember if it was a dollar or what. But I could feel the suspicious gaze of some old men as I was looking around. I took out my camera and took a few frames, one of which was sort of directed back toward the bar and everybody in it. I overheard one of the men ask "What's he taking pictures of?" I felt self-conscious, a little goofy, so I left pretending I hadn't heard him. I was in and out easily within three minutes.

Walking back I had sort of lost my bearings. In Astoria it's a lot of high-numbered avenues intersecting with high-numbered streets, like 31st Avenue and 41st Street. Once I straightened out which way to go I was trying to remember if I'd ever played pool in Queens before. Sure, I have played lots of three-cushion, but the only time I could think of where I'd actually played pool was after one of said three-cushion sessions at Carom Cafe. I couldn't, and still can't, recall a time where I'd played pool at a bar in Queens. When Yvonne and I were first dating, she lived in Maspeth. And I quickly identified a couple places near her home that had pool tables, but I never played at any of them. I got to Doyle's and was glad to see not only a pool table, but a pool table that was in use. It was the very same situation: walk in, approach the bartender, explain who I am and what I want to do, etc. He seemed to be a tad skeptical, although I realize how it puts people on the spot when I come into a bar unannounced like that. Perhaps a little worried he wasn't automatically saying "Sure, go ahead!" I said "Actually, you know what? I'll take a pint of Miller and two dollars in quarters." That's probably what I should have done in the first place, just gone in and played the role of an unassuming customer. But it wasn't my intention to actually play, only because it was getting late and I still had to get back home. At any rate, once it was my turn I played pretty well, putting some flashy english onto the cue ball and breaking up a lot of clusters. I won the first game pretty easily. When shaking the guy's hand he said something along the lines of "If you want a really good pool player, you should play the bartender. I'll leave it at that."

So the next guy I played knew about the APA, even knew league rules, but we still called all shots. He was very talkative and friendly. By this time I could see that the table was incredibly off-kilter, in serious need of releveling. Still, I was playing convincingly and by the end of my second game I was in a no-brainer runout situation. But I neglected to take into account that the effects of the slant/tilt of a pool table are greatly increased at slower speeds. So when I went for my second-to-last shot and tried to drift the cue ball with some follow, it ended up going on a nearly 45-degree tangent as it came to a stop. The cue ball was nearly two feet from where I had planned to it to be. Still, I went for a bank shot but missed badly. I think my opponent sensed my frustration with the table. So instead of going for the simple cut shot I had left him with, he banked the 8 the full length of the table and nailed it. Which was probably a good thing because the bartender was next on the list.

Gateway to the East Village

2007-12-07T13:17:00.000-05:00

I suppose I've had a blog post about Nice Guy Eddie's on the back burner for a while now. Whenever I'm going to the East Village, nine times out of ten I'll walk right by there. It's the kind of place I dismissed for a long time. Heck, I dismissed the East Village the first five years I lived here. Perhaps it was the garish KISS mural outside, or it reminded me a lot of the kinds of places I disliked in college. I always thought of it as a "lowest common denominator" bar, or very "Indianapolis." I guess I just thought it lacked sophistication.

But I obviously had a change of heart, somewhere around 2004. The first time I stepped in was to have a beer before meeting a friend for a show across the street at Mercury Lounge. Actually, it was an old neighbor of mine from Stanton, a musician by the name of Andrew Goodsight, who had used one of my photos as artwork on the cover of his CD. At that time he was living in Florida but was back in NYC visiting and had invited me to the show, some friends of his who were performing. I arrived early and naively thought I would be on the list. Instead of forking over the $10 cover I went across the street to Nice Guy Eddie's. A little later he called and I told him where I was and so he came over and we had 2-for-1s instead of going to the show (he met up with his friends afterwards).

I remembered the cheap happy hour and have since suggested Nice Guy Eddie's as a meeting place, particularly for people coming from other parts of the city because it's so close to the F train. I of course began stopping in to play pool, and for a while it was my favorite place to get warmed up before heading to Sophie's. I remember the first time I played pool there, there was a guy who was a damn good player. He was playing a much weaker player, but he hit the eight in early on a bad roll and had to sit down. Then it was my turn to play, and I pretty much destroyed the weaker player. It was very much an adrenaline game, the kind where I go on automatic and come across as a flawless player. Then, the next player I played was a lot better and for whatever reason I started making stupid mistakes. The first player noticed these mistakes and was scoffing at me, essentially accusing me of missing shots on purpose. What could I tell him? I can be a pretty inconsistent player.

Nice Guy Eddie's is one of the new places we played this season in our different division. I was looking forward to playing there and seeing who all on their team I might know. There were a few familiar faces, in particular Joe B. (in white shirt above), who I remembered from killer pool at Edge. We had a good time there, eeking out a 3-2 win against a very evenly matched team.

I wrote "Gateway to the East Village" as the title because Nice Guy Eddie's is the first place I look into when I'm entering the East Village on one of my pool tours. Because of the happy hour and the $1 table, I can easily make my dollar last a bit longer there. Even if it's only long enough to figure out where I'm headed next.

The Sixth Ward

2007-12-03T16:29:00.000-05:00

I found a new bar the other day that has a pool table. Naturally, the first thing I always think in such a situation is "I need to do a blog post about this place." Then it's "I wonder who all esle already knows about this place," followed by "I wonder who's going to start a team here before me." Later on I always find myself in the predicament of wanting to write about the bar, but only having empty pictures of the pool table.

In the case of The Sixth Ward, it's a rare situation where I've photographed the bar (or restaurant) long ago and have some idea of "then and now." The Sixth Ward is a recent reincarnation of a restaurant that I photographed almost two years ago for the Times. Back then it was called Heirloom, and it served a vegetarian menu. I lost track of Heirloom, as it's on a stretch of Orchard Street that soon became a hassle to navigate due to construction on both sides of the street. Read here to get the most current dirt on the location, which is 191 Orchard. Yvonne and I had been walking by several weeks ago when we saw a new awning. I looked in and saw the telltale sliver of green felt. A few days later I went back to take some pictures. The pool table is in the back of the bar, in a sort of in-between area that joins the main part of the bar to its garden in the back. The pool table is in a kind of greenhouse-like space, lots of daylight. I only had my fifty millimeter lens with me, so it was a little tight for pictures. I was determined to make it back to Sixth Ward to actually play some people before writing anything. So after getting knocked off the Sophie's table on a Thursday night that's exactly what I did. Nobody was playing when I got there so I started hitting some balls around. After a while I saw a couple eyeing the table and nearby pinball machine and I asked if they wanted to play. Long story short, if I remember correctly, one of them had scratched and left me with ball in hand and a pocket hanger on the eight. I sensed they wanted play again but only if it was quick game between the two of them. So it was no-brainer for me to give them the table. I went back to the main area to get some more quarters and another beer. I went back in to play some pinball and to take a few snaps of the couple playing. Soon the girl had had enough but the guy agreed to play me.

By then some of their friends had shown up. And so, perhaps wanting to show off, I obnoxiously said I would bank the eight. In doing so, I had to pass up a couple easy straight-in shots on the eight. I tried to play those safe, until he missed a shot and left me with a risky cross-corner bank. I decided to go for it but the cue ball double kissed the eight and both balls, laughingly, went into the same side pocket. Loss of game for me and a good reason to head home.

Below I've included one of the daytime shots from my initial visit. As you can see, it's an attractive space with a skylight feel not unlike Toad Hall. Not surprisingly, it's a little tight in some areas but not too bad at all. Considering the abundance of all that glass, I suspect the table will see abnormally high shifts in room temperature and humidity throughout the course of a year. I don't envision the table ever getting moved because of a private party or live music shows. So it seems to be nicely achored into its space. There is a heater hanging from the ceiling so I would imagine that would keep it bearable. If anything, I could see them having to close the back room down if the temps dip below zero.

