u/ArtDecoNewYork

I apologize for the crappy photos (my lens is broken), but my new cue finally arrived and I couldn't resist. My last cue was stolen which was heartbreaking, I waited about a month to choose a replacement. I was gonna buy another Meucci but came across a pretty good deal for this cue.

It's a Viking Twilight Series cue with a Cerulean Tide points and butt sleeve, with matching ringwork. The forearm is Khaki stained Birdseye Maple, and it has a black and blue linen wrap.

The quality looks excellent in person and I'm happy to have bought it, I'm looking forward to shooting with it tomorrow.

While psychedelic rock was very popular in 1966 and 1967 (and broadly impactful to this day), it waned rapidly in 1968. Two of the biggest culprits are Bob Dylan's John Wesley Harding (his country album released in December of 1967) and The Band's Music From The Big Pink. Apparently, the latter was directly influential to the point of hippies and hippie adjacent musicians ditching psychedelia and moving towards a folk/country sound. Apparently, Eric Clapton was so blown away by it that it led to him wanting to disband Cream and move away from psychedelia.

I gave this album a listen, and honestly I'm not that impressed! I like a few of The Band's songs a lot, however I'm honestly surprised that rock musicians were blown away by this. I certainly don't think this album is worthy of killing off psychedelia, to me it's just a decent folk rock album that was not exactly covering new ground.

And the best song on this album in my opinion happens to be the one closest to psychedelic rock (Chest Fever).

Interestingly, The Band was so successful from about to 1968 to 1970 (and influential on the musical zeitgeist), with comparatively limited commercial success afterwards.

I think this is really cool, for a while I've been wanting something like this where you could choose different options and get to visualize how the cue will look.

Changing the stain color and wrap color are free, while pin sizes, inlay color, and butt cap color can be changed for a reasonable fee. Of course, it's going to be a bit more money than buying the stock option on Seybert's or Pooldawg, however it's a pretty reasonable price for a cue with a relatively high degree of customization. You can change the wrap color, stain color, inlay colors, and pin size and still be a about a maximum of $100-$200 over standard pricing for the stock model.

I've been having fun messing around with the options, and I can see myself going this route when I have a bit more money to spare.

I assume a lot of new players think that they "need" a carbon fiber shaft, especially Europeans. And thus we have constant threads about various Chinese made CF cues from Amazon.

But in my opinion, it is wiser to get a mid range American made cue (something like Pechauer, Meucci, Joss, Viking, rtc.), especially one with a common pin size.

For instance, you can get a great looking, well built cue like this for $423, but still have the option to add a different shaft if you choose to somewhere down the line.

https://seyberts.com/collections/pechauer-cues/products/pechauer-pro-series-natural-stained-maple-pool-cue-p03r

I bought a Meucci for $380 last Black Friday and though it is now stolen, it was a total joy to both look at and play with. I felt no need to swap out the shaft (their standard wood shaft is LD and feels great), but if I did then I would have the option to put many different shafts on there.

And if you wish to spend much less money than that, it is better to get something like a Viking Valhalla for $130 (which also has a common pin size) than buying a mystery CF cue or spending $400 on a low end cue with a CF shaft that you might want to upgrade from anyway.

The matches start at 11 AM EST, these should be good. It's free to watch on youtube, on the Predator Pro Billiard Series channel.

I think that if either Seoa or Centeno go on to win it, they have a strong case for being the best women's player in the world. It would be back to back 10 ball titles + the current 8 ball title for Chezka, while for Seo it would mean she's the reigning 9 ball and 10 ball champion.

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I ran 8 balls in a row on my first turn the previous game, which I only have done once in my almost 3 years of playing pool.

Then the next rack, I got my first ever break and run!

I feel lame posting about breaking and running on a bar table (granted, a Diamond with 4.5 inch corner pockets rather than a Valley), but I've been wanting to get my first one so badly after many blown chances.

This came after a stroke tweak I made tonight, where I put extra focus on keeping my bridge hand very stable.

I analyzed some footage of me playing tonight, which turned out to be very helpful. I didn't realize the camera was rolling, so the footage was candid.

Good news: I used to have a mega chicken wing and it seems to be going away! I no longer try to tuck my arm in to make it straighter, and that has (surprisingly) made my arm look much more aligned than before.

Bad news: that alone does not mean greater accuracy! I played pretty poorly tonight, likely from not staying still enough on the shot. I've been trying to break that habit for so long, but it keeps coming back when I'm alone and nervous.

Another thing I noticed is that I keep holding my cue too far back, which is probably something I keep doing inadvertently since I can't see what's behind my field of vision.

Based on this shot, does my stance/alignment look decent, and are there any tweaks I should try incorporating?

Don Felder opened up (a surprise to me), and The Guess Who were great.

Burton Cummings has such a friendly Canadian grandpa vibe and the boys put on a great show! Him and Randy still sound great, and this is one of the best value shows I've seen in a while.

We got lucky and they moved us from the 300s to 100s!

The shooter is on the 8 ball, and the teams disagreed on whether the 8 or 1 was struck first.

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Compared to before,

-far less wrist pronation

-my middle knuckles now point towards the floor

-my forearm hangs at closer to 90 degrees than before, but its still at least 5 degreed off

-I find that the square stance comes more naturally than trying to contort myself into a classic pool stance

But damn, I didn't realize I was still "punching" the ball like that! I knew the snappy action was bad, but I had not seen video of myself in a while so this was revealing. I also should have avoided going for a big draw shot when shooting into 3/4 of a pocket.

I tend to shoot roll/follow shots much more smoothly, but for whatever reason I have a tendency to shoot with a snappier stroke when I go for draw shots.

So: do I get my elbow closer to 90 degrees by choking up on the cue more, or standing a little further from the table?

And any other stance/stroke tweaks I should experiment with to move towards something more desirable?