Happy Birthday!

I haven't posted in a few days so I wanted to get a quick note in here to outline what I've been up to since the 4th. It's amazing how time flies when you get busy, and I've certainly been that.

7/11 is my birthday - so part of the reason I've been AWOL was centered around that. I had some company in from out of town, and spent some quality time with them. Sunday morning, they dropped by to see me play my APA Masters match. I set their expectations a bit during dinner the night before, explaining that the Masters format was not handicapped, and that pretty much everyone in the Masters league had a higher skill level than I did, and that I was mainly there to learn and any games I won were icing on the cake... yada, yada.

We started with 8-ball, and after a few very close games I found myself down 4-1. You may recall that I've been in this exact same situation before, so it was familiar territory. I fared even better than last time though, and swept six straight 9-ball games to win the match 7-4! I won two of the games (in a row) by sinking the 9-ball on the break, so needless to say my opponent was a bit stunned by the time the dust settled.

Monday night was my normal (APA handicapped) 9-ball night, and I had a severe case of "aim-itis" where I was missing shots, even easy shots, by just a little bit. It was ugly, and it's extremely frustrating when it happens. Figuring this out and improving my consistency is top priority for me. When I figure it out, I'll share for sure! My leading theory at the moment is that it could be vision-related. I usually wear glasses during matches because the smoke in the bars irritates my eyes too much when I wear contacts. With glasses, I believe, there is better potential for parallax errors to be introduced into the aiming equation. I've been thinking more and more about getting lasik surgery lately, and the more I run into problems with my glasses, the sooner it's going to happen I think.

Wednesday night is my normal APA 8-ball night. I was put up against our division's "Top Gun". The Top Gun listing keeps track of the number of victories as well as the aggregated skill levels of the defeated opponents, so the person with the highest score typically has several victories against higher skill level opponents. This gentleman leads the category in our division by a comfortable margin; he's only lost one match all session. Well, after last night, he's lost two matches. After starting the match off with one of my worst lags ever, I buckled down to business to sweep him in straight games.

Wednesday night was the first I used my birthday present (a new Tiger X-Pro shaft with their new Onyx tip), and it definitely came through for me! I'll write more about it in the near future when I get a few more matches with it under my belt.