The biggest blow, for a cheapskate like me, is the $1.50/rack and $6.00/Stella combination, as opposed to Sophie's prices of $1.00 and $4.50, comparatively. You see, that's the most brilliant part of playing at Sophie's, that you keep getting two quarters back as change so you rarely have to make a trip to the bar solely to get quarters. On top of that, when you want quarters at Sixth Ward (or Lucky Jack's and Whiskey Ward for that matter) you're pretty much forced to fork over three dollars worth. I know, this is about as nitpicky as you can get. But I like my beer cheap and my pool cheaper. In the end, I sense there'll be some temptation for me to step into The Sixth Ward for a nightcapper and check in on the action from time to time.

Space Billiard Cafe

2007-11-29T15:52:00.000-05:00

A couple weeks ago a high school friend of mine living in NYC informed me of a billiards hall on 32nd Street, in the heart of "K-town." In all honesty, I had always thought of Koreatown as being more along Broadway through the lower 30s. That is, I never knew there was a stretch of 32nd Street, just off Broadway, that was crammed with Korean restaurants, spas, karaoke bars, etc. But what got me especially curious was how my friend said the place was in a 12th floor penthouse and open 24 hours a day. It sounded too interesting not to check out. So there I was last Wednesday night, happy that it was not a regular "school night" due to Thanksgiving being the next day, riding the B/D express from Grand Street to Herald Square. I wasn't on street level more than 20 seconds before I spotted a bright sign for the place, on the south side of 32nd in the middle of the block between Broadway and Fifth Avenue.

I know that the billiards scene in New York has a pretty big Korean influence. I know the originator of New York's billiards mecca, Carom Cafe, was a Korean by the name of Sang Lee. On my way to 32nd I had suspected the place might have pocketless tables, or at least I had hoped they would. Riding the elevator upstairs I was pretty excited to find out for sure. Indeed, the moment the elevator doors parted my eyes went straight to a set of red, yellow and white balls on the nearest table. I went over to the man behind the counter and he immediately pulled out a tray of 16 pool balls for me. I was like "No, I just want the three balls."

About half of the room's 14 tables were in use. I went over to a corner table and got down to practicing. The first thing I noticed was that the tables were a bit smaller than I'd played on before, definitely not the 5x10 monster Chevillottes and Verhoevens in Queens. Another thing, and probably the biggest drawback to playing at Space (and most ironic considering its name), is that the tables are incredibly close to one another. At one point during my hour-long practice session one of the players on the next table was aiming a shot and the butt of his cue was perilously close to a ball on my table.

I noticed that not everybody was playing with the trio of red, yellow and white balls. Some people were playing with two reds, a yellow and a white. I'd take brief glimpses just as they were about to shoot. Their games seemed to be less about hitting three rails and more about simply caroming one's cue ball off one red to the other. I looked this up and came across a wikipedia page for Four Ball, or as it's known in Korean, "danggu" (hence the name for Space's website, danggu24.com).

By far, though, the best part of playing at Space was the digital timer near each table. Whenever I rent a table anywhere else I am constantly fishing out my cellphone to keep track of time, especially when I'm approaching the last 10-15 minutes of the hour. But at Space, it's all done for you. It's super convenient to just be able to quickly glance over at the timer. And each table has its own rack of scoring beads as well. I played as well as I could have hoped, scoring 19 points in an hour.

It's a really great place, I am glad I was told about it. The walk from my apartment to the B/D train was longer than the walk from the Herald Square station to Space Billiard Cafe, so it feels especially close to home. It's a tad pricey, my hour cost me $12 (and I think it goes up on weekend nights). However, you can save money by going the BYOB route if you want. Of the 14 tables, three are pool tables. So it's not unlikely that you might have to wait if you want to play pool.

Needless to say, I won't be jonesing to take the 7 train all the way to Flushing, or the F to deep Brooklyn, just to play billiards. I'll still head out there from time to time. But I had long wondered if there were any billiard tables in Manhattan. I thought surely there had to be some tables in residences, private clubs and whatnot. But now I know where I can go that's a lot easier to get to. Oh, and I forgot to mention one other really cool thing. When walking into Space, take a quick left and go to the windows. Then look straight up.

From the Archive: Fat Cat Billiards

2007-11-16T12:49:00.000-05:00

From October 2000 to May of 2004 I shot over 700 rolls of film for the Village Voice. I have a very haphazard system for filing all those pictures. I have stacks and stacks of negatives stored in envelopes, plastic bags, manilla folders and notebooks. Fortunately, the photo staff at the Voice took pretty good care of the film, sleeving it in archival Print File negative pages and labeling everying with at least a date and year (unfortunately, many of the sleeves are marked on, X-ed up, numbered, etc. as a result of editing). I've taken the additional step of categorizing everything by subject and year. For example, all my nightlife/bar/music pictures from 2002 are in one stack. So finding a picture isn't too painful. It helps that I have a good memory (and, of course, that I can search the Voice's archive online). Yesterday I wanted to take a look at the outtakes from a burlesque show I shot at the Knitting Factory in 2003, so I hunkered down and started digging. In doing so I came across two rolls of film I shot at Fat Cat Billiards that I had totally forgotten about.

I'd guess that about one out of every fifteen assignments I shoot ends up not getting published, for whatever reason. I still get paid, it's just that stories get killed sometimes. This shoot at Fat Cat was one of those assignments. Up on top of the two pages somebody had written "BTS," which I now remember means it was for the annual back-to-school issue of the Voice. I'm assuming it was part of some roundup of ideas for cheap entertainment, things to do if you're not 21, etc.

There really wasn't anything too great on the film. I got out my digital camera, put the negs on a lightbox and shot some pics of the negs and inverted the image into a negative so that you can see the frames as positives. This is the same technique I used to convert my 4x5 negs to digital files. Anyway, you can see what the place looks like. I'm definitely due for another visit soon. I did make a few scans as well. There was one picture (below) that I liked. It seemed to have the most depth. I really like the little detail of the cube of chalk that's fallen onto the table in the foreground.

More Docs Outtakes

2007-11-08T15:53:00.000-05:00

Wow, the title of that last post "Skirting the Edges of Burnout" sounds pretty heavy now. I think I've definitely bounced back the past week or so. I played third this past Tuesday night, beating a SL3 4-0 to stave off the other team from reaching a 3-0 lead in the match. Right from the opening lag I felt great. But I wasn't without some errors. In one game I missed a shot on the 8 by not moving the stance-hindering bar stools on one side of the table. But it all worked out in my favor and I felt calm, focused and totally in control of everything. With the score now at 2-1 we put up our star SL3 player, Grace, who went on to slay yet another SL5 2-3 to tie the match 2-2 and get us to the rubber match. (For those not in the know, you can check out the APA's "games must win" chart that explains all this.) We ended up losing, laughably, 2-3 thanks to one of our senior members who I think has the APA's worst win/loss record when it comes to playing last. In the end, it was good to have Captain Caveman back from the hospital. I could tell he was just happy to be in his usual seat watching everybody play. He played damn well himself, especially for not having played in a month. His match went hill-hill before his opponent won on an 8-on-the-break earlier in the night.

