Dec. 29, 2022 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:16:14
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day! | ||
| What's up, man? | ||
|
unidentified
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Keep this like a fist from your face. | |
| You are the first professional pool player to ever be on this podcast. | ||
| Yeah, thank you. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| How old are you, man? | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm 22. How long you been playing? | |
| I've actually started with a different game called Russian Pyramid. | ||
| Yeah, I've seen that before. | ||
| Yeah, that's the game we play in Russia. | ||
| You know, I've played since I was about six. | ||
| That's when I had my first coach. | ||
| But I've been around the billiard balls since the very beginning. | ||
| What are you ranked in the world right now? | ||
| You're like, in my opinion, you're like top three, top four in the world. | ||
| There's currently too many different rankings. | ||
| You can't really... | ||
| Because I didn't play as many tournaments this year, like official ones, so I don't have any ranking points. | ||
| Because you're from Russia, and you couldn't play in tournaments for a while, right, during the Ukraine crisis? | ||
| Yeah, so since the end of February when the whole thing started, they banned all the Russian athletes and they only removed the ban I believe in the end of July. | ||
| You know what's crazy is they didn't ban UFC fighters. | ||
| Yeah, for example. | ||
| We have a lot of Russian UFC fighters, and they don't even get treated badly. | ||
| They don't get booed. | ||
| I mean, they get booed a little bit by some assholes. | ||
| It's different in every sport, like hockey. | ||
| You know, Ovechkin is still playing. | ||
| You know, there's a lot of great players in hockey that still play from Russia. | ||
| So in Poole, they made a decision to not have Russian players for a little while, and then they relaxed it. | ||
| Why did they relax it? | ||
| It's not your business. | ||
| You're 22. You're not involved in politics. | ||
| Well, you can understand it from, I don't know, from like the business point of view. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| But, you know, pool, in my opinion, is a small sport. | ||
| And in the end of the day, I don't know how many pool players will you ban by banning the Russian athletes. | ||
| I know, I mean, three players. | ||
| Yeah, there's only a few from Russia, right? | ||
| Yeah, that play internationally. | ||
| And you're the best. | ||
| From Russia, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| You're one of the best in the world, period. | ||
| It's kind of crazy to be one of the best in the world at something at 22 years old, because you have so much room to grow and get better. | ||
| Oh, yeah, for sure. | ||
| I mean, that's got to be very promising for you, because at 22 years old, you're just sort of like, your body's not even fully formed yet. | ||
| Your brain's not fully formed. | ||
|
unidentified
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They say your cerebral cortex, your frontal lobe, fully forms when you're 25. Yeah, I mean, I still have a lot of potential and I definitely will be aiming to get up there. | |
| So how did you make the trek from Russia coming to the United States to play? | ||
| How old were you? | ||
| You mean the first time I came? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| It was 2016. My very good Russian friend and my sponsor, he brought me to Derby City Classic. | ||
| So that was my first experience. | ||
| So you were like, what, 16 or something? | ||
| 16, yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
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Robbing people at 16. I did pretty good. | |
| In the 9-ball division, I think I finished in round 12, which is like the last 12 players out of 500 plus. | ||
| That's pretty good for 16. Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And then a lot of people kind of recognized that I can play, and I got an invite for Derby City Classic Invitational Ten Ball Tournament. | ||
| And the Derby City Classic, we should tell everybody, is this enormous eight-day tournament that takes place in Kentucky. | ||
| Yeah, nonstop action. | ||
| Every year, it's like the Hustlers Convention. | ||
| Like all the great players, all the gamblers, all the people that talk shit, all the people that sell queues, everybody goes down to the Derby City. | ||
| Yeah, that's the biggest pool fest. | ||
| I still haven't been. | ||
| You should. | ||
| I know, I wanted to. | ||
| Do you know Justin Collett? | ||
| He used to run the Action Report. | ||
| I've heard, but that wasn't... | ||
| He's a good friend of mine. | ||
| At one point in time, we had actually talked about doing a documentary on the Derby City. | ||
| Because I think it's such a crazy subculture of America that most people just have no idea. | ||
| Oh yeah, that's great. | ||
| You can for sure film a movie about it. | ||
| Oh yeah, there's so many characters, there's so many oddball people. | ||
| You know, I found pool when I was, I guess I was about 23, somewhere around that, 23 or 24. I first started playing pool and I injured my knee. | ||
| I had an ACL tear in my knee so I couldn't work out. | ||
| For a while and a friend of mine who was a comedian, we started playing pool together. | ||
| We both sucked. | ||
| We were just playing pool. | ||
| But just so lucky that the place that I picked to go to was a local action spot. | ||
| And there was a lot of big gambling going on there. | ||
| Like guys would come in and play $10,000 sets of one pocket. | ||
| It was a big deal. | ||
| And so I got to see these guys, and I got to see this subculture that I wasn't aware of, and I got to see what it looks like when the game of pool is played really well, when someone's really good at it, how beautiful it is to watch, and how exciting it is to watch. | ||
| So I was exposed to it at a very early age. | ||
| Not an early age for most people, obviously not an early age for you, but for me it was like, I had no idea that there was a world out there where people just wanted to play pool all day and gamble. | ||
| Oh yeah, there's a lot of people that do play pool every day. | ||
| All day? | ||
| Eight hours a day? | ||
| For sure. | ||
| How many hours a day do you play? | ||
| It depends on my tournament schedule. | ||
| I'm not an action player that plays all day every day. | ||
| When you say action player, you mean gambling? | ||
| Gambling, yeah. | ||
| I consider myself as a tournament professional player. | ||
| But you do gamble? | ||
| I do, yeah. | ||
| You have gambled. | ||
| I'm aware of some gambling that you take place in. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I've played some matches, big ones and small ones. | ||
| What's the biggest one you've ever played? | ||
| How much? | ||
| The biggest amount that I ever won was 51,000 from one guy. | ||
| It was this year. | ||
| But we played by the rack. | ||
| So we started off playing like 1,000 a rack and then we increased. | ||
| 1,000 a rack? | ||
| One pocket. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Which is still a really good bet. | ||
| Yeah, that's a very good bet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and then we played all day and I kept winning and winning. | ||
| He was increasing and increasing, raising the bet. | ||
| Fifty-one thousand dollars in a day. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's nice. | ||
| He must have been sick. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Did you give him a spot? | ||
| Yeah, I had to give him a spot from the beginning and then by the end of the day the spot was even bigger. | ||
| So, let's explain one pocket, because there's a lot of people that are listening that don't know what that means. | ||
| One pocket is a game, on a pool table there's six pockets. | ||
| And in one pocket, you each have one of the corner pockets near where the balls are racked. | ||
| And the goal of the game is just for other people, not for you. | ||
| Obviously, you know how to play. | ||
| The goal is, there's 15 balls in a rack. | ||
| The goal is for you to get eight balls in your pocket. | ||
| You only have one pocket that you can shoot the balls in. | ||
| But now for a player like yourself, like if you were going to play someone like me, you'd have to give me a big spot. | ||
| It would have to be like, you know, I'd have to get like four balls and you'd have to get 11. Something like that. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| Yeah, that's basically what it was with that guy. | ||
| We started off at, I was giving him 12 to 6, I think. | ||
| And we ended up giving, I ended up giving him 10 to 5. Which is a huge spot. | ||
| That's a huge spot. | ||
| He was on that tilt and couldn't do anything. | ||
| That's the problem once you start losing a thousand dollars a game. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh my god. | |
| The world of pool and gambling is such an interesting world to me because it's something that people get very, very, very addicted to. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| There's a lot of characters in our sport. | ||
| Yes, there are. | ||
| So when you were playing the Russian Pyramid game, so you're over in Russia and you're playing this game, how were you exposed to 9-ball and 10-ball, the games they play here in America? | ||
| So what happened was I was obviously a little short and I couldn't really reach the table because the pyramid table is a little bit higher than the pool table and I think I was about eight or nine year old and my coach told me that I probably have to switch to pool if I want to play professionally. | ||
| And, you know, I have more potential. | ||
| I can travel the world. | ||
| And we decided that we have to switch, and that's when I started playing pool. | ||
| So when you say your coach, is that common in Russia that young players have coaches? | ||
| Honestly, all over the world, the game is treated differently. | ||
| Only in the U.S. it's more of, you know, some entertainment that you can just go to the bar and drink beer and have fun. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Yeah, in Russia, they treat the game as a sport, and we have practice facilities, coaches that work with kids. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| I know it's the case in other places. | ||
| Like, I know in Taiwan they do that. | ||
| Yeah, China. | ||
| Germany, I mean Poland, Netherlands. | ||
| Kopinyi, I heard they have a day where all they do is jump. | ||
| They just practice jump shots all day. | ||
| The whole game is jump shots. | ||
| I believe that. | ||
| I did that too. | ||
| Do you do that too? | ||
| I mean, I've practiced a lot. | ||
| I've jumped a lot of balls before when I was a kid. | ||
| I just had fun jumping balls around them. | ||
| I'm fascinated by Russian methods for sport because so many elite combat sports athletes come out of Russia. | ||
| So many great wrestlers, so many great mixed martial arts fighters, great kickboxers. | ||
| And I had Jon Bernthal on the podcast. | ||
| You know, he's a very famous actor who's in The Punisher and The Walking Dead and a bunch of movies and stuff. | ||
| Really, really interesting guy. | ||
| But he went over to Russia to study theater. | ||
| And he said that it was so different than anything he'd ever done and for the first year you didn't even read anything. | ||
| They just worked with you on rhythm and remembering things and concentration and acrobatics and ballet. | ||
| It's like Russia is, the way they treat sport is so disciplined. | ||
| Well, back in USSR, I think they treated it even more strict than nowadays. | ||
| You know, the coaches were really, really hard on the kids, and I think that's why they all raced with discipline. | ||
| I think that's the main factor that really favors them. | ||
