March Catch Up

No, I'm not talking about a condiment. It's unfortunately been a recurring theme lately... I've noticed that once again I haven't posted in a while, so I figured I'd address that with a big heaping buffet-o-topics covering what I've been doing and/or working on lately (instead of posting to my blog). I've been busy on several fronts.

Eye update
My eyes have been through a lot in the last year or so. You may recall me mentioning in December that some sagebrush attacked my right eye. What wasn't mentioned in that post was... a few days later, just as I was regaining sight in the eye (I still didn't feel I could see well enough to drive)... a baby attacked the same eye! WTF? I had a 9-month old sitting sideways on the table in front of me at Joe's Crab Shack in Phoenix, and she suddenly spread her arms in reaction to someone else at the table trying to get her to clap - and jabbed my open right eye again with one of her sharp little fingernails. A slobber and food covered fingernail, of course. She's lucky she's so cute.

I'm happy to report that my eyes are doing pretty well now, but I still haven't gotten the post-LASIK touch up to correct the less-than-stellar correction that the first round of LASIK gave me. They wanted to wait until my eyes stabilized, and that sounded like a great plan to me... I'm a "don't rush, get it right" kind of guy, especially when it comes to something like my eyes. My eyes were stable in December until some sagebrush and a baby's finger destabilized them again, so now we're rolling up to my one-year anniversary of the original surgery (I distinctly remember getting it on March 31st last year because I considered waking up the next morning (April 1st) screaming that I couldn't see.

Tournaments
I've been hitting tournaments fairly hard lately, at least every single weekend at a bare minimum over the last couple of months. I once managed to squeeze in four tournaments in a single weekend - three of them in a single day! The dirty little secret here is that I got knocked out of some of them fast enough to get to the next one(s) but shhh!

One of the tournaments was the APA Regionals at Main Street Billiards in Mesa, AZ. I won some and lost some there, didn't qualify for Singles Nationals, unfortunately (which was the whole point of going). The loss that knocked me out was a stupid one - we were hill-hill, my opponent broke and was left a tough shot which he missed. I went to the table and worked my way through a not-so-straightforward run-out... got decent shape but a fairly long shot on the 8-ball. After such a nice run, I confidently fired it in instead of shooting it nice and easy, and it rattled out! Dumb! Dumb! Dumb!

I was happy with my performance overall, though. The losses were close, and the wins were solid. A referee made a point of coming over and giving me kudos on my play after a match, and an opponent made a point of dropping by to tell me "good luck" again before he left the pool hall for home after I knocked him out. Overall, I've been shooting well and definitely improving.

PoolSynergy
I'm sad to report that PoolSynergy seems to be on hiatus for the foreseeable future. Although a few of us are interested in keeping it going, several of the past regular writers have either dropped out completely or have simply been too busy to contribute lately. You may have noticed that we didn't do it this month (March) for the first time in something like two and a half years. We're taking a breather and haven't decided if we should try to regroup in the future or not.

New League
As another part of my self-imposed "self improvement" program, I've thrown myself into the fire by getting into another league... this one being BCA-sanctioned (which has been my goal for awhile). I started out with APA a few years ago, and I think I'll continue with it for a bit longer... still have a few unfulfilled goals... but I'm wanting to get my foot in the door elsewhere.

I say "thrown into the fire" because it's a non-handicapped league and I chose the toughest division available. While I chose the division partly because of my schedule (it's a good night for me)... I mainly chose it because many, if not all of the best players in town are in the division. Take last week, for example: one of the players on the opposing team was Max Eberle. Enough said?

Max missed a tough cut on the 1-ball in one of his games allowing his opponent to run out. Max then did something that impressed me: He set up the same shot and tried it over and over again until he started making it consistently. He probably missed it 10-15 times in a row while everyone looked on until he had it nailed.

Pool legend Jimmy Mataya is also in the league. I don't expect to kick butt anytime soon, but I know I'll get some great experience and I'm sure I'll have my moments. I was in a similar situation the first time I played in the Masters division of APA, and surprised everyone by ending up with the best point average on my team!

When describing this new league to my girlfriend I jokingly said, "I'm not even sure if I qualify to be their water boy to be honest, I'm just thankful they let me on the team and I'll be happy to play every now and then." As she often does, she came up with the perfect analogy, "so you're like Rudy, huh?" I laughed and said, "Yep - exactly!"