Most Wednesdays I try to take a night off from pool, which is exactly what I did last night. But then Thursday rolls around and I'm getting the itch to play again. My usual Thursday night pool circuit would be getting underway right about now. Invariably I would head out in the direction of Doc Holliday's but poke my head into a few places along the way. Eventually I'd get to Doc's, take a few moments to acclimate my nostrils to the strong doghair-esque odor, and work my way toward the bar during the last hour of happy hour. The fun part about Doc's is seeing who I know and who all I don't: there always seems to be a good mix of knowns and unknowns there. I am itching to get back to Doc's but I'll save my cash tonight and do Pitt Street instead. Here are a few more outtakes from Doc's. The couple in the top photo you may recognize from a post I wrote a couple months ago here. Below is a woman I've played before at Doc's and at Sophie's, her name is Marian.

Skirting the Edges of Burnout

2007-11-06T15:00:00.000-05:00

I haven't been very prolific on the blog the past few weeks. The "glory" of becoming a SL5 has been somewhat faded by hardships in my professional life. Indeed, it's been very slow for me in the photography world lately. And so there I was in my doldrums a couple weeks ago, sitting in the undergound bar that is Josie Woods, waiting to play in my first-ever APA singles qualifier, worrying about missing phone calls due to the poor signal reception and wondering what reason on Earth did I have for coughing up the $15 entry fee. I guilted myself into thinking, "Do I really need to be here? Couldn't this $15 be spent on something more important?" Long story short, I got whupped 0-4 by another SL5. I just couldn't find my tempo on the table. I played what I thought was a pretty good first game, repeatedly finding my way out of the safeties my opponent had thrown at me and my one remaining ball (the 5). But the adrenaline only took me so far before my opponent finally got ball in hand on me. I lost my momentum and my grip on the crucial first game. Conveniently, I was able to shrug it off as "Colorado Rockies Syndrome." But what made it sting more is some players I know had shown up specifically to watch me play.

It was somewhat of an uphill slog getting my confidence back. I wasn't able to make it to league night the following Tuesday, so it was four or five days before I ended up playing again. What I had really wanted to do was play a couple times in total silence and solitude. But I had to settle for the rec center over on Pitt Street. Now, at the rec center there are two tables. I am more than happy to play on what I call the "junior table." But the other table, I'll call it the "main table," is where all the big machismo action takes place. The thing with playing on the main table is that if you lose you can spend as long as a half hour waiting to get back on. That's because many of the players over on the main table insist on playing last pocket (aka "purgatory pool"). And they just love it when there are four or five people watching, all waiting to take on the winner. I, on the other hand, relish playing on the junior table, where even if you lose there's nobody waiting to play next so you get to keep playing. Even if it means taking on weaker players, I'll stay on the junior table simply for the amount of uninterrupted practice time I get to put in. I was there on Saturday and played an old man who appears to be just learning the game. I played him easily 10-12 games of 8ball, and I won them all. I also played some teenagers I had never seen before. Part of the machismo of playing at the rec is the number of "continuous breaks" you get. But with this man I played, I insisted every few games that I rack the balls and let him take a turn breaking. After playing for three hours straight, I felt I had gotten back into stroke. My arms felt good and sore.

L.E.S. Nights

2007-11-01T17:08:00.000-04:00

I wanted to share with everybody some recent photographs I came across taken by photographer Chris Bickford. Chris was in town in October participating in an eight-day photography workshop hosted by Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey. His project was simply titled "In The Night." When I first saw the photos (posted on Harvey's blog here) I knew exactly where three of them were taken: Welcome to the Johnson's, Whiskey Ward and THOR. Considering these three places are all near Essex and Rivington, I initially thought Chris hadn't "worked it" very hard. Still, though, he had a real nice shot of a couple having an intimate moment near the jukebox at WTTJ. "There's a blog post somewhere here," I thought. So I did some digging.

I easily found Chris's website and his travelogue, in which he writes rather eloquently about his workshop experience and the Lower East Side. I emailed him to find out more. Turns out, Chris actually lived at Norfolk and Rivington from 1997 to 1999 (he's now based in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina). Knowing that, and of course seeing the finished project and outtakes, gave me a whole different context. His writing struck a note with me and my own thinking about the Lower East Side. It definitely changed my initial thinking that he hadn't worked the story hard enough, or that he was simply photographing his friends having a good time. He's got a very strong eye for color and mood. The work speaks for itself.
Considering Chris lived in the Lower East Side ten years ago, I respect his opinion on how the neighborhood has changed. But it's more than a one-time Lower East Sider coming back to visit the neighborhood. He could have taken a holier-than-thou "What happened to my neighborhood" or "I was here before all of this" attitude. But he is fair and balanced, if not a bit nostalgic even. Reading him muse over modern day Lower East Side hip-dom is quite interesting. He describes the project as...

...a somewhat lyrical exploration of the New York night, focusing on the hip Lower East Side. From a visual standpoint, I was attracted to all the colors of artifical night light: neon, blue stage lights, red-gelled interiors, halogen street lights. From a thematic viewpoint, I was looking to capture what I saw to be the prevailing mood of the nightlife on the Lower East Side: a world of people searching for something, sometimes finding fleeting hints of it, but generally lost in the darkness of a place that is ultimately apathetic to whether or not their band makes it, or whether they find love, or how cool they look. The Lower East Side is one of the great bastions of the “Tragically Hip”, and to me there is some poignant irony about it all; so many people who yearn to be different, to rise above, to express themselves as artists, to escape the conformity of their upbringing…and all of them drowning in a sea of sameness: tattoos, pork pie hats, rock bands, wallets on chains, cigarettes outside the bar…I don’t think I really scratched the surface of that theme in my piece, but it was there with me the whole time. There were moments when I saw it all in a more positive light, when I thought of this great teeming world of art and music and young people out doing their thing, hooking up and breaking up and living out the dramas that are the stuff of rock and roll songs…but mostly it struck me as a sad, lonely kind of scene, with a retro-upon-retro style that no longer seemed to have much substance to it…kind of a Foucault’s paradise of endlessly circular self-references.

I think he nails it. I'm sure there's somebody reading this who endured harsh winters squatting in abandoned buildings in the 1980s who would scoff at all this, and what I'm about to say. But I moved to New York in 2000 and lived in a tenement building on Stanton that had closet-sized hallway bathrooms still in use. Drunks from Bowery would urinate and deficate on my building's front door. There was a homeless couple living on my roof. The superintendent's helper slept in the cellar. But then I'd walk a few blocks over and some elegant woman in high heels would be exiting a taxi, shouting into her cellphone trying to meet up with a friend who she can't see is standing right across the street. The clueless woman, the four men dressed identically, all standing in a line to get into the newest nightclub: it's all won out over the homelessness and the begging for change (or perhaps fueled it). And the madness hasn't stopped. In the emails I had with Chris, it was easy to tell he had some of the same thoughts I did. The funniest description he gave of the Lower East Side is one that I'll think of every time I walk past Piano's on Ludlow Street on a weekend: ironic, retro, trust-fund rocker purgatory.
I'm sorry this has turned into a rant about gentrification. But it all started when I saw some pictures taken at some places I like to play pool. I came across this work two days after playing at Lucky Jacks with Steve Tseng, who is pictured above at the red pool table.

Chris isn't sure what's in store for this project. "I’m thinking maybe I could take pieces of this idea south, to small towns and regional music scenes, where I might find a little more soul, a little more humanity. I think maybe I’d like to add a stronger element of 'Americana' to it. Maybe make it a piece about the 'American' night. Or hell, maybe I’ll just suck it up and head back to the LES for another dose of postmodern blues, New York style."

Eastside Billiards

2007-10-30T15:04:00.000-04:00

I read about Eastside Billiards last year in a New York Times Urban Tactics piece by George Morin. I remember reading that it was close to where Cory Lidle crashed his airplane into a highrise residential building on 72nd Street. Shortly after I read the article I'm sure that I googled Eastside and made a point of visiting. But actually making a trip uptown would be a long time coming.