| So in Russia, they have the pyramid game. | ||
| Is that the primary game that people play? | ||
| That's what everybody's playing. | ||
| I mean, honestly, pool is so small in Russia that you can count the players on both hands. | ||
| So why did your coach think that you should play pool then, if the pyramid game was so big? | ||
| Really, that's a good question because, like I said, I was really, really short. | ||
| Maybe he was feeling that... | ||
| You weren't going to grow? | ||
| No, but he was thinking, I think, at that time that it's better off starting with pool because I can reach the table and then switch back to pyramid. | ||
| But he wasn't expecting that I will be as good. | ||
| I started to progress really quick. | ||
| I started to win amateur tournaments, you know, winning junior tournaments. | ||
| Let's see that game. | ||
| Pull up a game of Russian... | ||
| How do you call it? | ||
| Russian Pyramid Billiards? | ||
| Russian Pyramid. | ||
| Russian Pyramid. | ||
| Is it a larger table? | ||
| It's a 12-foot table with tiny pockets, bigger balls. | ||
| So it's tougher to make the ball. | ||
| It's a completely different game. | ||
| It's fun to play. | ||
| It's not fun to play if you've never played any billiards. | ||
| Are the corners rounded or are they flat? | ||
| They're flat. | ||
| They're flat. | ||
| So they're flat like a pool table, not like a snooker table. | ||
| Oh wow, look at the size of that table. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| Look at the tiny pockets! | ||
| So the pocket is essentially the size of the ball. | ||
| Almost, almost. | ||
| Wow, this is crazy. | ||
| Why is it called pyramid? | ||
| Because of the shape of the rack, I don't know. | ||
| So, and in Russia, when you play this, you mostly play with an open bridge, right? | ||
| Yeah, mostly they use open bridge, but for like hard shots, I believe, when they have to draw the ball. | ||
| And so you can use any ball? | ||
| It depends on the discipline you play. | ||
| So this guy is shooting... | ||
| This guy is some amateur. | ||
| I don't know what he's doing. | ||
| Yeah, he's just whacking balls around. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But at least we get a chance to see what the table looks like. | ||
| So there's one... | ||
| Is that a red ball? | ||
| Looks like a maroon ball? | ||
| So red ball is a cue ball. | ||
| There is a discipline where you have to play only with a red ball. | ||
| Kind of like pool. | ||
| And there is discipline where you can shoot any ball. | ||
| But it's the same thing. | ||
| It's a race to eight balls. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mmm. | |
| And whoever makes eight balls first wins. | ||
| In any pocket? | ||
| Any pocket, yeah. | ||
| The thing about snooker players, and I guess probably this Russian pyramid game too, is that your fundamentals and your form have to be so perfect because the table is so big and the balls are so small that any room for deviation on your shot, you have to really tighten everything up. | ||
| Whereas opposed to a lot of American tables, those five-inch pockets, you know, there's a lot of room for fucking around and sloppy shots will still go in. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's the difference between the games, I think. | ||
| Fundamentals has to be really, really good, playing snooker and pyramid. | ||
| That's mostly what they work on. | ||
| And pool, you can see all the players that have their own style, their own techniques. | ||
| They can get away playing some weird styles. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They can get away with bad fundamentals. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, there's some great players that had bad fundamentals. | ||
| Like, have you ever watched Keith McCready play? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Sidearm. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Total sidearm, but amazing player. | ||
| Oliver Ortman from Germany is the same way. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, you know, that's because they started when they were young, and they couldn't reach the table either. | ||
| So they had to have their arm sideways because they couldn't let it hang down normally. | ||
| That's my problem nowadays, too, because my stance, I grew up with the wrong stance. | ||
| Were they like a straightforward stance as opposed to like a sideways pool stance? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like a snooker table stance? | ||
| And Russian pyramid, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, same. | ||
| Similar, right? | ||
| Yeah, and I have to slightly change it every year because I'm still growing and I'm taller than the average pool player. | ||
| You're still growing? | ||
| You're 22? | ||
| You haven't stopped growing? | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| That's interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you also have to bend at the knees too because you're kind of tall. | ||
| So like to lock the legs out. | ||
| So that's the thing that I always experiment with. | ||
| I can play with one bent knee and with both bent knees. | ||
| Yeah, because I was always taught to lock legs, that if you locked your legs, you have a more stable stance. | ||
| But then I watch guys like Shane Van Boning, and he bends at the knees. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, every player is really different. | ||
| You can see, for example, Carlo or Carlo Beato or Jason Shaw. | ||
| They have their legs straight, both of them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because they're not as tall as the other ones. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| You have both legs straight, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I always do that. | ||
| I didn't used to do that though, but then I got some pointers from someone. | ||
| Max Eberle actually helped me with that. | ||
| Max Eberle coached me when I lived in LA. That was the first. | ||
| I had some lessons when I first started out in New York from like, there's a guy named Jimmy Abel that was like an old school straight pool player, was a really good player. | ||
| And a few other guys gave me some pointers and tips, but Max gave me some real lessons. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he changed a lot of my fundamentals and tightened everything up, because I had a lot of bad habits that I didn't even know I had. | ||
| That's the difference, I guess, what I'm talking about with Russia, is that if you have a coach and you have a program, It's probably, like, explain how that works. | ||
| Is it like a very disciplined regiment that you guys would practice? | ||
| I mean, not really. | ||
| It may sound really professional, but what happened with me, I had four, five different coaches. | ||
| And from the very beginning, I was, for example, as a seven-year-old, I had a coach, and I reached the limit That I could learn from one coach and my parents used to always tell me, well, we have to switch because that's the only way to grow. | ||
| And once I found that coach, the very last Russian coach that I had at the 13, when I was 13, I felt like I couldn't grow more because we don't have many professional coaches in Russia because the game was really small. | ||
| Russian pyramid has many, many coaches. | ||
| And I got really lucky because in 2015, Johan Reising, he was a Mosconi Cup captain many, many, many times for Europe and US. He came to Russia as a national coach and practiced with the national team for two years. | ||
| That's when things really changed and I think I'm really grateful that it happened. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| So you're playing pool over in Russia. | ||
| Are there many pool tournaments? | ||
| I mean, we have amateur tournaments every two weeks, maybe, and one tournament a month, which is called Russian Cup, which is kind of like a professional tournament. | ||
| Just one a month. | ||
| So you realized at some point in time that you were eventually going to have to come to America to pursue it professionally, or Europe. | ||
| Europe was my first step because we have a Euro Tour. | ||
| That's the major tournament in Europe that I started with. | ||
| I mean, that's the path that all the players have to go through in Europe. | ||
| You have to play the Euro Tours and if you do good on them, then you can start really traveling and playing international tournaments. | ||
| I watched a match with you against Oscar Dominguez, who I know from L.A. I played in a tournament once against his dad, and his dad actually did that table out there, that really tight Brunswick. | ||
| His dad cut those pockets. | ||
| Oh, he's the best, yeah. | ||
| He's the best. | ||
| He did my old diamond at my house, too. | ||
| Yeah, he's amazing. | ||
| The best table mechanic in the business. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, 100%. | |
| Yeah, and boy, he did all the hard times tables, and they were all brutal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really tight tables, yeah. | ||
| But I watched you play him, and what did you run, seven and out on him? | ||
| There was like this one match. | ||
| How long ago was it? | ||
| It wasn't that long ago. | ||
| We played in his pool room in Sacramento. | ||
| I think it might have been, yeah. | ||
| I think it might have been in hard times. | ||
| In hard times in Sacramento. | ||
| But it was like, you played a perfect match. | ||
| Perfect match. | ||
| It was beautiful. | ||
| I mean, you got perfect on every ball. | ||
| Is this it right here? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A month ago. | ||
| Yeah, the name of the video is Absolute Perfection, Fedor Gorsett vs. | ||
| Oscar Dominguez. | ||
| Oh yeah, that was this year. | ||
| That's actually his pool room in Sacramento. | ||
| Which is Hard Times. | ||
| Yeah, he bought Hard Times, which is amazing. | ||
| It's an amazing place. | ||
| I played there once when I was doing stand-up comedy up there. | ||
| So you guys playing ten ball? | ||
| Ten ball, yeah, with the magic rack. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The magic rack, for people that don't know, there's a regular rack. | ||
| When you put the balls in the rack, it's a wooden rack or a plastic rack, and it's shaped like a triangle. | ||
| And then there's this plastic sheet that keeps the balls completely tight, and it's not a rack like a normal rack. | ||
| It's something that you place the balls on, And it ensures that all the balls are completely tight. | ||
| So, in a situation like that, and obviously you know this, it's just for people who don't know, the balls will spread very evenly or very, they have a similar reaction every time. | ||
| So you're playing for specific balls. | ||
| Yeah, you have more control. | ||
| You can actually control the ball you can make on the break versus the regular wooden rack. | ||
| It's not really like that. | ||
| Some people get upset at the magic rack because really good players, when they have a very good controlled break, they either make the one on the side or they make the corner ball and then they play in position on the one with the cue ball and then they just get out over and over and over again. | ||
| But I appreciate perfection. | ||
| I appreciate watching something like this where someone just gets dead on every ball. | ||
| It was fun playing you out there too. | ||
| Oh yeah, me too. | ||
| It was fun watching, you know? | ||
| I honestly didn't think that you were that good. | ||
| But you played really good. | ||
| Well, I was just happy I ran out the first game on you. | ||
| Oh, yeah, you put some pressure on me. | ||
| At least I got one. | ||
| I had to make some tough shots, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a tough table, too. | ||
| That four and a quarter inch diamond. | ||
| That's not an easy table. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| Yeah, but I got excited. | ||
| I was excited to play. | ||