VBB Scene
Probably the biggest drain on my "spare time" over the last month or so was the creation of a new online discussion forum for the Las Vegas pool community. This is something that I've felt we needed for some time now so I recently teamed up with Amy Encinias, president of Vegas Billiards Buzz, to bring it to fruition. It's similar in function to the bulletin boards hosted by AZ Billiards and Billiards Digest, but we're focusing on pool in the Las Vegas area. You don't have to be a Las Vegas resident to participate - anyone traveling to or having an interest in billiards/pool in Las Vegas area is more than welcome to register and join the action, so drop by and check out the VBB Scene!

New Pool Adventure
If all of this isn't enough, I'm headed across the country to Baltimore in a couple of weeks for a brand new pool adventure. I'm really excited about it; anxiously hopeful that it works out well. I'll most likely write about it in an upcoming post, so stay tuned!

Happy Holidays, and yes I'm still alive

I got a text from a friend today:

dude did you give up your blog or what?

Point taken.

No, I haven't given up my blog... just been dealing with a lot of sh!t happens outside of pool and busily trodding along on my treadmill hamster wheel trying to keep up with things.

I think someone turned up the speed on the treadmill a couple of months ago when I wasn't looking!

It hasn't been any one "thing"... but a whole raft of numerous "things" over the last several months. Most weren't horribly serious in the overall scheme of life, but required my attention and ate up time and resources nonetheless.

I did have one issue that rose to the level of "drop everything and give this 100% of your attention" but I'm happy to say, while still a work in progress, I think we're mostly out of the woods on that one.

I felt particularly bad about missing PoolSynergy earlier this month. I'd have to go back to verify, but I think that was the first one I missed in a looong time. Even in the months where I only managed to make a single blog post, that post was typically the PoolSynergy post.

So what happened this month? Too busy with the holidays?

Nope. Not a good enough excuse, unless I'm up until 3 or 4 in the morning doing something else... because I've stayed up that late to finish off PoolSynergy before.

Earlier this month I ran into something else that I simply couldn't overcome.

I ran into... a sagebrush branch.

It wasn't my finest moment. I was out hiking after dark and saw something at the base of some sagebrush. Curious, I bent over to pick it up. I had a strong flashlight, and the object was well illuminated.

Turns out, the branches of the bush were not so well illuminated.

One of those not-so-well-illuminated branches found its way into my open and unaware right eye. Luckily, the branch didn't completely penetrate the cornea, but it gave me a pretty nasty corneal abrasion that hurt like $%^&(*& and left me blind in that eye.

But wait, there's more... I got LASIK earlier this year, remember? They did what's called monovision, which means one eye is corrected for distance and the other is corrected for reading. That was the goal, anyway. Turns out, neither eye got corrected as well is it was supposed to (follow up surgery still pending, but that's yet another story).

To cut to the chase here, the right eye is my distance eye. It's also the eye that got somewhat closer to plan with my initial LASIK procedure. Losing my right eye made me effectively blind for a few days. Scary!

Luckily, it seems like it's healed fairly well in the last couple of weeks and I can see about as well as I could prior to the incident. I've got another eye doctor follow up next week, so we'll see.

Anyway, onward and upward into the next year!

I have two partially completed blog entries that are "on hold" for various reasons beyond my control. I should be able to publish those fairly soon once the holds clear.

I'm heading in a couple new directions with my pool game in the upcoming year, and I'm sure that will give me plenty to write about as well.

As I close... I leave you with some sage advice: protect your eyes!

The Continuing Adventures of LASIK

I believe this is the first weekend since the end of February that I haven't had a tournament!

I've also been buried with other things - daughter graduating from high school, family and other company in from out of town, etc, etc. As a result, I'm behind, plain and simple. This is only the second posting for June (lame). I only had two postings in May (lame)... and I didn't even do PoolSynergy this month (ultra lame).

I'm behind on numerous topics, so I'll try to chip away at them over the next week or so. First up is... LASIK.

As you may recall, I took the plunge and got LASIK surgery a few months ago on March 31st. For those of you sitting on the edge of your seats waiting to hear the good news about how that went... keep sitting. I wish I had better news to report, but unfortunately my vision is less than optimal.

This is extremely frustrating. I put off eye surgery for years and years. I kept an eye on the state-of-the-art. I battled internally whether I should take the plunge or not. I even resisted when my mom suggested getting it done by her employer (she was an office manager for an eye surgeon for several years). She obviously had inside knowledge of his success rate and so on, and no doubt I'd get a good discount... but still I opted to wait. The procedures at the time (late 80's, early 90's) seemed to be enjoying a good deal of success, but I knew they were still in their infancy for the most part... and really there was nothing pushing me to go for it. I was OK with glasses and also able to wear contacts on occasion when glasses didn't cut it.