And so it was over a year later, last Sunday, as I was on my way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art when it dawned on me "Oh yeah, there's that poolhall somewhere up there." But I couldn't remember where it was, or even its name. I had a vague recollection that it was in the 80s somewhere, but no idea as to what avenue. Considering I had to meet some people in front of the Met, I figured I'd only get a quick peek at the place, with no time to actually play. So I got off the bus at 86th and wolfed down a cheeseburger at the nearest diner. Somehow thinking the poolhall was on 83rd, I headed south. I approached a man who looked like a neighborhood resident and asked if he knew of the place, to which he replied "Is it upstairs?" That, yes, I remembered. He pointed me back toward 86th and told me that it was on the north side of the street. I spotted it quickly, a bright orange awning at 163 E. 86th Street between Third and Lexington. Within minutes I was upstairs at Eastside talking to the man on duty, Vernon, who graciously agreed to let me take a few quick snaps.

The space has been a poolhall since 1991, when it was called Eastside Amusements. Originally, there were only 11 pool tables. But in order to compete with the nearby Amsterdam Billiards Club just down the street at 210 E. 86th, a slew of arcade games was brought in to Eastside to differentiate it from Amsterdam. A few years ago Amsterdam closed its doors on the Upper East Side and soon followed suit on its Upper West Side location. It was during this period that Jerry Shipman bought Eastside and took it "from being a ratty arcade-and-pool hangout for local teenagers" and turned it into a full-fledged poolhall ("a cultural asset that no self-respecting New York neighborhood should be without"). By getting rid of the arcade games (and the inherent "riff-raff") Shipman was able to add five more tables. Eastide currently has 15 full-sized tables and one coin-operated table (set for $1.50/game), with plans to add one more full-sized table.

The Cory Lidle accident took place on a rainy mid-October day last year. The article in the Times ran about a month later. I couldn't figure out why the plane crash was even mentioned. My guess is that the reporter had already planned to check out Eastside Billiards that night, and with the plane crash having occurred several hours earlier, perhaps he thought it would make the article a little more "moody." Indeed, when combined with the photo (of Shipman racking some balls) I get a sort of somber, rainy-night vibe from it all. I covered the plane crash that day, so I was curious how one reporter would end up writing about a poolhall when a major news story was happening a mile away. So I called Eastside and spoke with Shipman. As it turns out, the writer plays or used to play a lot of pool at Eastside. He was impressed with how Shipman turned the place around. So he pitched the article to the Times and one other paper. Neither Shipman nor myself were crazy about the photo, taken by Liz O. Baylen (who at 28 is "one of America's most notable young photojournalists"). I am of the school of thought that says if you're going to feature somebody's back so prominently in a photograph, there better be a good reason for it: i.e. the person doesn't want to be photographed, which certainly was not the case here. To be fair, I would bet anything that Baylen submitted many others that showed faces but that some page layout person preferred a more anonymous view of the place.

At any rate, I was happy to finally got to see firsthand what Eastside Billiards is all about. It seems like there's an interesting history there. Considering that my visit was on a warm Sunday afternoon in October, I wasn't too upset that I couldn't stay longer. It'll be cold and rainy and dreary in no time. I think that's when I'll head back.

Slim Pickins

2007-10-23T13:37:00.000-04:00

Not much to report these days. Hopefully I'll have a new batch of pictures before long. This is one from Sophie's taken in late August.

Snagged

2007-10-18T12:08:00.000-04:00

I was stoked to discover yesterday, during my weekly page-through of the Village Voice, that one of my pool pictures made it into the Voice's annual Best of NY issue. My longtime photo editor there, Staci Schwartz, was kind enough last week to email me a long list of things for which she needed photos. One of the photos she was looking for was "a closeup of a cool tattoo on someone’s arm or someone getting tattooed." A picture I had taken recently at Doc Holliday's was the first image that came to mind. It was a picture of an outstretched hand with a huge fish hook embedded in it. The picture up top I think has a little more depth to it. I like the pool table in the background. But the one at right is the one I submitted to the Voice because it shows the tattoos a lot more clearly. If I ever run into that guy again at Doc Holliday's I'm sure he'll appreciate that I got the photo into the Voice. I remember asking him about the hook and him saying something along the lines of "Yeah, straight out of Serpico." I'll have to watch that movie sometime and see what he's talking about. At any rate, that's definitely my favorite thing about freelancing—getting the "Do you have any photos of_____?" calls or emails. Incidentally, these two photos were shot on film. And so whenever people see my Leica and ask "Is that a digital camera?" I always go on to tell them how ironic it is that my "personal work" mostly ends up on the web, in the form of digital scans from negatives. Whereas all my "work work" is done digitally, primarily for newspapers, and ends up being reproduced as halftone images on grimy newsprint. Regardless of the medium, it's always rewarding whenever any of my "personal work" gets published.

Billiard Tables on the Big Screen

2007-10-15T15:48:00.000-04:00

Once I was reading something about Martin Scorsese where it said that he had directed a Michael Jackson video. Some time later I was watching something on YouTube when it popped back into my head. So I searched for the first Michael Jackson video that came to mind, Beat It. When I got to the part of the video that's shot in what appears (at first glance) to be a poolhall, I naively assumed it was the work of Scorsese. Only because it reminded me so much of the scene he would later direct in The Color of Money at Chalkie's, where Vincent plays Mozel. But I quickly figured out it Beat It was not directed by Scorsese. It was the video for Bad—lamely excerpted from an 18-minute film—that was directed by Scorsese. A different Italian-American, Bob Giraldi, was the director for Beat It. Regardless of who directed what, I couldn't help but notice the pocketless tables in Beat It. I thought "that's pretty bad ass to film around billiard tables." No doubt 99 percent of all people who've ever seen Beat It have overlooked the absence of pockets. But it was cool watch Beat It again after so many years. I had long known about the Eddie Van Halen solo in the song. But what I didn't know was that, during the recording of the solo, "a technician who was unaware Van Halen was beginning a take knocked on the studio door, entered and quickly closed it when he realized his error. Afterwards, it was jointly decided to leave this mistake in; the knock on the door is clearly audible just prior to the launch of Van Halen's guitar solo."

Fast forward to a couple weeks ago, Yvonne brought home "Mean Streets," which is an early film by Scorsese. We finally got around to watching it last night. Pool is sprinkled throughout this movie, but there's an extended fight scene that takes place in a downstairs or basement poolhall. Acccording to the dialogue, it's on King Street. I would love to know where this poolhall is or was actually located. Check out the scene here (or go to bottom of post). The beginning of the clip shows them driving from high overhead, and I cannot for the life of me figure out where it was shot. If you watch closely you see that they make a left turn onto a one-way street that's going the opposite direction. Then all of a sudden it jumps to them on Bleecker Street about to turn right (downtown) onto Bowery. A summary of Mean Streets can be read here here. In this clip there are billiard tables, pool tables and what appear to be snooker tables:

A Pool Player's Commute

2007-10-10T16:18:00.001-04:00

For this fall session we got moved into a different division. We were in Division #014 and now we're in Division #013. Caveman said it's common for that to happen every few years, expected even. I don't know how it happened, but I'm not complaining. I'm actually pretty excited about it. Not only do I think it's awesome that we'll be facing a whole new division of pool players, but the venues are all much closer to Sophie's. In our new divsion, the farthest north we have to go is 14th Street.

In what may take the cake as the biggest pool-dork idea ever, I've made a map comparing our old division locations (green) to those of our new division (red). Sophie's is marked with the blue circled X. If you look closely you'll see that some green and red arrows overlap. That's because three bars–-O'Hanlon's, Josie Wood's and Whiskey Ward--are all places that we played in our old division.