| Because I don't get a chance to play. | ||
| I play my friend Sean, but I don't get a chance to play real elite players. | ||
| He wins some games. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Something to fuck up? | ||
| He gets out. | ||
| He gets out. | ||
| He can win some games. | ||
| But not like you. | ||
| Well, I appreciate it, too. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| So, when you decided, like, pool as a profession is, there's a small handful of people that make a good living. | ||
| Oh, very small, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, very small handful. | ||
| And then everybody else is just basically doing it because they have a passion for it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a strange thing to dedicate your life to. | ||
| Because a lot of people feel like it's one of those things where if you get really, really, really good at it, you go, damn, I could have got really good at something else and I'd be rich. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, for sure. | |
| For sure. | ||
| Like if you got really good at tennis, you'd be rich. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| If you got really good at golf, you'd be rich. | ||
| But honestly, the way I see it, the game is growing nowadays. | ||
| The prize money is getting bigger and bigger. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Well, Matchroom Pool is doing a great job. | ||
| They put on a lot of tournaments, and you could watch them on DAZN, the streaming app. | ||
| But it's an underappreciated game that occasionally blows up in America. | ||
| When The Hustler came out, everybody wanted to play pool. | ||
| And then there was a lull, and then The Color of Money came out with Tom Cruise and Paul Newman, and everybody wanted to play pool. | ||
| Pool rooms exploded all over the country and it was on ESPN. But then slowly but surely it kind of fades. | ||
| And it's in a position now where I think the internet is really doing a good job of bringing it back. | ||
| And I have some ideas of my own what I want to do. | ||
| And one of the things that I want to do is I want to host matches here. | ||
| And me and my friend Tommy from the East Coast, who's a really good player, do commentary and put it up on YouTube. | ||
| Sure, that'd be great. | ||
| I think it'd be a fun thing to do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That'd be fun for sure. | |
| And to get a guy like, you know, maybe you versus a guy like Mika Eminen or a guy like Shane Van Boning and have you guys play matches. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| For prize money. | ||
| That'd be fun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good, right? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I think... | ||
| I've been trying to figure out ideas to make pool more popular. | ||
| For sure, yeah. | ||
| I mean, that helps. | ||
| I think that's the best one, is me do commentary. | ||
| Because I can't play good enough to play in a tournament, but I can, you know, I can play good enough that I understand what's going on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So, there's a hope. | ||
| Well, that sounds real good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when you first started going to Europe and playing, how old were you then? | ||
| I was 14 when I went to, or 13 when I went to my first Euro tour. | ||
| So this is like your parents fund this or someone else? | ||
| Do you have a sponsor? | ||
| No, so what happened was when I was, the very first Euro tour I went to, I was sponsoring myself. | ||
| So I spent my own money out of my own pocket and did really good. | ||
| I finished in the last 32, my very first Euro tour. | ||
| And then my father passed away when I was 13. And two years later, after tough, tough times, one guy... | ||
| So I was always going to the pool room in Moscow trying to hustle people. | ||
| At 13? | ||
| At 13, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I was really passionate about the game, and after school I was always going to the pool room trying to play with somebody, I mean, cheap, like $10, $20, trying to make something. | ||
| And also it's good practice for me because... | ||
| I mean, the more you play, the better you play. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there was one guy, his name was Mike Nikolaev, and I know he was playing worse than me, and we were playing for like 15 bucks per set. | ||
| So I was going, you know, thinking that, you know, it's free money, 45 bucks, win a couple of sets and go back home. | ||
| I get there and I only had like 20 bucks with me. | ||
| I had no money. | ||
| And I ended up losing all of the sets, all three sets. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know how it happened, but I lost everything. | ||
| And I told him that I'll pay him later. | ||
| And then the same evening, he messaged me, you know what, we have to meet again tomorrow. | ||
| And when I came to the pool room, he offered me a sponsorship. | ||
| He said, I'll take care of you. | ||
| You can pick whatever cue you want. | ||
| And, you know, we have to plan your career. | ||
| And if you really want to make it, then I'll help you. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Just one match? | ||
| You played one set against each other? | ||
| No, we played three sets. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Three sets. | |
| I lost all of them. | ||
| Yeah, but even though you lost, he still saw so much potential in you that he wanted to sponsor you. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| There was a lot of situations like this in my life, honestly, that I'm grateful, and it's absolutely amazing how it happened. | ||
| So... | ||
| Yeah, after this we started with some European tournaments. | ||
| I went to Norway, Sweden, some Euro tours. | ||
| And I wasn't really winning, but I had a slightly progression. | ||
| I was always practicing and trying to get better. | ||
| And yeah, like I said, with Johan Reising coming to Russia as a national coach at the same time, that was perfect timing. | ||
| Because Mike told me that we can possibly work with Johan individually later on. | ||
| which happened and uh that's how it all started that's so fortunate yeah it is isn't that crazy how that works a one encounter with someone can change your entire life oh yeah mike and his brother vladimir they uh they helped me so much and it's crazy how it happened and then we went to derby city classic people saw how i play and then uh How old were you then? | ||
| 16. 16 at the Derby City. | ||
| They wouldn't even let you in this year, right? | ||
| I think you have to be... | ||
| Last year they changed the rules because of the casino, and I didn't play the year before. | ||
| Well, it used to be on a boat, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is like, there's a term, riverboat gambler. | ||
| I was good friends with this guy who was a really hilarious pool player who used to call everybody, oh, he's a riverboat gambler. | ||
| Everybody who is a wild, crazy gambler, he would call a riverboat gambler. | ||
| So I thought it was so appropriate when they moved Derby City to an actual riverboat. | ||
| But I would imagine... | ||
| Do they have to deal with waves? | ||
| Does the boat move? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I really... | ||
| I mean, that sounds stupid for a pool. | ||
| It is, it is. | ||
| I mean, unless that sucker's anchored into the ground, like, it's gonna move around. | ||
| Like, the balls could shift. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, if somebody drives by and leaves a big wake, you know, the tables could move a little bit. | ||
| So yeah, what happened was then the year after I came to Derby and I did good in that invitational tournament and on the side I used to always hustle and do something like bet on the matches and trying to win a little more. | ||
| And then I... Actually, what it was, I was playing that Invitational Temple tournament, and me and my friend Maxim, who also was a pool player with me on the trip, we used to bet on me playing in that tournament on every match. | ||
| And we didn't know the person that we were betting on. | ||
| It was Alan and Jason, the brother that came with me today. | ||
| So we were betting and betting and betting, and then I think the final match, I got into the finals. | ||
| I played Roberto Gomez. | ||
| We asked him if you want to double or nothing or bet again. | ||
| And they said, no, we're good. | ||
| So I ended up losing, and then they were staking Skyler Woodward at the time. | ||
| They were putting Skyler in the tournament, and I drew Skyler in round 10 of Derby City Classic and beat him 9-1. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's very good. | ||
| Oh, yeah, he is. | ||
| He's still a top player today. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's how I met the other two brothers, Alan and Jason. | ||
| That's another... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, that's crazy. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, was Skyler on the Moscone Cup this year? | ||
| Was he on the U.S. team? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The Moscone Cup, for people who don't know, is a really amazing event that they put on where it's every year... | ||
| It's in December? | ||
| It's either end of November or beginning of December. | ||
| It's a team match between Europe and the United States. | ||
| So you have all the top European players and they play all sorts of different ways. | ||
| They play individually, one-on-one. | ||
| They play two versus two, which is very interesting. | ||
| If you and I were playing two versus two, And we were on the same team. | ||
| You would make a shot and leave position for me, and then I would make a shot and leave position for you, which is interesting because some of the guys are left-handed and some of the guys are right-handed, so you have to leave position for a left-handed shot where it would be awkward for you to reach if you're right-handed, but it's perfect for left-handed. | ||
| So there's a lot of weird thinking. | ||
| And then on top of that, there's the wildest crowd in all of Portland. | ||
| But they're great, because they're quiet when the player's down on the ball. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, they know what's going on. | ||
| All of them are pool fans, and they know when they can get in. | ||
| I wanted to get out to Vegas to see it this year, but I was just too busy. | ||
| I really wanted to go, because it looks like so much fun to watch on TV, because there's so much screaming and cheering when someone makes a shot, and then everybody quiets down again. | ||
| Yeah, this year that was as wild as it could be, I think. | ||
| Yes, it was very wild. | ||
| And Europe won this year. | ||
| And unfortunately, you weren't allowed to play for the European team. | ||
| I was allowed, but I wasn't... | ||
| They didn't pick you. | ||
| I wasn't picked, yeah. | ||
| That's bullshit. | ||
| I think that's bullshit. | ||
| I mean, yeah, I think so too. | ||
| I think it's bullshit. | ||
| I think it's because you're Russian, 100%. | ||
| It just seemed like they probably were like, look, maybe it's not the best time to put a Russian player in the Moscone Cup. | ||
| And it probably isn't. | ||
| Maybe politically. | ||
| I don't think they have a problem with it in America. | ||
| No. | ||
| Because, like, when Russian fighters fight in the UFC, no one has a problem with it. | ||
| It's like when they're really good, you know, no one cares. | ||
| No, and honestly, this year, being in the United States, I stayed here since February, and I had a lot of support from American fans, and everybody treated me so well that I don't think there will be any problem. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| No, this is a country of immigrants. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's the whole country. | ||
