Hook & Ladder II

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

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

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.