Bars from our old division that I won't miss: Paddy McGuires (two-dollar tables, not very good seating for visiting team), Barfly (nice table but it's too big for the space, a white pole gets in the way) and Why Not (cramped table, too far from Sophie's). Bars that I will miss most: Maker's (lots of seating and plenty of clearance around pool table) and McSwiggan's (same reasons as Maker's, but with added convenience of the M15 bus stop right outside the front door). Peter Dillon's (right) was another nice place to play. Granted, these critiques are my own personal opinions. And none reflect the personalities of the people we play at the venues. I know Sophie's is not without its own shortcomings.

This week we just had our first away game at one of the new venues, Edge Bar. I am no stranger to Edge. A tight table for sure, but at least they have nice Trouble Shooter short cues of varying lengths to choose from. Getting a high-quality short cue is an idea I would like to see implemented at two other new venues we'll visit: Lucky Jack's and Musical Box.

Logistical things aside, there is something to be said for all the times I've been in a cab or on the bus headed back to Sophie's after a great match elsewhere. I would say the commute is definitely a different kind of team-bonding experience. Below, Slima watches a train approach after our playoff loss to Why Not in September.

Membership Has Its Privileges

2007-10-08T18:54:00.000-04:00

In late September I renewed my membership over at the Hamilton Fish Recreation Center. A six-month renewal cost me twenty-five dollars. That's 14 cents per day. To practice pool. On big tables. Instead of sitting here at my computer, it is most likely where I'd be this very moment if the place wasn't closed early for Columbus Day. I started playing at the rec center in early 2006, around the same time I joined the APA. Since then, there have been times where I've gone over a month without stopping by to practice. It's hard to get into any groove or get any kind of respect when you have such a spotty attendance record. And I realized playing only in bars was depleting my cash flow too quickly. So for most of 2007 I've been going pretty regularly, two or three times per week on average. When I saw a Skill Level 5 ranking next to my name on the scoresheet last season, the first thing I thought was "all that practice over at the rec center has paid off." I've long ago come to the conclusion one does not become a 5, 6 or a 7 by just playing on league nights. A lot of the players in the league that I've come to know and sort of "keep my eye on" all definitely practice throughout the week. I haven't played in a match in almost a month, and having the rec center for practice has become a good way to stay somewhat in stroke. Granted, there are many times where I go to the rec center and I'm just not feeling it. It'll take me three games before I finally get any sort of toehold. Other times I'm on fire, stringing together six, seven, or eight wins in a row, which is actually much more of an accomplishment than doing so at Sophie's. One thing is for certain though, at least at the rec center. We've all beaten one another many times. There's nobody who's unbeatable.

Mississippi Delta

2007-10-02T15:15:00.000-04:00

A couple times over the past few years I've come across a photography book by Birney Imes called "Juke Joint." The last time was about six months ago, at the McNally Robinson bookstore on Prince Street. The book is a photographic study of the juke joints scattered along the Mississippi Delta. Juke joints can be defined as "primitive rural counterparts of resort night clubs" where "the blues was incubated until it gelled into a recognizable art form." Naturally, the juke joints Imes photographed are all oozing with character. Photographed in the 1980s, the dilapidated, run-down, ramshackle structures are remnants of a dying era. Looking at the photographs, I couldn't help but notice that many of the juke joints have pool tables. "Good idea for a blog post," I thought. Click here to see a gallery of images from the book. And then go check out the high resolution version of the cover photo, which was taken at the Riverside Lounge in Shaw, Mississippi in 1986. Some reviews of the book can be read here and an amusing account of a speech Imes once gave can be read here.

Around the same time I came across "Juke Joint" I was at a bar with a copy of the New York Times spread out in front of me. On the front page, below the fold, was a picture taken in one of those juke joints, a place called Po' Monkey's in Merigold, Mississippi. The photo, taken by Nicole Bengiveno, features two men playing pool. So I took a picture of the newspaper. After all, it's not every day that the editors of one of the biggest and best papers in the world choose to publish on the front page a photo of people playing pool:So when the time came for me to begin writing this post, I did a quick google images search for juke joint and came up with a treasure trove of great images. One of my favorites (at the very top) is a photo taken at Po' Monkey's by Brett Peruzzi and Robyn Gold. Their journey of the Mississippi Delta juke joints can be read here. An exterior of Po' Monkey's (taken by Daryl Thetford):
Another fantastic image I found was one taken by Bill Steber. Steber's photograph of women dancing at Junior Kimbrough’s juke joint in Chulahoma, Mississippi was part of an extended essay on blues culture in Mississippi. The work earned him an Alicia Patterson Foundation Grant in 1998. Not only is it an iconic moment, but if you look closely you can see a pool table in the backround:All of this made me recall reading the book "The Color of Money" by Walter Tevis. My favorite part of the book is when Eddie Felson is encouraged by Minnesota Fats (with whom he has been playing a series of televised straight pool matches) to get back into the game by touring the South and hitting all the roadhouses. In the book, Eddie is based out of Lexington, Kentucky so he's not far away. He starts in the fictional town of Haneyville, North Carolina. And then he gets some serious action on the doorstep of the Delta, in Memphis, where he plays at "the hottest place in the whole South," a bar called Thelma's. Here he plays for $1000 per game in 8-ball (on bar tables set up for 25-cent games, no less).

The only geographic reference in the movie version of The Color of Money is the 9-ball tournament in Atlantic City, New Jersey. But most of the movie was filmed in Chicago. I think the scenes from the South in the book version would make an excellent basis for a film. And I think the perfect place to begin would be Messenger's Poolhall in Clarksdale, Mississippi. "Part pool hall and domino den...and part café and juke joint," Messenger's was the subject of a documentary in 2005, as well as a feature article in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger (story can be found here, scroll down a bit). I know I would love to visit all these places. This shot of Messenger's by Daryl Thetford says it all:

THOR

2007-09-27T12:30:00.000-04:00

For the past five or so years I've kept a wary eye on the Hotel on Rivington (THOR). I can't remember when they started building it, but it seems like ages ago. I'm thinking it was mid-to-late 2002. Because I have a picture I took in early 2003 where the structure had already topped out. Then from what I recall, it seems like construction halted for a long period of time, creating an eyesore of uncovered rusty steel beams. According to wikipedia, the building was completed in 2005, around the same time I moved to an apartment about four blocks away. But before I even moved to New York I was aware that the corner of Ludlow and Rivington was the location of the famous panoramic image featured on the cover of the Beastie Boys album Paul's Boutique. I even edited the album's wikipedia page when a new bar opened up this summer that seemingly paid homage to another store in the photo, Spitzer's Corner Shop. Then at some point it became Spitzer's Dress Shop (see photo above, which I took summer of 2004) and the bar now it its place is just known as Spitzer's Corner. THOR, known as a "trademark of gentrification in the Lower East Side," has since gone on to host countless rooftop/penthouse parties. Walking on nearby Delancey, I've often looked up in envy and seen people taking in the views at sunset. Indeed, I came across a photo several weeks ago, taken by Jake Dobkin, who had the opportunity to photograph one of said parties up top. One of the many things I love about the photo is that it shows the back of my building, on its Orchard Street side (it's the building that's next to the building that touches the taller building with the white columns. Click on photo, left, to enlarge). A couple weeks ago Yvonne and I snuck into THOR and took the elevator to the top floor, naively thinking we'd find access to the rooftop. After getting off on the 20th floor we were confronted with the oddness of one of the luxury suite's doors being wide open. We concluded there was a housekeeper inside cleaning. We found a stairwell and went up one more story on the very sticky stairs (too many spilled drinks) but alas were turned away by the ubiquitous orange roof door alarm. Not wanting to go all the way back down to the ground floor, we got off on the second floor. That's when we came across something that surprised me greatly: a nice Brunswick pool table (not coin-operated). After not being able to find any pool balls and feeling a bit like we were about to get kicked out, a friendly concierge-type person came in and asked if we wanted to play pool. All I had to do was give them my ID in exchange for the balls and a rack. So it was a very unexpected surprise. We played for a half hour or so while drinking juice drinks from tall glasses.The pool table is reserved primarily for guests of the hotel and patrons of the bar. So it's not like they encourage people to come in off the street and practice their pool for free. But the second floor bar is open Thursday through Saturdays and anybody can go to the bar at that point. The table had black felt and played very nicely. But the dark felt combined with somewhat uneven overhead lighting made it a little more difficult to see the pockets (cloudy Sunday around 5pm didn't help much).It's doubtful I'll go there with any regularity simply to practice, especially considering I have to buy something from the bar. But I do think it's really classy to have a pool table that's free for hotel guests. Part of me wonders if there's every any high-stakes action with twenty dollar bills being thrown around (I sort of doubt it). Or if it's just young urban professionals sipping $12 martinis playing 20-minute games of doubles (more likely). Regardless, there's definitely some sort of potential there. Next time I'm walking back from the East Village on a weekend night I see people upstairs playing I'm definitely stopping in.