Fast forward a couple of decades... once I got serious about playing pool, I found playing with glasses to be annoying. I also discovered that playing with contacts wasn't perfect either, especially in the smoke-filled bars and halls here in Las Vegas where I spent most of my pool playing hours. It wasn't so bad in the smoke-free bars when I traveled to California and Arizona, but even then I discovered that I couldn't keep score or look at things like my phone or menus while wearing contacts because presbyopia had crept in on me (I wore progressive lens glasses as a result).

So I revisited the possibility of corrective eye surgery. I have numerous friends who have done it and are happy with their results. I checked out some of the local doctors, and found at least a couple of them with clean records with the FDA and recommended by local ophthalmologists. It turned out that a couple of my friends had their surgeries done by one of them and were able to personally recommend him. Digging further, I discovered that he was known as a doctor who people often turned to in order to correct errors that other doctors made. This all sounded pretty promising.

Enough about the doctor. I looked into the available procedures and how those were coming along since the days of my mom being an office manager. It sounded like significant progress had indeed been made! One procedure in particular, iLASIK, was being touted as the first and still the only procedure approved by the military for pilots and even by NASA for astronauts. This caught my eye (no pun intended) for at least a couple of reasons - (1) I initially wanted to go to the Air Force Academy to be a pilot but couldn't because of my vision. I checked into eye surgery then and found out it wasn't an option. (2) Going through a stringent military program myself, I knew how conservative the military (and NASA) would be about people they dumped hundreds of thousands of dollars of training into. I knew they wouldn't approve a procedure on something as important as the eyes unless there was very minimal chance of screwing up their investment.

Well, I'm sorry to report that NASA would be pissed with my results so far if I was an astronaut. I've approximated what I see when I look at a stoplight in this Photoshopped image.

It's not only noticeably less than 20/20 (in my distance eye - I opted for monovision), I'm also seeing double images... even with one eye closed!

My eye doctor calls it astigmatism. I call it eff'd up. I didn't have significant astigmatism before, and now through the miracle of laser surgery I do. Actually, my understanding of astigmatism (at least regular astigmatism) is that images are distorted in some way - a circle can appear to be an oval, for example. I'm seeing distinctly separate images rather than distorted images, and it gets worse with distance. When I see an airplane flying across the sky, for example, I see two separate images.

Hopefully, this will have a happy ending. My doctor says he's committed to getting it right, and is currently monitoring my progress on a regular basis. A second "touch-up" procedure is likely at this point to get me dialed in better, and so far he's confident that he'll be able to fix it to my satisfaction. They say they need to let my eyes stabilize before doing a second procedure, and that makes perfect sense to me. I want them to do everything possible to get it right next time.

I'm being patient and hopeful... but can anyone blame me for being a little nervous about this whole thing? Yes, my 'uncorrected' eyes are much better than they were by most measures. I can function without glasses and/or contacts. I can drive, work, etc., but definitely not as well as I could before surgery with glasses. I struggle at times with certain things that were easy with glasses, and I think it all makes me tired earlier than usual.

So how does this affect my game you might ask? It's impossible to be sure, of course... and I'll admit I delayed writing about this for awhile because I thought fessing up about my vision woes might give my opponents some sort of advantage, but I have since decided to go ahead and get it out there. The LASIK commercials make it sound so nice and rosy... you wake up the next morning, able to see the birds chirping in high definition and all that. Well, maybe some people do... maybe even most people do - but I'm here to tell you that not everyone does - even if they researched the doctor and ponied up extra bucks for the best procedure currently available.

Back to my shooting... I actually am doing pretty darn well all things considered. I haven't won any tournaments, but have had several 2nd place finishes in difficult fields since my surgery. I've beaten people I don't always beat. I've even beaten a few people for the first time ever. I'm stringing together respectable runs including several break and runs in both 8 & 9-ball. I've also had typical periods of mediocre play as well, of course, but that's normal. Overall, I think the negatives of less-than-great visual acuity (and double vision) are being countered by the positives of being able to shoot with a better stance and not having to deal with glasses... so it's more or less a wash, as long as I pick the right object ball image to shoot at.

I Have a Vision...

Yesterday, I finally pulled the trigger on LASIK surgery. Today, things are still a little... ummm... cloudy would be the best term I think. Sometime next week I'm halfway expecting to log in and find that this entire article is gibberish.

I'll admit it was tough to resist the urge to wake up this morning screaming in a complete utter panic that I couldn't see at all - which would have been the coolest April Fool's joke of all time, but I decided it might traumatize my kids a bit too much. Not because I was blind, mind you, but because they'd realize I wouldn't be able to do important things like take them to the mall and movies and so on.