| There's no one, I mean, unless you're Native American, and even them, most likely some of them came across the Bering Strait a long time ago, or some of them might have been here originally. | ||
| But this is a country, primarily the vast majority of the population, their grandparents or their parents or some or them, they came from another country. | ||
| So I think we're more accepting of that here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's a tough question for me because I still don't really know the real reason why I wasn't picked. | ||
| It's 100% because you're Russian. | ||
| I'll just tell you the real reason. | ||
| All right. | ||
| It has to be. | ||
| You're without doubt one of the best players in the world. | ||
| Like I said, I think you're in the top five of the world, for sure. | ||
| You could win any tournament in the world, right? | ||
| Don't you think? | ||
| Yeah, I can. | ||
| Yeah, any tournament. | ||
| You enter, you could win. | ||
| You're in the finals against Jason Shaw, whoever it is. | ||
| You have a very good chance of winning. | ||
| I agree, yeah. | ||
| But that elite level, when you get to that level, the Shane Van Bonings, you, Dennis Orcolo, anybody can win. | ||
| Oh, for sure, yeah. | ||
| And everybody, we have a different winner every tournament, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But for the rare people that can win, like, how many times has Shane won the U.S. Open? | ||
| Five. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| It is. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Or Earl, how many times did Earl win the U.S. Open? | ||
| It's the same, I think. | ||
| I invited Earl on the podcast. | ||
| He didn't even get back to me. | ||
| Earl was mad at me because I did an impression of him. | ||
| Have you ever seen my impression of him? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, that's great. | ||
| But I can only do an impression of him because I'm a fan. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, if I can do that voice, the only reason you can do that voice is you've watched my game. | ||
| I'm a giant fan of that guy. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Like, when I was doing that, that was with Justin Collett from The Action Report, who was... | ||
| Play that, Jamie. | ||
| For people who don't know, this is my best impression. | ||
| Like, out of all the impressions that I do, I can do a bunch. | ||
| I can do like Mike Tyson. | ||
| My voice is not good at impressions, but there's a few that I could do. | ||
| Here, rewind. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is Justin with TheActionReport.com. | |
| We're joined here tonight, live from Hollywood Billiards in Los Angeles, California, Mr. Earl Strickland, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Earl, how are you doing tonight? | ||
| Pool is a beautiful game played by ugly people. | ||
| Okay, first of all, how are you going to play pool if you're not properly equipped? | ||
| Where's your beekeeper's outfit? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You don't have no ass weights. | |
| I don't see you in waders. | ||
| For people who don't understand, Earl is very eccentric and he wears like weights on his arms and shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You have to put Earl Strickland's picture to understand. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jump cue. | |
| When I was a kid, you couldn't jump. | ||
| Fucking jump cue. | ||
| That ain't jumping. | ||
| What the fuck is that? | ||
| You got a tiny little cue and you're all pleased as punch? | ||
| You got a big smile on your face like you just did something? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Get the fuck out. | |
| Jump with a Mewchie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I jump full table with a Mewchie. | |
| How about that? | ||
| How strong is that? | ||
| What's your plans for the rest of the year? | ||
| I mean, you've got a lot going on. | ||
| A lot of it involves marijuana. | ||
| I think that's what he got upset at. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| How does he know? | ||
| Now play a video of Earl Strickland actually talking. | ||
| Because there's a video of me and Earl when I met him. | ||
| I don't even know if he remembers when I met him. | ||
| I met him after that. | ||
| And he's like, why are you picking on me? | ||
| I'm like, I love you. | ||
| I'm a big fan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've watched you and I. | |
| How can you watch Poole? | ||
| All the guy does is pick Lynn off the table and sweep it with his hand. | ||
| They won't even shoot. | ||
| Johnny Archer, Ralph Sukey, and Charlie Williams will pull and pull all together. | ||
| That's good enough. | ||
| So, that's my best impression. | ||
| It's the most obscure impression in all of the world of entertainment, and I picked Earl. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's a perfect copy of him. | ||
| I want you on, Earl. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Come on, Earl. | ||
| I'm your fan. | ||
| That'd be fun. | ||
| I love the guy. | ||
| I'm a giant fan of his, and he's absolutely one of the greatest, if not the greatest, nine-ball player of all time. | ||
| Yeah, and the greatest character in the game. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| I mean, for people who don't know, he wears, like... | ||
| Tape all over the tips of his fingers so that it looks like he's got golf balls in the end of his fingers. | ||
| Weights all over the body, too. | ||
| Yeah, he wears weights on his body so he stays still. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He wears weights on his elbow sometimes. | ||
| Sometimes he wears, like, shooting glasses, like tactical glasses. | ||
| He wears giant headphones so he can't hear anybody. | ||
| I mean, he's very athletic, too. | ||
| He runs every day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He has, like, a thousand push-ups and seat-ups every day. | ||
| And he's, you know... | ||
| Super, super accomplished. | ||
| And still, to this day, can play top-flight, world-class pool. | ||
| And he's in his 60s. | ||
| I mean, he was on Moscone Cup. | ||
| Yes, he was on Moscone Cup. | ||
| Played really well. | ||
| He's playing with, like, a very large tip now. | ||
| What is he doing? | ||
| This is his new thing. | ||
| It's like a 14-millimeter tip, it looks like. | ||
| He has some weird cue. | ||
| It's like a brake cue shaft with a brake cue ferrule, but the playing tip. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's, like, super thick. | ||
| And he never lets anybody touch his cue. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, he has tennis rap all over there. | ||
| And he was the first guy, I think, to play with an extension completely attached to his cue all the time. | ||
| Yeah, and I think Shane Van Boning is also playing with an extension because of Earl. | ||
| I think so, too. | ||
| Yeah, I think he actually played Earl and he's like, let me try that. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| There's something to it. | ||
| I know you don't like the extension, but... | ||
| But there is something to it. | ||
| When you have that extension on, it seems like there's a little bit more momentum. | ||
| It changes the balance, and that's what players like about it, I think. | ||
| Yeah, like a lot of top players now play with at least a 4-inch extension. | ||
| Yeah, and a tiny one, too. | ||
| The 1-inch extension. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just for just a little bit of weight out back. | ||
| Just a little extra weight out back. | ||
| Yeah, I'm, like I said, I wanted to get Earl on, but he didn't want to do it. | ||
| But I'm like, I think it'd be interesting to talk to you because I just think your journey and just to be such a young guy and to make this trek... | ||
| Come from Russia and come to the United States and now live here and play pool. | ||
| I'm just fascinated, like, what is that like? | ||
| Does it feel strange to you? | ||
| I mean, it feels really strange, but it's been already eight months, so I got really used to that already. | ||
| Do you have a permanent residence in America? | ||
| So, actually... | ||
| I actually should apply for a green card this week. | ||
| My girlfriend, Christina, she already got a green card last weekend. | ||
| Your girlfriend plays too? | ||
| Yeah, and she's good. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's the key to a relationship with a pool player. | ||
| You can't be playing with non-pool players, or you can't have a relationship with non-pool players, because they're not going to understand. | ||
| No, it's tough. | ||
| I mean, pool players, they're traveling a lot and playing pool all day. | ||
| I mean, how can you like it if you're not... | ||
| No. | ||
| I think you have to be involved. | ||
| So it narrows the dating pool for pool players. | ||
| How many guys date pool players that are actual pool players? | ||
| Like Josh Filler, his wife is a pool player. | ||
| Tyler Steyer. | ||
| His wife is a pool player. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, who else? | ||
| There was someone else. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whatever. | |
| Someone else. | ||
| But there are pool groupies. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I found that out with my friend Johnny. | ||
| Because my friend Johnny was a really good player when I lived in New York. | ||
| And, like, girls wanted to fuck him because he was a pool player. | ||
| I'm like, this is crazy. | ||
| He's a big, fat guy. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| But girls loved him because he was so good. | ||
| He was such a good pool player. | ||
| You know, I don't know if you've ever read this book. | ||
| It's a book called McGurdy, Life of a Billiard Tussler. | ||
| Very interesting book. | ||
| Robert Byrne wrote it. | ||
| And it's about a guy who, you know, Robert Byrne, the guy who writes all those instructional books. | ||
| Yeah, I've heard of him, but I never read the book. | ||
| He wrote this book about this guy who was a famous pool hustler in the Depression and traveled around. | ||
| It's an interesting book for anybody to read, not just someone who's interested in pool, because it's about this person who's involved in just deep struggle, like riding around on railroad cars and begging for food. | ||
| It wasn't an easy life by any stretch of the imagination. | ||
| But what was my point? | ||
| I forgot my point. | ||
| Oh, this is my point. | ||
| So they were in a pool hall once and Nixon was on TV and he was the president. | ||
| And he was with this guy and the guy goes, look at that guy. | ||
| President of the United States and he can't make a ball. | ||
| That's how pool players think. | ||
| They don't give a fuck about you if you can't play pool. | ||
| I mean, some of them are like that, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, a lot of them are like that, man. | ||
| That's like one thing that I'm proud of. | ||
| I've played pool with some people, and they're like, oh, you actually can play some pool. | ||
| Well, that's how I was today. | ||
| I played Mike Siegel once, and I broke and ran out. | ||
| Well, I didn't break and ran out. | ||
| He missed a ball, and I ran out the first set on him, too. | ||
| And he talked about it on a podcast, too. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I was very proud, because he said that I'm a really good pool player. | ||
| I'm like, oh, Mike Siegel said that. | ||
| Wow, I mean, that's an achievement. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Yeah, he has a podcast now. | ||
| It's him and Kim Davenport and David Pierce. | ||
| I think I saw it, yeah, at the International Open this year. | ||
| They were doing something. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's cool. | ||