Bar 169

2007-09-24T15:47:00.000-04:00

What an obscure place 169 Bar is. I guess I must have walked by it a couple years ago as I was exploring what was then my new neighborhood on the Lower East Side. It's named after its address, 169 E. Broadway, and faces Straus Square, which is formed by the intersection of E. Broadway, Canal and Essex/Rutgers Streets at Seward Park. The bar was closed, but I looked through the window and could see a pool table way in the back. A month or so later I went back and went in to play a couple practice racks. Other than the table being a bit too tight of a fit near the restrooms, I remember there was a hideous customized design/logo on the felt surface, something pertaining to a poker tournament or some event in Vegas perhaps, I can't remember exactly. The only time I ever heard anybody mention the bar was at nearby Whiskey Ward when I asked some folks where else they play pool. Bar 169 is about as far off the beaten path as you can get. But in my opinion that's never a bad thing.

A few weeks ago, bored from all my regular pool places, I was walking home when I decided to go to 169 for a nightcap. It was pretty late on a Thursday, had possibly even spilled over to Friday by then. I was hungry for anonymity and in search of a fresh environment. I was pleased to see some people playing pool, but when I asked if I could play the winner they said they only wanted to finish their game and be done. So as I was putting in my quarters afterwards a kid came up to me and seemed eager to play. I egregiously suggested a game of bank the eight. I made quick work of him in that game, then was approached by a very young-looking girl who wanted to play her friend. Since I had done what I set out to do and it was late, I said I'd give her the table as long as I could take a photo. She was a little hesitant since she was under 21, but I said something like "Oh don't worry, I just want to show the overall scene."

The resulting photo (above), and the strength of her break shot, pretty much sums up how I feel about the place: sort of ho-hum. But I would never say I won't return. I'm not one to post comments on bar review sites such as citysearch, baropinions, dodgeball, etc. But the comments I came across regarding Bar 169 were overwhelmingly negative, some approaching hateful: "If it was possible to contain all of the human excrement that is produced yearly in the United States and fashion a bar and it's [sic] staff out of the sh*t, 169 Bar would be the place." Ouch. The reviewer, nbettie, vowed never return to 169 and "matter, of fact, I would prefer to drink my own urine." Since 169 is a live music bar, many of the comments dealt with the soundman/sound sytem, everything from being denied soundchecks to the sound system being "too tinny and too laden with bass all at once." One reviewer said the bar is a "trap for the working artists of NY" that "pretends to be a friendly lower east side bar presenting live music but the truth is that they are spamming musicians through myspace and then taking the money they make at the door, and spend at their bar on show nights" (whatever that means).

As for the clientele, one reviewer said "each patron looks depressingly alone" and another said there are "a lot of old people, and not hot cougars and dilfs either...a bit grim." Even the bar's pets don't go unscathed. Folks described the "ugliest aquatic creatures ever displayed" in the "bottom-feeder-friendly fish tank."

Personally, I agreed most with whoever wrote that Bar 169 is a "homemade lounge/dive eluding classification" that "looks a little thrown-together." Without a doubt, the most glowing and positive review (and, interestingly, the one that gave the best props to the pool table) was written over four years ago by the folks at Lockhart Steele, who said it's "a divey joint, with a good pool table (naturally)" that "transcends the utter diviness of, say, Blue and Gold." But by late 2004, somebody was asking if Bar 169 had "jumped the shark," calling into question the venue's hosting of an amateur female Jello wrestling night.

A Postcard from Doc Holliday's

2007-09-22T11:34:00.000-04:00

I've been playing a lot at Doc Holliday's lately. The bar has long been a staple of my East Village circuit. It's the kind of place where, even if nobody's playing, I'll go ahead and rack the balls and ask around to find an opponent. And it never fails that if I'm playing with a group of people for a while I'll get to know them a bit and take some snaps (above, my apologies for the obnoxious tilt correction). Typically I go in around 7 o'clock and catch the last bit of happy hour and stay a couple hours. Then it's over to Sophie's, which is just waking up by then. Sophie's and Doc Holliday's have a unique history in terms of pool. The captain of my team, Caveman, actually started our team based out of Doc Holliday's around 1994 (but he got 86'd on 9/11 for making an inappropriate comment to one of the bartenders). Last year I was informally offered Doc's Sunday team by its captain, as they had had enough and were disbanding. I declined, as I was happy with my Tuesday night gig. Now that Whiskey Ward has a Tuesday night team, maybe it's time for Doc's to enter the fray again. I'm still pretty loyal to Sophie's. But to tell you how much of regular I have become at Doc's, I was there a couple weeks ago and it was much later, like 10:30 or so. I had been on a good string of games (bank the eight, any pocket) with some players who ended up leaving around the time my friend Aris showed up. So when a group of NYU-looking youngsters came in and asked the doorman, Steve, how to get on the pool table for a game of doubles, I was sort of honored that he felt comfortable enough to fit them in ahead of us (he of course thanked me). We were off to get a slice so anyway, so it was not like I needed to hog the table any more than I had. It's just cool that he knew I would have done the same thing.

Stamina

2007-09-19T17:43:00.000-04:00

It's been an interesting postseason for those of us at Sophie's. A couple Tuesday nights ago, three of us from the team were hanging out at at the bar enjoying a quiet, off-season night of pool. Around 7 o'clock, the bar's phone rang. Howard, the bartender, handed the phone to Freddy, saying it was something related to the pool team. It was the captain of the team from Why Not bar at 40th and 9th, asking us where we were. Turns out, our team had gotten the wild card but for whatever reason our captain had not gotten the word. Very quickly we ruled out taking a cab to Why Not to play. That wouldn't have been fair to the rest of the team. I made a bunch of phone calls and long story short we were able to reschedule the match so that we wouldn't have to post a forfeit (thanks to all involved in that, you know who you are). The rematch was this past Tuesday at Why Not and we lost to them 0-3. But it wasn't like it was a total shutout for us. Our first two players, both 4s, got to the hill in their matches, against a 5 and a 6. Then it was me, a 5, vs a 6. And it was a grinder, going over 40 innings and nearly two hours. It started out close, tied at two games a piece, then I just ran out of steam and allowed him to take the last three games in a row. Looking back, there were a handful of moments where I wish I had just taken a few more seconds on my shots. I had an easy runout in one game, but as I was preparing to go for it the palm of my bridge hand, which was sort of cupped around my opponent's 9 ball, barely, imperceptible to everyone but me, touched it. It didn't even really move the ball. But I admit here and now to the world that I should have called myself out on it. My opponent probably would have said "Go ahead, don't worry about it." Instead, I allowed it to distract me and I hastily shot and blew an opportunity to get to the hill. As they say, hindsight. I'm going to try to take a few days off from pool. Just wanted to post something about the end of the summer session (my 101st entry to this blog, as it turns out). Above is a mix of new and old team members from Sophie's. Left to right: Cary Conover, Josh Vietze, Adam Friedstein, Joseph Williams (aka Slima), Chris Cino, Grace Mangum and Wilfredo Correa.

