my spot

Every time I go to Sophie's I always end up sitting in the exact same spot. It's toward the back of the bar, right near the jukebox. This spot affords me a view of the entire bar and it provides a relatively clean background if I want to take a picture of people playing. When it starts getting crowded and people come in looking for tables, I always offer up my spot (since it is a four-seat table). Here are a bunch of photos taken from my spot:


This is Ludo, who I'm told is no longer in New York. He is from the Brittany region of France and has a very thick French accent. One night I was shooting at the top of my game, playing brilliantly and tearing through the clipboard. A couple nights later I was playing slow, safe, timid. So he came up to me and said "What is this? I watch you the other night, and now all this careful shooting. Where is your panache!" Look it up.


Will Esposito, who is on my list of "players I've never beaten." Even with a broken foot he is a great player. A super nice fellow who plays on two teams out of Musical Box on Avenue B. I will get a better photo of Will sometime and post it.


A photo of a kid named Eamon, who was in with his mother a few Tuesdays ago as our team was warming up. Not a bad player for his age. We have him signed up for our roster in 2018.


Finally, a photo of Julie Madlener, who is also somebody I've never beaten. I always seem to run into Julie in unfamiliar turf, and when I've had a couple too many. Despite this, she has graciously put up with my numerous inquiries about her game. A few weeks ago she came into Sophie's and we chatted a bit. I knew she had gone to Vegas for the APA's National Singles Championship. So I was curious to know how she fared. I was stoked when she told me she finished in 9th place in her field (players at skill levels 6 and 7). Congrats.

Stats

We finished out our season on Tuesday night. Our team didn't have the best season, but it could have been worse. We won five out of our 14 matches (a .357 average). Of our nine losses, five went 2-3 and four went 1-4. In other words, we never got shut out (the dreaded 0-5). Indeed, our high point was our defiant 5-0 win (on their table) against a team that beat us 5-0 last time we met (on their table). Such are the dynamics and inconsistencies of our roster from week to week. The rest of our wins this season all went 3-2. Overall, a definite improvement over the winter session, in which we only won two of our matches. Our MVP of the spring session is Mr. Josh Vietze (left), who won nine of his 12 matches. The last six matches in which he played were all wins. Ever the humble player, I doubt he is even aware of this.

This of course means no more league nights for Sophie's III until the summer session, which begins in early June. I can sense the break will do our team well. Time to regroup and recruit. Time to face and battle one another "on the clipboard" at Sophie's. My goal is to practice more. Anymore, I'm only playing two, maybe three times a week. I have sensed a tapering-off of my confidence this season and have to settle for a ho-hum .500 personal average. Hats off to the Paddy McGuire's team Chalk Is Cheap, which went into Tuesday's match as the first place team in the division. They showed exceptional class, putting up their weakest player against ours in the final hill-hill match, even though they had some some heavy hitters they could have put up. And for buying our team shots afterwards. Good luck to everybody in the playoffs. I'll look forward to hearing about it.

A Rare Masse

I made this shot a few weeks ago at Sophie's and have been meaning to diagram it since. Due to some sort of Shockwave incompatibility I can't get cuetable.com to work. Plus, I don't think you can illustrate a masse there. So Photoshop it is.

I guess you could call this a masse to billiard to combo. Or, masse to cue ball carom to combo. It wasn't a league game so I had to articulate it very clearly, and I didn't use any of those fancy words. I probably said something like "Alright, here's what's gonna happen: I'm gonna curve around the seven and the cue ball is going to go OFF my fourteen into your six, then six to the twelve in the corner." It was pretty sweet.