Straight Pool Shark Move

This crazy incident happened almost a year ago.  I found myself telling a friend about it over the weekend, and mentioned I had always meant to share it in my blog.  He said, "You should!"

So, here I am.

Here I am about to tell you a crazy story about something that happened during a straight pool match, that to this day is still very shocking to me.

Several of my friends play in the local straight pool league in the area.  A situation came up during one of the matches, and the guy who it happened to, I'll call him NYPD, actually vented about it on a public forum.  So, I'm not really sharing anything that is a secret, BUT if you haven't heard this story, it's quite appalling.

NYPD was playing against someone I'll call, The Critic .

They are in the "better" division so they race to 150 points in straight pool.

During the match, the score was 97 to 40-something, NYPD's favor.  He was up at the table and he had two balls left, both balls were in the rack area.

He pocketed one of the balls, made the cue ball come off the bottom rail bumping the other ball out of the rack area into a great break shot position.  But he also kept the cue ball in the rack area, so that he could have ball in hand.

When you leave the cueball in the rack area on your last ball, you get ball in hand behind the head string.  This is a great part of the game that can help you get good shape for breakout balls.

There is no rack lines on the table, and the cue ball rolled close to the edge of the rack area.  But he knew it was IN the rack area because of the marks on the cloth (it is easy to tell with the worn out cloth on the tables where the rack area is).

NYPD goes over to write down his score while The Critic starts to rack.  NYPD looks up and sees that he has a different rack then what they had been using for the whole match!

This out-of-nowhere rack is a thin, wood rack.  His son had brought in with him to play his match on another table. 

They had been using a plastic house rack which has a lip on the bottom that makes the rack wider.  They had been using it the ENTIRE time.  Now all of a sudden The Critic starts to use the thin rack.

"With the score being what it was, it meant we had used the house rack for 9 racks up to that point," NPYD explains.

The Critic racks the balls and tells NYPD that the cue ball is not in the rack......

"I couldn't believe the Bull he was trying to get away with," NYPD expresses.

NYPD told him that he protested the different rack, which of course ticked of The Critic.  He threw the wood rack back under the next table and re-racked using the plastic rack.

NYPD got cue ball in hand and finished off the match 150 to 68.

NYPD shared, "I wish that i could of beat him even better. "

Now, this is only one side to the story, obivously.  But I do not know any reason to all of a sudden start using a different rack.... if I hear why, I will update this plog post, tho.