Deep Brooklyn

2007-09-14T21:23:00.000-04:00

After repeatedly seeing a John Varvatos advertisement featuring Aerosmith's Joe Perry playing pool in Brooklyn at a place called "Playboy Billiards" I did a little research. About the only press I could find online is that it was voted "Best Pool Hall" by New York Press in 2006. My ears perked up when I read they had a billiards table. So on a rainy Sunday night last month, I paid a visit to the place, which now goes by the name Brooklyn Billiards. After being there I definitely feel it is an underrated gem, a very special place. For those who haven't read the NYP article, here it is in its entirety:

For close to 30 years Brooklyn Billiards on Coney Island Avenue was Playboy Billiards—until the assholes at Playboy decided all of a sudden that there was a trademark issue and forced the name change. With one table for billiards, about 20 for pool and two ping-pong tables in the back, the place isn't very big. But it houses a lot of talent. The tables are all in good shape with new felt that's properly tended. There are some broomsticks among the house cues, but it doesn't take long to find a straight one with a good tip. On any given day during working hours one can find between three and ten of the 20 or so guys who call the place home. Out of this cast of regulars there's a handful that can really play pool, but it's the billiards players who are some of the city's best. Nighttime and weekends belong to the local teenagers, mostly Russians, Russian Jews, Orthodox Jews, Italians and Pakistanis. Anybody looking for a real game is advised to visit during off-hours when it caters to pool players, not teenagers. As in most pool rooms, the first table is the action table. With tight pockets and good rails it's mostly reserved for 9-ball, but you'll occasionally see straight pool or a bunch of guys bored enough to get a group game going. There used to be this one Orthodox kid who played, we think his name was Steve, who was one of the best amateur players we've ever seen. Now he's got a wife and kid and not much time for running tables.

When I want to practice three cushion I am accustomed to taking the B, D, F or V train to 42nd Street to transfer to the Queens-bound 7 to go to either Carom Cafe, Spin City Billiards or Master Billiards. So I was more than willing to hop on a Brooklyn-bound F, which would drop me off about 15 minutes away from Brooklyn Billiards. I called ahead just to make sure they still had the billiard table and to check on its availability. The man said most of the billiard players rarely come in at night so therefore I would likely have it all to myself. So I got on the F train and took it to Avenue N and walked the 10 blocks to Coney Island Avenue. I had never been in that exact area of Brooklyn (we'll call it somewhere between Ocean Parkway, Mapleton and Midwood) and was impressed with Ocean Parkway itself, a grand boulevard with long, tree-canopied sidewalks. It was a pleasant walk through a slight drizzle. Rounding the corner onto Coney Island Avenue I could sense I was getting close to the place, as I saw a bunch of young men outside smoking cigarettes. Walking into Brooklyn Billiards I got a sense of going back into a different era. If you can imagine Katz's Deli on Houston Street having pool tables, this would be it. Inside there is nothing luxurious or fashionable, no obnoxious neon lights or decor. It's just a nice, classic pool hall.

Initially, my thinking was that I would have to wait for the billiard table, because a man was already using it. I resigned myself to the fact that I would just practice on a pool table until he was done. But the man behind the counter suggested I go up to him and ask him if he wanted to play. So I went over and introduced myself and he willingly obliged and let me join him. He got everything set up for the opening shot, putting the red object ball on the foot spot and the white and yellow cue balls about six inches away from each other on the head string. Since it was his table and he was nice enough to let me play, even going so far as to give me take the first shot, I decided I would concede the white cue ball to him and take the yellow for myself. I chalked up, got down on my shot, fired away and surprisingly came within several inches of a successful billiard shot (a relatively high percentage shot, it's a fairly easy shot if you've practiced it or ever seen the setup. Check here to see an example). The man, whose name was Pedro, easily scored a few points before I got my first point. There was one memorable time early on when I was looking over a shot, hesitating which way to go. The white and the red were right next to one another in a corner. And I was waiving my hands around like an idiot trying to figure out the angle when he simply pointed his cue to a certain diamond and said "Hit here, right english." Sure enough, my ball went three rails around the table, came back slowly to hit two more rails and then softly nudged into both the white and the red. One time, his cue ball double-kissed the red ball, but still hit enough rails and made contact with my yellow at the end. "In my country, we don't count that." I asked him where he was from, thinking he'd say somewhere in South America. Turns out he's from Puebla, Mexico. After about 20 minutes, I had gotten comfortable to the Verhoeven biljart table and was somewhat relieved to have avoided a shutout. I had scored about five points when I came very close to nailing a difficult "ticky." Sometimes I would sense Pedro wanted to give me advice on a shot, at which point I would stubbornly stop and indicate I wanted to try to figure it out on my own. But it was unmistakable, Pedro had definitely grown up playing billiards. Many times he would make two points in a row, and may have actually made three in a row once. When it's played correctly, three-cushion billiards is truly hypnotic to watch. In the end, the score was 10-20 before Pedro decided that it was over. I didn't know we were playing to any set number. Overall I was happy with myself, happy to have gotten the chance to play "against" another person, taking small pride in the fact that I got to 10 before he got to 20. Hell, I was happy that I got to 10, period, considering I was only shooting about half as often as I would have if I had just been playing by myself.

I had a good time. The vibe at Brooklyn Billiards is very chill. Playing next to our table were some young girls, one of which was wearing a hijab. It was cute to watch them play. Lots of cool pictures on the wall, the coolest of which was a large French poster for the movie The Hustler ("L'Arnaqueur"). Interestingly, it was Gleason-less and featured a pocketless table. Also there were outtakes from the Varvatos shoot. Lots of other things have been filmed there, some TV shows, music videos, and I think a scene from one of the Men In Black movies. The owner, Neil Block, wrote me an email out of the blue last week after I had left my contact information there. He seems to take pride when he writes "We have not changed a thing in this place for the past 30 years." And I hope he continues to not change a thing.

New tip

2007-09-13T12:22:00.000-04:00

I splurged this week and paid $38 to have my cue professionally retipped. The past few times I've done it myself (see below). What I do is take a single-edge razor to slice off the old tip. Then I shave off any glue residue from the ferrule to get it as flat as possible before using Krazy Glue to apply the new tip. Last time I did this I messed up and didn't use enough glue and the tip came off. So I cleaned everything up and tried again, but on the second attempt the glue hardened before I got the tip on perfectly even. It was a fraction of a millimeter off. I decided to stick with it, as it wasn't enough to mess up my shots...just enough for me to be annoyed with myself. Before long, it was worn down (very likely due to my incessant use of the Cue Cube). I kept putting off buying a new tip, not wanting to go through the whole hassle of doing it myself again. At some point I saw this video and I was mesmerized by the precision of it all. Eventually, last week, I brought my cue to Blatt's and a guy named Earl presented me with a few options. I think he got out a Le Pro, an Elk and a Sterling, ranging from (I can't remember exactly) from $10 to $25 installed. I told him I like to use the cube scuffer a lot and that I was hoping for a longer-lasting tip. I also mentioned that I was hoping to be able to get a little more draw from a tip. That's when he put all the tips away and went to another room. He came back with a few Moori tips. I immediately liked the handsome tan color of the tip and its many layers, as opposed to the darker, compressed-looking tip I had been using. He said it would cost $40 to have a Moori put on, but for me it would be $35 because my cue, a 20 ounce Smith & Wesson was purchased at Blatt. I chose a Moori III Medium. So far, no complaints. We'll see how long it lasts.

