First Tourney of 2010

Well, it's about time I start writing about my tourneys of the year, huh? It's already March as I write this and I have played in a few already so I am WAY behind. Oops.

I don't know how much you all like to read about my tourneys - I figure you blaze through the details of each descriptive match. But admittedly I write these tournament blog articles mostly for me to reflect and reminisce. While hopefully most of my other type of blog articles are less bland for you.

Well, my first tournament of 2010 was in early January. I went to a men's event, keeping with my newly set goals for the year:

Men's Events: I want to play in Open events this year. Put myself out there and play them. This year, I want to play in each of these events at least one time: Ray's Waco tourney, one of Zach's north Texas tourney's, Doc's ten ball tournament, the weekly Clicks tournament in Dallas, and Fast Eddie's Open event. I also want to try and play in a few weekly tournaments around the Fort Worth area.

I attended Zach's monthly tournament at Crazy 8's in Lewisville, Texas. It was my first time to ever go to this nice pool room and good tourney. I liked this tournament for a couple of very-important-reasons-to-me:

1. it was handicapped (yay!) and
   
2. they paid last lady :)
   

The entry was only $40 and I got to race to 4. The handicap races ranged from 3 to 9. The tourney had a hefty player's auction and I was bought by someone who suggested me so it was kinda cool they had that faith in me. :)

This tourney was kinda a bigger tourney than usual for me to be playing literally with the boys and I hadn't done this very often. If I had, it was a tourney around peeps I either knew well, or knew most of the players in. But I knew the experience would be awesome and helpful. See Cristina's blog about this very topic, which actually helped me decide to add this particular goal this year. Thank you, Cristina!

My first match was against a guy (I'll call him Dallas) who seemed perturbed with me because I wanted to hit a few balls before we played. He had already started to rack the balls (before the flip) and when I asked him if I could hit a few balls, he kind of slumped his shoulders, picked up the rack, and then rudely slapped the balls to spread them out. My friend came up to him and said in his deep voice, "Hey, Dallas, she's with me." I felt proud he defended me; he didn't have to do that. I felt uneasy that I wanted to hit a few balls and it obviously ticked him off, but I had never hit a ball on those tables in my life so thought I should. I admit I had over an hour to hit balls before the match, but all the tables were taken every second it seemed and I hadn't had the opportunity yet. I hit only a few balls, though, and then racked and we flipped the little coin.

I felt like everyone in the world was watching, lol. It was very weird! I had butterflies and tried to play pool but I admit it wasn't easy. It was a great experience, though!

Dallas missed a couple of shots late in a few racks and so all of a sudden I was on 3 and he was on 5. In the last game of the match, he tried to kick the 1 in instead of calling a push out and I got ball in hand and somehow ran the rack out, lol. So, he wasn't very happy I'm pretty sure.

I then played a guy who raced to 5 and although I had a couple of stupid shots/misses, I won the match. I think he was under more pressure because he was playing a girl. That match was on one of the front tables and again I was aware of peeps around me.

The next match was against a guy I'll call Army who raced to 7. He played a lot better than the other guys - he played really well. I didn't get many chances til the middle of the match and by then I wasn't playing up to my speed that I could have been playing at. Army told me after the match that he had to bear down against me - I noticed he was pretty chatty (happy) to tell me that while he seemed relieved to have beat me. In other words, I don't think he would have told me that if he lost and he obviously wouldn't have been as chatty had he lost.

On the one-loss side I played another 5 but I think his ride was ready to get back to Houston so he wasn't into the game very much at all and I won pretty easily.

I then played another 7 - he was The Gloved One I talked about back in October. He played very solid against me and only missed a few times. I was more into watching his shot selections and his knowledge of the cueball path that he studied before each shot, than the people around me, so that was nice. He played good and after I lost I mentioned to him maybe some day we could practice together.

I couldn't believe it! I received $75 for Last Lady - that was SO awesome! Usually "last lady" is just the entry fee, but this was more than that and it was such a great treat. :)

I noticed that the 5 players were definitely beatable but in order for me to beat a 7 or 8, I would really need to play super well to beat them because they simply play so much better than 5's (and myself). However, I do race only to 4 so I could do that!

I plan to play in another one of these tournaments this year. Hopefully more than one more, actually! It was great to test the nerves and butterflies! I loved it!

Tourney Description: Cool