After dropping them off at school, I drove to the eye doctor for a follow-up eye appointment. My eye doctor is 8 miles away. Las Vegas traffic sucks. My vision is still a little... ummm... cloudy. Perfect! Then it hit me: other people were probably driving to the same destination with equally bad (or worse) eyesight... ugh!

Actually, the drive didn't go too badly. I took it easy and stayed on surface streets (the term local radio jocks use for non-highway streets even though it makes no sense to me because as far as I can tell highways are also on the surface... but I digress). [halfway expecting to log in next week and find that I wrote "I digest" but I do that too, so it's all good]

The procedure itself was... interesting. The doctor and his staff were good about keeping me apprised of important things during the procedure... things like "you're going to feel a little pressure" which roughly translates to "we're about to shove some sort of odd device into your eye socket and apply a suction so your eye damn near pops out of your head" and "things may go dim or dark, but that's normal." Things indeed went completely dark with my left eye, and given that my eye was wide open and even bulging out of its socket it didn't seem normal at all. In fact, none of this stuff seemed "normal." It didn't go dark with my right eye, so I was able to witness the Intralase light saber cutting a flap on my eye. Going dark might have been better, I haven't decided. Oh, and let's not forget the best line "when the laser is on, it may smell like something's burning... but don't worry, you're not on fire or anything."

Overall, it seems like the procedure went well. Time will tell.

I shot a few racks this morning and am pleased to report that I can shoot OK in a fog if there's ever a league of tournament that requires it. I was making balls reasonably well. At least it sounded like balls were going into pockets.

Two Balls One Hole

Wow - this is only my third post this month, and the month is almost over. Sigh. Been busy, been a little sick, had sick kids... stuff happens. Mostly good stuff, though. Part of my busy-ness has been gearing up for upcoming tournaments as I mentioned in a previous post. As promised, I have a couple of follow-up posts to that one coming up soon.

What else? Let's see... I'm working towards LASIK surgery in the near future (specifically iLASIK). Yes, I believe the time has come. I've been watching the state-of-the-art in eye surgery evolve for decades now. My mom was an office manager for two of the leading eye surgeons in Reno back in the 80's and 90's so that was a good opportunity for me and we did in fact discuss it, but I didn't pull the trigger for various reasons. The technology has advanced significantly since then, enough so that the procedure I'm looking at is the first to be approved by the military and NASA for pilots and astronauts.

I've also been following the OMGWTF vs. Asia Cycak saga with moderate interest and amusement. If you have no clue what I'm talking about and feel left out, a couple initial posts about it are here and here. The drama is real and sad in many ways, but it serves as a good reminder that you need to watch your back with some of the folks out there. The whole thing also reminded me of a recent article in the Vegas Billiards Buzz. Kudos to OMGWTF for her usual journalistic excellence on the subject. By the way, am I the only one thinking this might be an opportunity for a streamed grudge match in another medium... like Jello, mud, or oil? I'm sure I could come up with a venue for that here in Vegas. (did I just type that out loud?)

Anyway, back to the subject at hand... sometime last fall, shortly after I took over as captain of my Wednesday night 8-ball team, I sat down and read the APA Official Team Manual cover to cover. I didn't really expect to retain it all, but wanted to have a good idea of what was in there so I could refer to it when situations arise. I remember in particular a passage at the top of page 48 (part of the 'Pocketed Balls' section that began on the previous page): "It occasionally happens on tables with small pockets that two balls become jammed in a pocket and are leaning over the edge of the slate to some degree..."

Now, this is a cruel thing to slip into a book I'm reading. Why? Well, maybe it'd be helpful to know a couple of things about me: I currently work at a casino gaming machine manufacturer. We develop slot machines, slot accounting systems, player tracking systems, and so on. In other words, my current life is filled with probability and statistics math. As I read, part of my brain spun off a background process to calculate the odds of such an event happening.

Prior to getting into my current line of work, I was a nuclear reactor operator. Consequently, I'm very familiar with and even taught nuclear physics at a college level (at a Navy training facility). As you might guess, another part of my brain spun off a background process to figure out the physics involved in getting two balls jammed in a pocket during normal play. At some point, I believe one or both of those background processes attempted to divide by zero and my head about exploded.

Suffice it to say the odds are huge. Most people won't see it in their lifetime.

Well, it happened to one of the players on my Wednesday night team (Ron Worley) when he broke during his league match last Wednesday night, coincidentally at a bar I've blogged about before. Never a dull moment there I guess.

Several people witnessed it - players as well as onlookers with accumulated pool shooting experience totaling well into hundreds of years, and no one had seen it happen before.