| I'm glad that people are, you know, because of the internet, there's like a whole thing with live streaming. | ||
| So there's like live stream matches and there's live stream matches that people do for pay-per-view. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is really interesting. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And it's also helping the game to grow, I think. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's still guys that don't travel and don't do anything, and they stay in their hometown. | ||
| And they're like elite players, too, like Justin Bergman. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, Justin is an elite player. | ||
| He's as elite as it could be. | ||
| As elite as it gets. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a video of him. | ||
| Pull this up. | ||
| Justin Bergman runs 18 racks. | ||
| That's been recently, but it was on the bar table. | ||
| It was on a bar table. | ||
| Was it seven foot or six foot? | ||
| Seven foot. | ||
| Seven foot. | ||
| So it's not as impressive, but it's fucking crazy. | ||
| When you watch him do it, it's not as impressive because he's playing on a smaller table, but I mean, holy shit. | ||
| But also it's a nine ball with the magic crack. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So it's the easiest game you can ever imagine on a pool table. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Easiest game you can imagine on a pool table, but still. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| I mean, 18 pack is an 18 pack. | ||
| Now, he plays with one of these keelwood shafts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you think of those? | ||
| I actually tried his shaft, and I'm the big fan, but I've tried a lot of keelwood shafts, and they're not as consistent as carbon fiber, I think. | ||
| Well, it's a different thing because you have a different feel, right? | ||
| Yeah, a completely different feel. | ||
| But, you know, Richard Su? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He makes those Tsunami shafts. | ||
| Those are really good. | ||
| I've got one of those for my Southwest. | ||
| I like it a lot. | ||
| And I'm going to have him make me some for other cues. | ||
| See, it's very, very personal when it comes to cues. | ||
| I mean, you like extensions, skill with shafts. | ||
| I like non-extensions and carbon fiber, and we could be playing completely different styles. | ||
| That's what's great about pool, I think. | ||
| Well, I like carbon fiber, too. | ||
| I think it used to be, back in the day, people would play with fiberglass Mm-hmm. | ||
| Cues, and they were a lemon. | ||
| Like, you saw someone playing, like, a black fiberglass shaft. | ||
| You're like, oh, this guy sucks. | ||
| Because they kind of sucked back then. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But then Q-Tech, which is your sponsor, started sponsoring Earl, and then they eventually sponsored Shane and a bunch of other elite players, and they started making, like, really good pool cues. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, they did, and I think they were the first ones that were making this fiberglass shafts that were really popular back in the day. | ||
| Well, remember they used to make a wooden shaft that's covered in like a thin sheet of clear plastic. | ||
| I think that's what Shane used to play with. | ||
| Yes, back in the day. | ||
| Earl, it looks like his was sanded down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It looked like he sanded the shit out of that clear stuff and got down to the wood. | ||
| And he was playing with like a very small millimeter. | ||
| I think it was like a 12 millimeter shaft. | ||
| Yeah, probably thinner. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How do you fall on what weight to play with, what millimeter to play with? | ||
| Did you slowly evolve? | ||
| Because you play with a fairly light cue. | ||
| You play with an 18 ounce cue. | ||
| For a lot of people that don't know, that's on the lighter side. | ||
| And your tip is 11.5? | ||
| 12.5. | ||
| Oh, excuse me. | ||
| 12.5. | ||
| You used to play with the 11 in the house? | ||
| I used to play with 11.7, and I used to shape it down a little more, so it probably was 11.5. | ||
| And was that the Z shaft? | ||
| No, that was actually the Jacobi edge shaft I used to play with. | ||
| Actually, that's another good story. | ||
| I came to Derby City Classic the very first time and Mike was a Jacobi Q ambassador, or he was a dealer in Russia, and he said, you have to pick a Q when we go to US. And I didn't want to change my Q on the tournament right before I start playing. | ||
| And he said, it's all right, you can do it, you know. | ||
| And I picked the cue from the wall and I started hitting and I really, really liked the cue. | ||
| And I ended up beating everybody. | ||
| I played so good. | ||
| That's amazing for me because it never happened to me after. | ||
| Right off the rack. | ||
| That is unusual. | ||
| Yeah, usually you have to experiment with cues and find what's better for you and what's with you and that's actually how I found that 12.5 is better for me and I've experimented so much that it's crazy. | ||
| For me it's so fascinating because what the game is, is you are rolling a ball purely with the force of your arm and the weight of the cue And you're trying to calculate the exact or very close to the exact amount of revolutions a ball is going to make over the course of like a nine-foot table. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And for people that don't play it and don't know how nuts that is, like some of the shots that you made out there, I was like, damn. | ||
| Because you're making these long shots, but you got within inches of where you wanted to be. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's just like a roll, one extra roll and you're fucked. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's such a game of just millimeters. | ||
| It's a game of millimeters, a game changer for sure. | ||
| But that's why the feel of the cue is so important. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's why, you know, and getting accustomed to what happens with that lighter weight cue or that heavier weight cue. | ||
| Like a lot of the older players, like Efrem Reyes always played with a very heavy cue. | ||
| I think his cue was more than 21 ounces. | ||
| Yeah, and they liked high deflection shafts. | ||
| Same as all the agents. | ||
| I don't really know the reason why, but they all like the high deflection shafts. | ||
| They like those stiff, southwest-style shafts. | ||
| Do you think it's just because that's what they started with and they're accustomed to what happens when you hit the ball? | ||
| I think so, yeah. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| For people who don't know what we're talking about when it comes to high deflection and low deflection, the way you hit a ball with English, so if I hit a ball and I hit a ball on the right side of the ball, it'll actually throw the ball off to the left. | ||
| And so everybody calculates that when you shoot a ball. | ||
| Like sometimes when you're aiming at a ball with a shaft that has high deflection, you're really aiming to miss. | ||
| But you're aiming with deflection so that you know that when the ball actually leaves the cue, it's going to kind of squirt off to the right and it'll make the ball perfectly. | ||
| Yeah, sometimes you'll have to aim to the right side of the ball to hit the left side. | ||
| Yeah, but all of that... | ||
| Is only available in your head if you're playing all the time. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It takes a lot of practice, of course. | ||
| You get a feel for pool. | ||
| When I was playing, when I lived in New York and I was playing every day, the best feeling in the world was when you're in stroke. | ||
| Like you've been playing every day, eight hours a day, and you can get out there and you can just fire balls in. | ||
| You just have that touch and it just comes and it goes. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's a crazy thing. | ||
| It doesn't really matter how much you practice. | ||
| You have these days when you just feel everything. | ||
| When everything just comes together and you just don't miss. | ||
| And the problem with me is I like to work out. | ||
| And if you lift weights, your feel's gone. | ||
| I know, that's why I'm very slim. | ||
| Well, do you know Willie Hoppy? | ||
| He wouldn't even drive a car on the days that he had a match. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Wouldn't even drive a car. | ||
| He's like, I'm not touching shit. | ||
| I'm just going to leave my arms. | ||
| Well, I have my own things, too, and every player has them, but that's too crazy for me. | ||
| But his was like, he didn't want to use his arms. | ||
| He didn't want any strain at all on his arms, even just turning. | ||
| I bet back in the Willy Hoppy days, I don't even know if they had power steering back then. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Did they? | ||
| What year was Willy Hoppy around? | ||
| So Willy Hoppy, by the way, wasn't even necessarily always playing pool. | ||
| He was more of a billiards player. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Died in 1959. Okay. | |
| So when did they invent power steering? | ||
| Let's find that out. | ||
| Because, like, that makes sense, because I have an old Porsche, and it doesn't have power steering, and every time I turn the wheel, I go to fucking, you know, it's like, it involves a lot of strain. | ||
| So maybe if he was playing, it was driving around some old bullshit car. | ||
| Technically a 1926, but I can't imagine that it was fully in every car or everything by then. | ||
| Yeah, and it probably sucked. | ||
| Even though they had it, it probably was terrible. | ||
| Yeah, probably. | ||
| But yeah, lifting weights is the worst. | ||
| Like I'll come here from the gym and then I'll try to play with Sean and I can't make a ball. | ||
| Yeah, you feel like it's like a toothpick to you, right? | ||
| No, it's just your arms not communicating with you right. | ||
| But it's actually really good to play after your workout because then your muscle memory kicks in and after practice sessions like this you will be playing better. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I think the only thing... | ||
| Your arms are exhausted, though, when you work out. | ||
| So, like, all the muscle fibers are torn, and they have to sort of rebuild. | ||
| And so the communication with your arm is like... | ||
| It's like your arm's drunk. | ||
| It's not thinking well. | ||
| I think it might not be a bad time to practice. | ||
| Just like set up some balls and just practice using the weight of the cue and stroke through it. | ||
| But if I had to play like a serious game and I just worked out, I'd be fucked. | ||
| I don't have any confidence. | ||
| Of course, yeah. | ||
| It's the worst thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you do anything before you play like get a massage or anything like that? | ||
| Does that ever help you? | ||
| Yeah, I stretch a lot. | ||
| Stretch? | ||
| Yeah, I have a lot of problems with my back because of the way that I grew up and the way I had my stance set up when I was a kid. | ||
| So I have to stretch every day after the practice and before every morning. | ||
| What part of your back? | ||
| Your lower back? | ||
| The lower back, yeah. | ||
| Have you ever done anything to strengthen that? | ||
| I'm doing some core exercises, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I'm doing some planking, but I'm not very into it. | ||
| You're not very into exercise? | ||
| No, but I want to be. | ||
| You want to be? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, there's a bunch of things that you can do for lower back that can help you a lot. | ||
| I'll show you afterwards. | ||
| We have a gym next door. | ||
