Sadly, I lost my last match on Sunday.  Should have won, shot terrible, blah blah blah.  Lots of excuses that don’t mean anything.

Our last night of Pool League (for the Spring session) was this previous Sunday night.  I think I’ve mentioned before that we have 3 sessions – spring, summer and fall, followed by a yearly tournament in early January after the holidays.

I try to make a point of not shooting summer session.  It’s not that I don’t like to shoot, because I really do.  It’s really a combination of having a lot of other stuff going on in the summer, and also that the days are longer, so it feels like I’m wasting valuable sunlight by being in a bar at 7pm when it’s still bright outside.  I also seem to shoot better in the fall after having the summer off.

So, if you were going to surprise me on league night by showing up to heckle me, don’t bother until I start back up in the fall.

What I WOULD like to mention is that we were at Uncle Bob’s on N12th in Quincy.  I’ve given this bar a good mention before, as it’s generally clean and friendly.  Well, Sunday night the place was pretty clean, but the pool table was filthy.  The balls were dull, and if you picked them up they felt gritty.  Also, for whatever reason, people tend to congregate at the west end of the bar near the table, which makes it hard to shoot.  I’ll still list them in my top half of Quincy bars, but they could be better.

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Well, I hate to have to say it, but I lost at pool league again this week.  I lost last week too, but this week and last week were entirely different, and here’s why. Continue reading »

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It’s Sunday night, so once again it’s Pool League night.  Tonight we’re shooting at The Place, which is at 1040 Hampshire, on the corner of Quincy  Medical Group’s campus.  It’s kinda small, but they’ve managed to squeeze in 4 pool tables on one end of the bar.  They’ve also kept their prices down to 50 cents per game, where most of the bars in town went to 75 cents.

We’ve got another team member this session that we didn’t have in the last, which means we don’t all end up shooting every night.  We’ve basically got 6 regulars and 1 part-time, and we only shoot 5 matches, so it’s nice to have a break once in awhile.  When we had 5 and 1, I always felt obligated to shoot even if I didn’t feel the best, because otherwise we’d end up with a forfeit.

Hopefully we’ll have better success this week than last, when we only won 1 of 5 matches.  With those numbers, we’ll have no chance of winning our bracket.

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Ach, lost at pool league tonight.  We were shooting at the North End bar in Quincy.  They’ve got a larger-than-typical pool table with fairly fast felt.  When I say larger-than-typical, I mean bigger than the usual bar table, which is 7×3.5′.  My parents have an 8×4′ table, and this one was bigger than theirs, so I’m assuming it was a 9×4.5′.  When the pockets and balls stay the same size but the table gets wider and longer, it can feel a little strange shooting.

I won one, lost 3, won 2 and lost the last one to lose 4-3.  I’m a 5, so I’d have had to win 2 more games.  Overall I didn’t do too badly.  Mainly I just struggled with getting the cue ball where I wanted it for the next shot.  The table being bigger than what I’m used to combined with the felt being very fast made it seem like the cue ball would roll forever after a shot.

So, I lost but put up a decent fight.

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Quincy Lite Pool League is scheduled for Sunday, Monday and Tuesday nights.  Any time a holiday falls on one of those days, the entire week is cancelled for the holiday.  For example, if Christmas would happen to land on Tuesday, all 3 days would be cancelled.  We all like to shoot pool, but we like holidays more.

Every year we have the Superbowl roll around, which of course conflicts with a Sunday night league.  In years past, teams have called each other and arranged to move their matches to another night during the week so everyone could go to their Superbowl parties.

I’m not sure when it was changed, since I was out of the league for several years, but this year I found that someone had the good idea of just treating the Superbowl weekend like a holiday weekend and skipping it on the schedule.  Great idea!  Noone has to worry about arranging an alternate night and everyone is happy.

So, have fun watching the Superbowl, wherever you may be.  Pool League will be back next weekend.

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The 2nd week was a little better than the first.  I won again, which was good, but it was close.  The guy I was playing was a pretty good shot for a 3-handicap, and was pretty good defensively, leaving me stuck a few times.  The match came down to the last game, but I managed to prevail for the win.  Yay me!

I think I said alst week that we were going to be shooting at Uncle Bob’s.  Turns out that was wrong, we were at Livermore’s again, which is also our home bar.  Livermore’s is a nice family-owned place at 10th & Washington in Quincy.  Owned by Larry and Linda Livermore, it’s a good clean hangout.  As for the overall experience, the positives were: fewer annoying people and no smoke to make my clothes stink.  Probably the only negative was a guy who apparently managed to shoot beer out his nose all over the bar.  I’m not too clear on why it happened, but I’m guessing he was pretty drunk.  After his incident he took his coat and left.

Next week we’re at the Cedar Club.  I haven’t been there in probably 3 years, so I’ll try to put together a review of the place for those of you looking for a place to go.

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Sunday night was week 1 of the first session of this year’s Quincy Lite Pool League.  Yay!  I’m always torn between my enjoyment of the game and the general unpleasantness of being in a bar.  Oddly enough, pool always seems to win out.  I suppose if it were more often, the unpleasantness would build up and pool would lose the war. Continue reading »

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Ah, the year-end City Pool Tournament is at hand, and this year I’m on a team that qualified.  How does a team qualify?  Well, by winning at least one session during the year.  A session being a 14-week long period during which your team plays 7 other teams 5 matches once a week.  Each match won is a point, and the leader of the 8 teams in your particular session wins that session.  I think there are also provisions for pulling in a few second-place teams if needed to round out the bracket to even numbers, but I’m not too sure how that part works. Continue reading »

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I really like shooting pool – I really do.  I’ve always been fairly good at it, and I have always had the feeling that if I were willing to put more time into practicing I could be really good.  It’s nice to have something you’re good at – it helps your self-image and self-worth.

So it’s always sad when something I really like to do becomes a chore.

If you’re not familiar with Quincy Lite Pool League, here’s the quick summary:  3 sessions per year + an end-of-year tournament.  Each session runs around 14 weeks long, and the tournament is a few days.  This makes it possible to skip certain weekends where a holiday falls on league night.  League nights for our league are Sunday, Monday and Tuesday – nights when bars in general are slow.  Each team shoots one night a week.  A team can have a max of 8 players but must shoot 5 matches.  A match can run anywhere from a minimum of 2 games to a max of 13, depending on handicaps.

In my younger days, I’d be out in the bars several nights a week, shooting maybe 20-30 games per night.  That’s a lot of games.  Now I don’t go out at all, and average around 6 games once a week for pool league.  And yet ….  I find myself relieved that this session is over.

How can this be?  How can I be tired of pool?  Well, here’s the problem – people.  With the good comes the bad, and that’s people.  League means teams, and teams mean people that you might not otherwise like being around, or even swerving to miss if they fall in front of you in traffic.  It seems that almost every session of every year that I’ve shot pool league, there’s been someone on the same team that I’m on who grates on my nerves.

These people include the “whiner” who complains they don’t get to shoot enough, the “drama whore” who brings all their personal problems to the bar with them, and the “mouthy drunk” who can ‘t keep their mouth shut when they’re drinking.  This session we even had someone who complained because noone would talk to them.

So, as we came to the end of this session, I was ready for a break.  A break long enough to forget the whining, the loud drunks, and anyone else who annoyed the heck out of me.  A break long enough to miss pool and want to shoot a few games.  The next session will start up and I’ll have forgotten all the bad parts, and will just look forward to playing the game again.

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