Some things have come up which are going to prevent me from playing pool this week - at all it seems. This is quite annoying after last week's seemingly unending hours of play. However, I think/hope this will be a good thing.
I bought 2 books last week: Byrne's Complete Book of Pool Shots and Zen Pool. I'm hoping/expecting that between these two titles, I can gain both information and confidence in both the physical and mental aspect of the game.
Byrne's book appears to be a nice collection of how-to and what-if shots for nearly all types of situations/positions. The next time I go to practice seriously, I'll be taking this book along with me. I hope to work through all the situations/position/chapters eventually - but for now I'm just starting small and choosing a few that caught my eye as I flipped through it.
Zen Pool is more of a 'what to do, how to prepare *mentally*' kind of book. I expect to read these throughout this week and am looking forward to putting my new skills into action. This will take considerably more time and effort, I expect. But I'm looking forward to bringing my game to the next level. This means I'm going to have to spend more time doing drills to hammer out the mechanics, further train my body and allow my subconscious to handle those high-pressure shots.
Lastly, I just added a new link on my sidebar to www.poolstudent.com (AKA Pool Synergy). I just found this site, and already I am favoriting the URL. Here are a few articles I particularly enjoyed reading today:
Play Pool Without Fear, How to Practice, How to Practice Part 2 and finally one that I find drives me up the wall more than just about any other topic: Learn to Win Under Pressure (why we choke and how to avoid it).
That's all I have for today - but it's plenty of information for you to browse through.
What The Heck?
5 weeks ago
Johnny,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the kind words about my blog, Pool Student's Blog. I'm glad you liked it.
PoolSynergy is not an alternate name for Pool Student's Blog, it's the name for our Blog Carnival (strange name but that's what they're called). Pool Synergy is a monthly virtual collection of pool articles on one theme. Each article is posted on the writer's own site, and the host (me for our 1st edition, Samm Diep for December's edition) writes up a summary and links to all the included articles. It's like an anthology spread across a number of sites with a central article to pull it all together.
Because PoolSynergy hosting rotates among contributors there isn't one address to use to find it. That's why I've posted a schedule at http://www.poolstudent.com/poolsynergy_schedule/
Pool Student's Blog is independent of PoolSynergy, it just seems connected to my blog because I started it. I'm confident that each of the other hosts will do a great job of lining up a great collection of articles on the theme of their choice, and making each edition better than the last.