| Well, I bought a thing, the machine that called HIPAA extension, I think. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| That's what I do. | ||
| I mean, that's for the lower back, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, that'll help a lot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's another machine called the Reverse Hyper, which is amazing. | ||
| But it's a very specialized machine. | ||
| You have to go to like a real strength and conditioning gym for them to have something like that. | ||
| But that's really good because it actually decompresses your back as well as strengthens it. | ||
| Yeah, well, the thing with me, I have one side of my back which is really tight and the other one which is really, really weak. | ||
| So I have scoliosis and it really makes it difficult for me to strengthen both sides. | ||
| Have you always had scoliosis? | ||
| Or do you think this is pool-related? | ||
| I think it's pool-related. | ||
| Yeah, you know, they've done these examinations of bodies of archers from like, you know, 2000 years ago, like guys who pulled a bow. | ||
| And so you'll pull a bow with your right side. | ||
| So one side is pulling and the other side is just holding. | ||
| And so you have one side that's like very muscular and the other side, it's totally imbalanced. | ||
| Like my friend John Dudley, he's a professional archer. | ||
| And he's a professional bow hunter. | ||
| And he's an archery coach. | ||
| And his back is so fucked up. | ||
| Because for decades, he's just been pulling with his right arm. | ||
| And so his right side is like his whole body's back's all funky because of that. | ||
| Well, it's kind of the same for me, but since I started to stretch and really take care of it, it's been better. | ||
| I mean, I'm 22 and my back is already like 45, I don't know. | ||
| Oh no. | ||
| Have you seen the documentary on Jeanette Lee? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, she had really bad scoliosis, and I didn't know how bad it was, which is so impressive that she was able to play so well, because they put these giant rods in her back. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Oh, my God, the scar goes up her entire back, and there's all these screws and shit in there that's trying to straighten her back out. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| They don't have to do that to you. | ||
| No, no, I didn't do any surgeries or anything. | ||
| But if you tightened up the other side, if you strengthened up the other side, there's got to be some exercises that you can do to balance your body out. | ||
| For sure, for sure. | ||
| You're just eventually going to do that? | ||
| I eventually have to do it, yeah. | ||
| This is Jeanette Lee's back. | ||
| Look at the size of that scar. | ||
| I mean, that is like, that's crazy. | ||
| That's like a two and a half foot scar. | ||
| It is. | ||
| That's her entire back. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| Yeah, I don't want none of that, so I have to. | ||
| I don't think they do that anymore. | ||
| I don't think they do it like that anymore. | ||
| There's all sorts of things you can do. | ||
| I mean, scoliosis is obviously a very complicated ailment, but there's people that believe that spinal decompression and strengthening and yoga exercises, like I was following this lady on Instagram and she had scoliosis and she fixed it with yoga and stretching and Well I was going to some gym called Functional Patterns or something like that in Russia and they told me that they found some program that I can work just on one side | ||
| for my back but unfortunately I can't go back and do that so I have to find something else here and I didn't really have time this year. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| I was playing pool non-stop. | ||
| How many hours of pool do you play a day? | ||
| Like I said, it's different. | ||
| When I practice and I don't have any tournaments, I try to play more, like six, eight hours a day, just straight practicing. | ||
| But when I'm in the tournament season and just have a day in between tournaments, I play probably two or three hours just to stay in stroke. | ||
| So when you say practicing, are you setting up drills? | ||
| Both. | ||
| Drills. | ||
| I work on specific parts of the game that are weak that I want to strengthen. | ||
| The break, the jumps, kicking, there's a lot of different aspects in the game that you can practice. | ||
| Do you break with one of those break rack things, or do you just keep racking the balls? | ||
| No, I actually ordered a break rack thing a couple of months ago. | ||
| It's pretty sweet. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Yeah, it's a great thing. | ||
| I mean, it leaves a big white spot in the middle of your pool table because the ball keeps bouncing. | ||
| Well, I put the double tape underneath. | ||
| Oh, that's smart. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, but there's a bunch of those interesting inventions that people have come up with. | ||
| Yeah, it's super sweet. | ||
| Yeah, when you have a great break, like a guy like Shane that has a killer break, like it's such an advantage. | ||
| I watched a match once, I forget who he was, I think he was playing Kopinyi and he was playing ten ball and he made six balls in the break. | ||
| Yeah, I mean break became so big nowadays that it's probably 80% of the game playing nine ball and ten ball. | ||
| Especially with that magic rack, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean with the wood rack it's a little bit different. | ||
| It depends who will be racking the balls, what are the rules. | ||
| I actually like the rules that they do nowadays. | ||
| They have the referees at every table racking with a wood rack and they don't touch any balls once they remove the rack so it's completely random. | ||
| That is probably better as long as the referee is giving you a good rack. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The worst is when you're playing someone and they purposely leave a little space there and you hear that slug sound. | ||
| Yeah, that happened to me too. | ||
| Yeah, it's gonna happen. | ||
| Yeah, especially on the big stage, big match. | ||
| I mean, it hurts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, there's so much at stake. | ||
| Oh yeah, of course. | ||
| There's room for shenanigans. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, but the break shot and pull is also like from a spectator perspective, like people don't like to see a soft break. | ||
| They like to see someone smash the balls and them scatter all over the place randomly. | ||
| That's why I really like the break that they have now, because everybody's just whacking them and hitting hope and believe that something goes in. | ||
| Yeah, well, there was a time where they were making people spot the nine ball on the spot, because they thought that would help, but then people figured around that, too. | ||
| I mean, pool players are figuring out the break so easy and so quick that it's a joke. | ||
| I mean, it doesn't matter which format you create. | ||
| With the magic rack, they will always figure it out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, they'll just practice all day and figure out which ball should be in which positions and whether to use a cut break where you hit it on the side or hit it straight from the middle. | ||
| What do you think about breaking from the box when they had rules like that for a while? | ||
| You couldn't break from the corner because you could make a better bridge off the side rails and people were hitting it harder and hitting it at that angle, you got more action on the balls. | ||
| Well, they use that breaking rule at matchroom events nowadays. | ||
| They have a nine ball on the spot and break box. | ||
| Not like a tiny break box that you can break from, and it's in the center. | ||
| So you really have to cut a lot, cut the one ball, and you still can make both wing ball and the one ball on the side, but that's way, way tougher. | ||
| That would be a place where I would think like physical fitness would come into play like if you were stronger you know you could if in that motion like maybe there's a thing that you could do with like bands or something like that where you develop a stronger break uh I mean I saw a lot of different pool machines that develop special muscles really yeah in Asia they they have them but I never what yeah they have like workout pool machines Yeah, | ||
| kinda. | ||
| Can you find them online? | ||
| I think so, yeah. | ||
| What are they called? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There is a pool machine called HIPS in Russia. | ||
| So it's like a round thing with a pool ball there and it just goes around so you just keep shooting the cue ball. | ||
| And what the Asian machine has is your cue is always going straight in the same line. | ||
| So you're developing the right muscles and your muscle memory remembers the straight cueing. | ||
| Are you putting the shaft through a tube or something? | ||
| Like how is it always going in the straight line? | ||
| Yeah, it's kind of like a tube, yeah. | ||
| Because Buddy Hall had a thing like that for a while, where he was selling, it was like a tube that sat on a table, a small tube, with like little legs. | ||
| And you would make a bridge, and the whole thing would be like sliding your cue through that tube. | ||
| I think it's really helpful. | ||
| I don't see these things, and I think if I were using it when I was a kid, it would help me a lot. | ||
| Because some people, they're cueing the ball and they don't even realize they're kind of going through the ball sideways. | ||
| Yeah, and even myself, even myself, I noticed that it's crooked a little bit. | ||
| Nobody's perfect, but... | ||
| Do you film yourself? | ||
| Yeah, that's what I did a lot when I was 16, 17. You know, I'm like a pool geek. | ||
| I'm always trying to figure out what's wrong and work on mistakes, and I used to analyze a lot of things, yeah. | ||
| Well, when you were 16 and 17, one thing that's interesting is that you had access to the internet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You had access to pool matches. | ||
| Yeah, I watched a lot of pool matches. | ||
| How much did that help you? | ||
| A lot, and that's actually what people don't understand, that they can learn a lot just by watching and not playing. | ||
| You definitely can. | ||
| You can learn a lot about where pathways that people like a pro takes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, how to run balls, the strategy of the game. | |
| You can even work on your fundamentals. | ||
| You know the player Nick Vandenberg? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| He used to work on his fundamentals, from what I heard, through hypnosis. | ||
| So he was closing his eyes and trying to repeat the stroke while he was asleep. | ||
| Yeah, that's crazy. | ||
| That's next level. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Do they drug test people at these events? | ||
| What do they test for? | ||
| I don't know, but we have a drug test on all the Metrum events, I believe. | ||
| One thing I think you should definitely drug test for is beta blockers. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Beta blockers, they cut your adrenaline. | ||
| So you don't get antsy. | ||
| Like, you don't get nervous when you're shooting. | ||
| That's a big thing in pool. | ||
| It's a big thing in pool, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I think they use beta blockers. | ||
| People have been caught using beta blockers for a lot of games. | ||
| Because anxiety and stress, which is, you know, look, if you can make a great shot under pressure, it's wonderful. | ||
| It's a great feeling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But if you had zero pressure, you would play better. | ||
| I'd play a different thing, of course. | ||
| So if you were in a big tournament, but you were on beta blockers, you probably wouldn't feel any of those nerves. | ||
