playing the right shot

[itsnoteasy]

Alabadi, its a frustrating game isnt it but i love it. Sometimes i can go set the line up and hit 60 straight away(had a cheaty 100 the other day 6 reds and colours ,around 40 odd, then kept potting the pink and black , managed that 4 times for a 50 odd so it had to be around 100 lol.) others struggle to do 3 reds around a 20 break , wish i had the chance of regular coaching, there just is no one within about 100 miles of me.
Vmax thats incredible snooker, my cueing develops all the major faults at some point or other,tightening the grip,dipping the tip (or pulling the but up , to quick on the forward stroke being the 3 worst , apart from that its perfect lol) i really am considering getting a purecue just to make me concentrate if nothing else, as when i do i can" feel " a nice cue action before i have finished the stroke.

[vmax4steve]

Vmax thats incredible snooker

It's incredibly rare for me to play that well, and it's these moments that keep me coming back for more. I have always been a natural player at everything I've tried, football, cricket, rugby, boxing, table tennis, darts, pool and snooker but always very inconsistant at all of them due to the fact that I find it impossible to deliberately focus. I have what I call a peripheral mind, always aware of everything that's going on around me, heightened senses maybe, dunno.

On rare occasions everything shuts down, my subconscious takes over and I can excell at something for a few moments, minutes or an hour or so. I liken it to when I learned to tie my shoelaces when I was a child, at first very difficult to get the brain engaged in the motor skills required, but repeating it very slowly and deliberately over and over again until it became habit and the neural pathways in the brain formed to deal only with that particular skill and you can do it in your sleep without even thinking.

This happens easily the younger you are because as you get older it becomes harder to form new neural pathways, proved to me when I attempted to learn to play the guitar when I was thirty five, had to quit everything else for two years to concentrate only on that. Thing is I found that learning the guitar came more easily to me when I was stoned, something about being under that influence shut down my peripheral mind and allowed me to focus while very relaxed and unflustered and I would find myself searching for sounds rather than trying get my fingers to do something they couldn't.
Not a good guitar player though and never will be as good as I want to be.

A lot of people have the same relationship with alcohol and snooker, I believe that Alex Higgins did to such an extent that he became dependant on it and of course it brought out his dark side, which is what too much alcohol does I'm afraid.
Pot though brings out your mellow yellow side but that of course makes you uncompetitive which is bad when you want to win a snooker match. Like Bill Hicks said, you can do everything you normally can when stoned, you just realise it isn't worth the effort. Strange though, I have been teetotal for ten years, not for any puritanical reason, and recently started to have a couple of halves of lager on league night only, so far unbeaten four matches in and good break in every frame so far.

Now that I've thought about that it will surely end, but it gives food for thought about what it takes for some to shut down what goes on in the periphery of the match table situation and those that can do it naturally.