Pool Table Observations

Shooting pool is one of my favorite past times, especially considering it's way past time I go out and do it. But that's what happens when you have a family: something's got to give. Anyway, it's a marvelous game. It requires a lot of skill, strategy, imagination, forethought, yet still even a child can enjoy themselves. The hyper-masculine can take their aggression out by hitting everything as hard as they can while receiving their feeder-bar rewards with the loud banging noises. The intellectual can calculate table geometry, exploit an opponent's skill with strategy, and all the while conquer the laws of physics to just get that damned ball in the hole.

One thing I noticed is how particular game scenarios can metaphorically apply themselves to everyday human life. I mentioned in an earlier post the Butterfly Effect, or more technically speaking "sensitive dependence on initial conditions." For our scenario we'll take a shot that spans the table, the object ball close to a corner pocket (in my mind about 8 - 12 inches) and the cue ball approximately the same distance from the opposite corner. With a perfect alignment behind the ball you shoot the cue ball at the object ball. The tiniest miscalculation at one end of the table can result in a solid miss at the other end, no matter how well the observer perceived the necessary chain of events to require the ball to make it, uninterruptedly, to the pocket. Given time the tiniest miscalculation can have unintended consequential results. On the other hand, it is possible to miscalculate and still have the ball enter the pocket, either through the space of the pocket being larger than the ball or resulting from the ball interacting with the bumpers surrounding the corner pocket. In that sense even mistakes can lead you to the same ends. Then there's the idea of re-creating a shot. Players call it fundamentals, skill, chops, any number of designations related to a mastery of ones profession, and the mastery I speak of is the ability to hit any shot anywhere on the table. I recreate the experiment and manage to sink the ball again. It is virtually impossible that every single condition can be exactly duplicated as in experiment A, but I can hit the shot, exemplifying consistent skill, and reproduce the same results. It just shows that, while there is a great degree of respect we are required to give to even the smallest events in our universe, it seems that our physical space is not without a buffer zone, and that would most resemble the world we observe. One other thing to consider is that a lot of pool players don't understand that the act of striking the cue ball itself is the result of a series of events. Proper stance, ball & shot alignment, stability of the stroke & follow through of the cue stick, steadfastness in the pivot hand, fluidity in the stroking arm, and eventually it all gets traced back to the psychological state of the player before the shot. And this is before any motion even occurs on the table (y'know, aside from the constant transference of energy between all objects, gravity, speed of Earth's rotation, etc). So with an inexhaustible number of complications it all comes down to how much you've been drinking.

Anyway, this is how I mentally visualize cause & effect. The tiniest detail can have the most profound consequences, yet the most consequential actions can still result in intended means. The entirety of existence as we know it now, at one point, occupied a time-space no larger than the point of a needle. At one point two celestial bodies were in the right place at the right time to which the laws of physics gently delivered them, astroid and Earth, into a collision course that resulted in that pretty moon we have in the sky.




I figure that making little posts like this, from time to time, might help deliver a better understanding of the way I look at things. In re-reading a lot of my comments and assertions it's obvious that I need to proof myself with greater scrutiny and better articulate my intentions. Most of the time it seems that I exercise a great deal of naivety. While sometimes true it's not always the case, but admittedly I'm not the most orthodox thinker.