| Like, I've seen people that are shooting a nine ball for a lot of money, and you see their hands shaking. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And you see they have to put the cue down and... | ||
| Yeah, take a deep breath. | ||
| And sometimes they forget to breathe, and you can see them, they're like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. | |
| Well, pool is one of those things where when you're... | ||
| It's one moment. | ||
| There's one moment. | ||
| And you're playing, and maybe it's a race to 12, and it's 11 to 11. And you and I are playing, and I have one shot on the nine ball, and this is for everything. | ||
| And if I miss, and if I hang that ball, you're going to win. | ||
| But if I make it, I'm going to win. | ||
| So it comes down to all this playing, comes down to this one brief moment. | ||
| And the walls close in on you. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| And it makes it very difficult for people if they don't have a very specific mindset or pre-shot routine that they approach a shot with. | ||
| They can get caught up in what's called like an open loop system where you just kind of like let the cue go. | ||
| And you've seen that. | ||
| Everyone's seen that. | ||
| They just miss the ball by like a full diamond. | ||
| They dog the ball and you're like, what the fuck happened? | ||
| Well, he spazzed out. | ||
| So do you have a pre-shot routine? | ||
| Yeah, of course I do. | ||
| Otherwise, it's impossible to play under pressure like you said. | ||
| What is your pre-shot routine? | ||
| How do you do it? | ||
| It's secrets, but... | ||
| Secrets? | ||
| Come on, give up the secrets, bro. | ||
| I mean, now it's so automatically that I don't really think about it. | ||
| But before, I used to always stand up on the line of my shot and kind of visualize what I'm going to do. | ||
| Decide what speed, what spin, and how I'm going to shoot. | ||
| Like, I already visualized the whole process, how I'm shooting the ball, and I even can imagine where the cue ball will land after the shot. | ||
| And then once I figure it out and I'm ready to shoot, I go down. | ||
| Then I... Do a couple of pre-strokes, do the pose on my last backswing, then I shoot. | ||
| Always pause? | ||
| I always pose, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I love that. | ||
| That changed my game a lot when I started pausing. | ||
| Oh, it's way better timing, and I think you can analyze things better that way. | ||
| Yeah, some guys pause with the tip in forward. | ||
| On the key ball, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and then they draw back and shoot, and some guys pause on the backswing. | ||
| Where do you pause? | ||
| I pause on my backswing. | ||
| That's the Buddy Hall way. | ||
| He was the first guy that ever saw it do it. | ||
| He had a long pause. | ||
| People called it the Buddy Hall pause. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because he would hold back and shoot through. | ||
| And when Buddy Hall was playing, there's a great book. | ||
| It's not a great book, but it's an interesting book. | ||
| That his road guy that he would travel with wrote a book about him. | ||
| And, um, back in his day, in Buddy Hall's day, they all took speed. | ||
| They all took amphetamines. | ||
| So they were all, like, he was real skinny at the time. | ||
| And, like, these guys, because they would play for, like, 12 hours, 15 hours, 16 hours. | ||
| They'd play until somebody went bust. | ||
| And sometimes they'd play for 24 hours, 48 hours. | ||
| They would just keep fucking playing. | ||
| Over and over and over again. | ||
| So they'd be just whacked out on amphetamines playing pool. | ||
| But the way it's been explained to me, I've never taken amphetamines and I've never played pool on anything other than marijuana, which helps a lot. | ||
| That's why I said that about Earl. | ||
| Marijuana helps a lot. | ||
| Do you ever smoke marijuana? | ||
| Yeah, I did. | ||
| Once upon a time? | ||
| It enhances feel. | ||
| Marijuana makes you more sensitive to things, and I feel like it enhances my touch, like where everything's going. | ||
| I can focus on things more. | ||
| Well, it's also very individual, I think. | ||
| For me, it was bizarre. | ||
| Paranoia? | ||
| Yeah, it wasn't very good, especially playing pool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that can happen too. | ||
| It's also something that you... | ||
| I think marijuana is something that you have to learn. | ||
| You have to learn what the effects are, what's the right dose, how much to do. | ||
| I smoke it before I go on stage. | ||
| I smoke it before I write. | ||
| I used to smoke it before jujitsu all the time. | ||
| A lot of jujitsu players smoke pot. | ||
| And they smoke pot and roll. | ||
| And I always said that it made my jujitsu quite a bit better. | ||
| Like, when I rolled and I was on jiu-jitsu, I was quite a bit better than I was when I was sober. | ||
| Well, for us, it's illegal to do it on a professional stage. | ||
| Right. | ||
| For a reason. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I think it is... | ||
| I mean, I've said this about jiu-jitsu, and I'll say it about pool. | ||
| I think marijuana is a performance-enhancing drug with some things. | ||
| Possibly yeah, it definitely is for comedy writing for comedy writing marijuana is a performance enhancing drug it 100% enhances your performance when you're writing for that kind of writing because like I write Silly shit, you know and when I'm silly with pot like silly ideas come to your head more often But for those guys when they were taking amphetamines what they said was And I've talked to someone who has played on them. | ||
| He said the balls, like you could see edges on the balls differently. | ||
| Like it almost like where there was a bunch of edges. | ||
| Instead of a round surface, they would see like a different geometry to the balls. | ||
| I believe that. | ||
| And they'd see lines more clearly. | ||
| They were just like hyper focused and like, you know, just like laser beam locked in. | ||
| Well, that's the difference between pool players too. | ||
| Like somebody is so talented and I believe that some players have a better vision, like a better eye. | ||
| Like Jason Shaw, I believe he has like the best eye in the pool world. | ||
| They call him eagle eye. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For a reason. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, he's ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That guy can, he shoots like long, hard shots and just fires them in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's another one of those guys. | ||
| It's like, there's this small handful who could just beat anybody in the world. | ||
| And he just won, he just beat, rather, the world straight pool record. | ||
| He touched a ball, and so they made it like 669, but he kept running and got to like 700 and something, where the previous record, like Willie Moscone had a record back in the day, it was like 500 and something balls. | ||
| But that was on an eight-foot table, wasn't it? | ||
| Yeah, and bigger pockets. | ||
| Five-inch pockets, eight-foot table. | ||
| But he did it on a nine-foot, and then John Smith beat that, right? | ||
| Yeah, 620-something, I think. | ||
| Right, and then Jason Shaw beat that. | ||
| And Jason Shaw's not even a straight pool player, which is crazy. | ||
| No, and that's the thing with the shooters. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, nine ball players will take over. | ||
| Well, that was the same with Earl, too. | ||
| You know, when Earl Strickland started playing straight pool, he'd just start running hundreds. | ||
| And everybody's like, Jesus Christ, he doesn't even play the game. | ||
| Like, imagine if he understood the patterns, like those guys who play straight pool all the time. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| It's completely different. | ||
| They just never miss. | ||
| And for people who don't know what straight pool is, straight pool is the old school game that was in the movie The Hustler with Jackie Gleason and Paul Newman. | ||
| And what straight pool was was always the king of pool games because you would play whether it was to 125 points or 150 points and you rack all 15 balls and the opening break is a soft break where you're trying to leave no shot for your opponent. | ||
| So you're just kind of clipping the edge of the ball and you're trying to leave the cue ball as far away from the stack as possible with everything as close as possible so there's no shot. | ||
| And the pressure of a shot then becomes very high because if you miss... | ||
| And you go into the rack and spread the balls out, a really elite player could run, like I saw Mike Siegel do that with a guy. | ||
| The guy made a shot, missed, and Mike Siegel ran 125 balls and out. | ||
| The guy never got a chance to shoot again. | ||
| And that's commonplace with the really, really elite players. | ||
| Yeah, I mean I played the straight pool tournament in October and there was a group stage where I had to play five matches and two matches I ran 125 and out. | ||
| We played race to 125 points and two matches I've lost I didn't play as good and the third match I ran 107 and I didn't get out through my group. | ||
| I just I finished fourth in my group. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So the level of players are increasing every year. | ||
| I think the level of players right now is as high as it's ever been. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I say this as someone who really respects the old school players. | ||
| I love to watch old school matches. | ||
| But I watched an old school match recently between Jimmy Rempe and Mike Siegel. | ||
| I was kind of amazed at the shots they missed. | ||
| If you watch the game compared to what we play nowadays, it's completely different. | ||
| Yeah, the best players I think ever are around right now. | ||
| But I think if you had a guy like Earl Strickland, Earl Strickland's still elite today, so he maybe is not the best example because he's continued to grow with the game. | ||
| I think the best players back then, if you put them in the same pressure environment with the same level of play that guys have now, they would probably be at that level too. | ||
| But back then, the players just weren't the same level. | ||
| Yeah, but also the game was completely different. | ||
| The environment was different. | ||
| The equipment was different. | ||
| They used to play in worn cloth, really thick cloth, dirty equipment, dirty balls. | ||
| The break didn't matter as much. | ||
| Everybody was just breaking hard and hoping for the best. | ||
| Yeah, they didn't have a sophisticated kicking method either. | ||
| I think when the Filipinos came here and guys like Efren started kicking balls to get safe, that's when people started really opening their eyes to what was possible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's interesting to me, too, is that the Filipino players, a lot of them played three-cushion billiards. | ||
| And they learned how to kick by understanding how the balls are bouncing off the rails in a table with no pockets. | ||
| And then because of that deep understanding of angles and how hard to hit in English, they developed this insane kicking game. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, they all say it's a feeling, but in the end of the day it's all practice and there is many, many different systems you can use for kicking. | ||
| And I really believe that some of the Filipinos are really super talented and they have that feel for kicking, but a lot of shots they just use different systems. | ||
| Yeah, it's also really amazing how many good players come from the Philippines. | ||
| Oh, it's unbelievable. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| I went to the Philippines when I was 15. What was that like? | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| I went with my friend and I was playing everybody. | ||
