11.30.07

You Don’t Know Fucking Shit About Pool

Posted by Bowman at 5:32 am in games

Ed, Richard, what the hell? Have you guys NEVER even fucking heard of 8-ball pool?

 I know you guys are the experts when it comes to videogames - you’ve seen how I am with that. My skills, or lack therof, are not in question here. What is in question is whether or not you guys have ever turned off Wii Play, gone to fuckin’ Main Event or a retirement home or some shit, and actually seen a POOL TABLE. IN REAL LIFE. OH MY GOD. CAPITALS.

For those of you just tuning in - I recently went over to Ed’s house and played some Wii Play with “the guys,” as I’ve taken to calling them. We played each and every one of those little mini-games, although I only really dominated at laser-hockey. This is understandable; me and Jeffrey Weng play air hockey like cocaine at the Union Underground here at UT.

However, one thing that Jeffrey and I also have played here in the Texas Union building is pool, or billiards, or whatever you like to call it. Fuck it, man, we play some motherfuckin’ cue sports with a goddamn green table, some colored balls, chalk, and big long wooden rods! While you contemplate the perverse nature of what that could imply, let me remind you of something very important - they supply you with two distinctly different racks. Got that? Balls, rods, racks. This is stuff you do all the time, and if it isn’t, you SHOULD do it all the time.

Anyway, as I was saying, two distinctly different racks. There’s a fancy diamond shaped one that you use to play 9-ball, in which you use the cue ball to pocket balls one through eight, alternating turns each time a player misses a shot (definition of “miss” varying), with the goal ultimately being to pocket the striped nine-ball to finish the game. This game was probably developed by impatient people, as most billiard games used a hellofalot more balls at the time.

The more commonly used rack is the BIG TRIANGULAR ONE. They give you a BIG TRIANGULAR ONE because most people want to play a standard American game of Eight-ball, as wikipedia likes to call it. Eight-ball uses all fifteen balls in a standard issue set of American billiard balls. The standard procedure to win is for a player to, in some fashion, attempt to pocket their designated set of balls, either solids (1-7) or stripes (9-15), and then pocket the eight ball to win the game, turns alternating when players “miss” (rules varying). To most of you who live in America, this should be pretty much rehash, as I’m sure any of you who have actually been somewhere where there is a pool table between these two oceans have seen that people tend to keep sets of 15 balls and a BIG TRIANGULAR RACK. However, to SOME INDIVIDUALS, an awful lot of key information about reality has been totally and utterly missed.

So, as we decided to play billiards or pool or whatever on Wii Play, I found myself playing a game of nine-ball, which, though I was unfamiliar with it, I could have probably easily figured out. Figuring that either Ed or Richard here could be, I don’t know, resourceful or helpful about this, I decided to ask them an honest question:

“Oh, guys, how does this work? I have never played pool with nine balls.”

So, here’s the rather constructive response I got:

“Michael, have you ever played pool before?”

So I said, “Dude, yeah. I just haven’t played with 9 balls.”

And they were like, “I don’t know what kind of wacky pool you’re playing, man. Have you actually played it for real?”

“Yes, come on! Look, usually what happens here is we have 15 balls, and some are striped and some are colored, and you call-”

“Look, I’m sure that’s how they do it in, I don’t know, Austria. I’m sure you also play with an octagonal table.”

“I know how fucking pool works, assholes!”

“Have you even used a cue before?”

Well, guess what guys? I have this to ask of you: Have you ever actually gotten out of your house? Have you seen a pool table in real life? Tell me, when was the last time you walked up to a pool table, picked up a cue, chalked down the end of it, then reached over for a rack underneath the table, put it onto the big green mat, and then started reaching in the pockets or tray or whatever and started loading it with the different balls? Did you ever pick up the BIG TRIANGULAR RACK? Did you ever notice that, in America, people tend to keep sets of FIFTEEN BALLS? Do you think that, because you can sit on your couch or stand on your little carpet floors and pick up a Wii-mote and play your little game, simplified in all its glory into an experience of aiming and thrusting your hand at a screen, you’re suddenly some sort of expert on billiards?

My experience may be limited - I may play like a fool and use the cue extender whenever possible if the shot is somewhere across the table. My great grandma and my dad and my cousin and just about everyone can beat me at the game. I stand and ponder the table endlessly as to how it works. And I tend to screw up anyway. Out of dumb luck I’ve beaten Jeffrey once or twice. Out of some act of God I beat one of my ex-girlfriends at it. But unlike you guys, I don’t sit on a goddamn ivory tower and pretend to know pool without having even played the most common goddamn variety of the game in the country, something so standard fare, you can’t even buy sets of billiards balls in sets of nine with a cue ball!

So, go ahead and groupthink your way out of making total asses of yourself in front of me. I guarantee that if either of you set foot in the Union Underground building and asked someone what you were supposed to do with the BIG TRIANGULAR RACK and the EXTRA MOTHERFUCKING 6 STRIPED BALLS, they’d laugh at you, stop, and then laugh at you HARDER when they realized you REAAAALLY meant it.

I mean, honestly guys, have you been playing pool in, I don’t know, Austria or something? We can whip out the octaganal table if you want.

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