East River Bar

2007-09-07T13:03:00.000-04:00

I've lived in New York for over seven years and during that time many of my assignments for the Village Voice have been to photograph bars. I would guess I've photographed at least 60-70 by now. Some are memorable, most are not so much. In 2004 I was assigned to photograph East River Bar, which is located on the Brooklyn side of the Williamsburg Bridge. With the bars I always like to call ahead of time to let them know I'm coming and ask when the best time is. I can't remember exactly, but the owner or manager at ERB would have said something like "Sure, come on over tonight. We should have a good crowd by around 8:30 or 9:00." So I walked over the bridge, pausing on the Brooklyn side to admire the sunset over Lower Manhattan. I arrived at the bar and saw immediately that almost everybody was out on the patio, where you can bring your own food to grill (BYOBBQ). There was a couple inside playing pool and so I dutifully photographed them as well. Over a year later, in the fall of 2005 when I had begun playing regularly, I went back to ERB in search of a game. This time, unfortunately, nobody was playing pool but I still wanted to shoot around a bit. The table was more beat up than I remembered, and it been re-oriented since my first visit, presumably because they have live music on the same platform. I do recall one funny detail, and I wish I had taken a picture of it: apparently the 8 ball had gone missing and so they got out a spare cue ball and used a marker to draw the number 8 with a circle around it. I am due for another visit, perhaps this winter once it's cold and they've got the portable fireplace up and running.

Sophie's photo roundup, part three

2007-09-04T16:15:00.000-04:00

It's been seven months since I did a roundup of pictures from Sophie's (you can click here and here to see previous photo roundups). Up top is Fulvia, who speaks with a very distinctive Italian accent. A few weekends ago I played her twice in one night, beating her both times. The next night she was back and we played again and I won again, but I let her have the table.

Adam from Sophie's takes a shot as Darin looks on. Darin also plays in the league, out of Musical Box over on Avenue B. I like this picture because it seems to sum up both players' styles and personalities. Adam is talkative, a bit of a jokester, and a pretty fast, animated player. Darin has a much more quiet, cooled down personality, and his playing style is much more on the careful, cautious side.

I played Lazlo at Pioneer in 2003 or so, and I thought he was a bona fide pool shark. Just the way he carried himself, the way he used his foot to spin the cue when chalking, his fast style of playing, etc. After he destroyed me I thought he may have taken my bag (turns out a friend had moved it for me), so I went out to confront him about it. I said "Alright man, where's my bag?" He looked at me with amusement and said "I"ll pay your rent." Lazlo is from Budapest. Here he is pictured above at left with some friends, during a much friendlier confrontation. In the middle photo is Will, who plays at Musical Box with Darin. Will is an exceptionally talented player in the Hispanic tradition. He is a veteran of the Hamilton Fish rec center, and can play last pocket with the best. At right is Johnny from Colorado. Johnny plays a lot at Joe's on 6th and at Ace Bar, where he works. He has been receptive to the idea of playing for the Sophie's team.

Grace, the North Carolinian. Grace got bumped up to a 3 this season. Season highlight for Grace was her slaying of two 5s. Last time I wrote about Grace it was in June and we were only a couple matches into the season. I wrote that she was adjusting to the competitiveness of the APA. She definitely seems to have gotten over her jitters, and we look forward to having her on board this fall.

I have no idea who this guy was. But he was very drunk and I think he got kicked out of the bar that night. Anybody who swings a pool stick around like that should. I didn't want to go anywhere near him.

Finally, a shot of our beloved Slima (right) taunting Chris. Chris was on our team two seasons ago, but will hopefully be returning in the fall. This was taken on a league night where I had to leave for an assignment, and so I had my digital camera with me. Actually, now that I think about it, it was taken after my assignment, when I came back to Sophie's. That's actually one of my favorite times to be at the bar: after a match. Win or lose, we like to put the scoresheet away and play "bar" (rules).

News From R.A. Dyer

2007-08-31T16:18:00.000-04:00

R.A. "Jake" Dyer wrote me this morning with news of a new website he's created called poolhistory.com. The site is a home for all of his pool-related writing, complete with links to his books, a blog as well as links to other pool websites. Of note is an extensive list of blogspot sites he's created that are dedicated to various players. Also, there's a must-see video from Johnston City, Illinois. Most importantly, Dyer has just written a new book titled "The Hustler & The Champ." In short, the book is about Minnesota Fats and Willie Mosconi. According to his website:

The Hustler & The Champ tells of both men’s hardscrabble march to greatness, of their bitter decades-long rivalry, and finally of the televised shoot-out that revealed pocket billiards to millions even as it exposed the deep contradictions within all of organized competition. Through the 1920s, the Great Depression, and the resurgent 1960s, R.A. Dyer follows the lives of both men and tells the story of America’s conflicted love affair with the sport of rogues.

If Dyer's book "Hustler Days" is any indication, his new book will be an excellent read. Dyer is a phenomenal researcher with a true talent for description and extracting dialogue from his interviewees. All of which add to give the reader a richly textured sense of presence. Dyer, also a columnist for Billiards Digest, is based in Austin, Texas, where he is a state capital reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "The Hustler & The Champ" is due out in October and can be pre-ordered on Amazon by clicking here.

Those looking to whet their appetite until October can look at another one of Dyer's contributions to the sport. He appears in a documentary called "Swimming With Sharks: The Art of the Hustle" that is included on the new two-disc collector's edition DVD of "The Hustler." The new DVD has four featurettes not included on the "Special Edition" DVD. They are "Life in the Fast Lane: Fast Eddie Felson and The Search for Greatness," "Milestones in Cinema History: The Making of The Hustler," "Swimming with Sharks: The Art of the Hustle," and "Paul Newman: Hollywood's Cool Hand." There is an interesting excerpt of an interview with Paul Newman from one of the featurettes that can be seen here.

A12

2007-08-30T12:08:00.000-04:00

Crossing Avenue A from Julep is Kelly's Sports Bar. For what was an embarrassing length of time, the sign actually read "Kelly's Sport's Bar." Nice. Before that, according to the Times, it was known as J. P. Warde's. However, on the bar's myspace page it is referred to as JP Wardes. I don't know when it switched to Kelly's, sometime in the past several months I'm pretty sure. The bar has also been gone by names such as Alchymy, Spoon and Jaycox Coal. At any rate, I haven't been able to find anything about the bar under its current name, whether it's new ownership, etc. But there is plenty of stuff online about the bar before the most recent name change. A dodgeball reviewer named J. Crowley complains that the owner "stole my money off the pool table, threatened to kick me out of his bar when I called him on his thievery, blatantly CHEATED in pool then denied it." Wow. I don't know, I feel like this is all dirt about the owner that I don't need to be scooping up. On the other hand, there was plenty of good things to say. Somebody named K.B. says "I knew this was a fun pub when the bartender started doing shots with me & my friends." Case in point. The last time I was there I saw a bartender mix a shot, pour it into the navel cavity of a young bride-to-be lying on the bar, then suck it up to the delight of all her friends. The funniest thing written about the space is the stealth sobriety test, which refers to a tricky incline in the floor at the back of the bar. If you've ever played pool there, you can't miss it.