19 Hours Later and 2nd Place to show for it

The M8 Pool League Midwest Championships kicked off Wednesday morning with a scotch doubles event that drew 50 teams! I couldn’t believe either. 100 pool players took a Wednesday off from work to play in a $500 added scotch doubles tournament. Impressive! It’s tough to even get half that turnout for a Saturday singles event.

The first round started at 10am with four 16-player brackets where the final undefeated and one-loss team from each bracket moved to a finals bracket. Mike and I came out of our bracket untouched and stayed that way through until we hit the brick wall of Team Slow & Slowerer for the driver’s seat.

The M8 League ranking system is quite a fair one. Your handicap is a number between 50 to 125 and during league you play one match to your handicap against one single opponent. You receive one point for every ball pocketed and 7 points for the 8 ball. So, you can beat someone 14-7 up to 14-0.

The scotch doubles format was 40% of your total handicap. Mike is ranked a 125 and I played league as a 75 so 40% of our total handicap is 80. We had to spot every team but one. We beat a 92 (80-36!), 40, 48, 40, 44, and a 74.

The team we lost to was a 66 and they played nearly flawlessly…the first time. We won our next match and in a valiant effort, took them to the hill of the second set that finished at 5 o’clock the next morning.

It was scotch doubles at its finest…

There’s a strange phenomenon that sometimes occurs with jack-n-jill (male-female) scotch doubles where the m-a-n believes they have to be the hero, maybe because they don’t have enough confidence in their partner’s abilities. Inevitably, they end up trying so hard to leave their partner so perfectly that they miss or make a mistake instead of just leaving the tougher shot and doing what they would’ve if they were playing by themselves.

Mike and I play such great scotch together because neither one of us change our games. We’ve had matches where we played better with each other than we probably would’ve had we been playing solo. I have to admit, I LOVE playing scotch with him!

So, in the final game, in the 19^th hour, Mike made the most perfect breakout shot, leaving me a simple “maker” that I, out of nerves, adrenaline, excitement, whatever, overstroked and left him just a little more than ideal angle to get me on the 8 ball (on the other end of the table). He made a great shot, but clipped the edge of their 6 ball and I ended up hooked, at hill-hill.

In my delirious state of mind, I made a poor decision to kick two rails instead of one and whiffed the 8 altogether, giving them a painful and anti-climatic ball-in-hand at hill-hill. The end.

I’m still proud of how we played overall and we ran some super nice matches, including a break-n-run to get on the hill in the final set. I learned a lot about stamina and endurance.

I had also lot my first match in the singles event last weekend and managed to finish third.

I’m currently in Houston for this month’s OB Cues stop. More to come later. Zzzzzzzzzzz…..

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