| I was playing a bartender that I couldn't beat. | ||
| I was 15, and I was thinking I'm good. | ||
| I mean, I was coming there to play good players, but I ended up playing everybody, and I was just amazed how good everybody's playing over there. | ||
| Like, the guy who works 24 hours behind the bar just never plays pool. | ||
| I mean, he's just a regular player in some random pool room, can run a couple of wrecks playing nine ball. | ||
| That's how crazy it is. | ||
| For me, it's insane. | ||
| If you walked into the bar here or anywhere else, I mean, would you imagine that the guy will run a two-pack of nine ball? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| Yeah, most likely not. | ||
| It happened multiple times for me there. | ||
| Really? | ||
| So the level seemed higher there? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, and the game is really, really big. | ||
| I mean, the taxi drivers, they know, everybody knows who Efren Reyes is, you know, Francisco Bustamante. | ||
| I've met people that are Filipino immigrants to America, and they'll tell me they're Filipino. | ||
| I go, do you know who Efren Reyes is? | ||
| And they're like, Bata! | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Like, they know who he is. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Pool is really, really big in the Philippines. | ||
| Well, pool came over the Philippines in the 1950s when the GIs were over there. | ||
| So American GIs were over there and they brought pool to the Philippines and the Filipinos just took over. | ||
| It's pretty crazy like how that transpired because when they play over there, they're playing on very tough conditions because the tables are all damp because it's very humid outside and a lot of times the tables are not balanced very well and the cloth is dirty and they use a lot of powder. | ||
| Oh yeah, they just throw it on the table. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| Yeah, they just leave it on the rails. | ||
| They leave stacks of powder on the rails, which is unheard of anywhere else. | ||
| No, and it gets messy everywhere. | ||
| See if you can find these Efren Reyes matches where he still plays right now. | ||
| He's playing all the time. | ||
| He plays constantly. | ||
| And they put them up online. | ||
| They go to Star Billiard's Efren Reyes. | ||
| And so when he's playing, not only do they have powder all over the table, which gets on everything. | ||
| It's all over the table. | ||
| But every time someone's about to shoot, someone... | ||
| Who's like either gambling or someone who's been assigned to it comes over and marks chalk where all the balls are in case someone moves the ball. | ||
| So that's a big distraction. | ||
| And then there's 50 people around the table with flip-flops talking on their cell phones. | ||
| Well, also, the action side of pool in the Philippines is huge. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huge. | |
| You have people betting every game, like yelling names before every game starts. | ||
| And you have, like, chickens running around the table. | ||
| Literal chickens. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was watching the Alex Pagulayan video, and you hear... | ||
| That's very common in the Philippines. | ||
| Do you have any videos from Star Billiards? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know exactly what I'm looking at. | |
| Nothing's coming up from a Star Billiards account. | ||
| Yeah, I'll find something for you. | ||
| It's pretty specific. | ||
| But the scene there is so fascinating because it's contrary to everything that you would ever expect in a pool tournament. | ||
| In a tournament other than the Moscone Cup where people are cheering in between shots, In these matches that they're playing, there's so much distraction. | ||
| Oh, distractions every shot. | ||
| I mean, they're trying to shock you, too, because if you're a foreign player coming to Philippines, they most likely will be betting against you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah, definitely. | ||
| I'll find something for you here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hold on a second, Jamie. | |
| This is this guy, Jeff Gai Ling. | ||
| G-A-L-I-N-G. Yeah. | ||
| Go to... | ||
| Here, I'll send this to you. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Hold on a second. | ||
| Share. | ||
| Jamie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Here, I sent you something. | ||
| So, this place, the way they do it, is the best preparation against someone distracting you. | ||
| Because they're constantly distracted, so they learn how to relax and focus. | ||
| Like, here, look at this game. | ||
| Yeah, that's a typical game in the Philippines. | ||
| Everyone's smoking cigarettes. | ||
| People are taking selfies. | ||
| They're all surrounding. | ||
| I mean, they are feet from the table. | ||
| Like, moving around walking while the match is going on with flip-flops on. | ||
| You have to move them to shoot every ball. | ||
| Like, imagine if you're that frozen in that back short rail. | ||
| Yeah, you have to get in the corner and say, excuse me, and these guys are on their phone, and it's so normal. | ||
| Now, look at the powder. | ||
| So there's a stack of powder on each side rail, and the stack of powder is so that they can use it and keep the cue ball moving slick through their hand, but no one anywhere else does this. | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, you can also imagine how humid it is over there. | ||
| Yeah, he's just practicing right now. | ||
| He's getting ready and warming up. | ||
| So scoot ahead a little bit so you can actually see the match. | ||
| This is not the match, for sure. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Now he's actually playing. | ||
| So, that fucking powder, that shit gets on the table itself, and it slows everything down. | ||
| And it also makes the balls cling. | ||
| They stick to each other. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| He's grabbing the cue ball before every game starts, too, and he gets on the cue ball, and then... | ||
| But because they play in these imperfect conditions, because they're accustomed to it... | ||
| They developed these amazing strokes. | ||
| I mean, Efren's stroke is just a thing of beauty. | ||
| And also, I think that's probably one of the reasons why they chose heavier cues, because they were dealing with this very slow cloth, because it was always dirty, humid conditions, so in humidity the balls don't move as well because there's dampness on the table. | ||
| Oh, he's getting a spot from that guy. | ||
| It looks like he's getting a spot. | ||
| Well, you know, Efren's very old now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He can't see very well, but the guy's still in action constantly. | ||
| Every week, I'm sure. | ||
| But look at this fucking crowd! | ||
| Look at all these people. | ||
| So this guy, Jeff Guiling, he has this YouTube channel where he's constantly showing these matches. | ||
| Look at the people on the street. | ||
| That's the street there. | ||
| Yeah, the doors open. | ||
| There's people on the street outside that can't get in that are watching this match because that's what kind of a legend Efren is. | ||
| Yeah, there's a guy sitting in the closet over there. | ||
| Yeah, he's in a fucking closet watching from the closet. | ||
| I mean, in any other pool room, like if you were in Texas and this was going on and you're gambling, Be like, get the fuck out of here! | ||
| Why is everybody near the table? | ||
| They're right there! | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're like where I am, like right here. | |
| They're that close to the table while some of the best players in the world are playing. | ||
| But it's really good practice, like you said, after playing in such a different experience. | ||
| Well, the Filipinos are what you call shark-proof. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And what sharking is, people think of pool shark as being someone who's like really good at pool. | ||
| That's not what we call sharking. | ||
| Sharking, for the people that don't know, is like if you were about to shoot and I moved and distracted you on purpose. | ||
| Like, I'll wait until you're right about to move and I'll drop my cue. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or I'll spill a drink. | ||
| I'll make some noise. | ||
| Like, people do things on purpose to try to distract people. | ||
| Yep, that happens a lot. | ||
| Especially gambling. | ||
| That's some bitch shit. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Isn't it? | ||
| Oh yeah, they try it all the time too. | ||
| But it's some bitch shit. | ||
| When someone does that, that's bitch ass shit. | ||
| Like, what are you doing? | ||
| Just play. | ||
| Well, there's a lot of moves, even when it comes to pro players too. | ||
| Is there, like, what? | ||
| I don't really want to mention names. | ||
| You don't have to mention names. | ||
| So I was playing a guy a long race last year, and, for example, everybody knows, like, if you win... | ||
| So we're playing a race to 100, and every day we're playing a race to 33. So I ended up winning day one, and I should be the one breaking the balls next day. | ||
| So I come in, and we're about to begin, and he's like, are we legging again? | ||
| So I'm like, ugh. | ||
| No, bro. | ||
| It's my break. | ||
| So there was a lot of different moves. | ||
| We agreed to play with one magic rack, and he ended up stealing the magic rack. | ||
| And then we were on a break, and I broke the balls, made four balls on a break, and I was dead out. | ||
| And he's like, are you practicing, or what are you doing? | ||
| I'm like, no, we're playing. | ||
| I just asked you a minute ago, are you ready to start? | ||
| And he's like, I didn't say anything. | ||
| I was thinking, you're correct. | ||
| This is a professional who did this? | ||
| I think you should say his name. | ||
| What does it rhyme with? | ||
| What does his name rhyme with? | ||
| What does it rhyme with? | ||
| Like, Bogan rhymes with Rogan? | ||
| Filler rhymes with Diller? | ||
| Everybody will understand. | ||
| He was a Filipino. | ||
| They're probably gambling a lot of money, right? | ||
| We played for $20,000, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| A big chunk of money, especially for the Philippines. | ||
| Yeah, a big chunk of money and people get a little feisty. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| In gambling, do you think that people take drugs when they gamble? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| What do you think they take? | ||
| Adderall. | ||
| Amphetamines. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because you can see, if you go to Derby City Classic, you will see people play for two, three days straight without any breaks. | ||
| That's a heart attack special right there. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And they play some crazy games like that. | ||
| These aren't the healthiest people in the world, either, that are taking this Adderall and staying up for days. | ||
| Like, they're burning it. | ||
| Oh yeah, it's unbelievable. | ||
| They play some crazy-ass games like 15-ball bang game where you just... | ||
| It's an old man game where you just kind of clip the balls and you're just banging balls around for like 50 minutes. | ||
| So it's a bank game? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 15 balls? | ||
| Yeah, but there is a lot of moving part. | ||
| Like you just play safety, safety, safety. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Until you have a good bank shot. | ||
| Yeah, and then after 50 minutes of playing safeties, you have a bank shot. | ||
| Most likely you're going to miss it. | ||
| And then it goes over and over and over and they do it for like days and days. | ||
| So Adderall's the big one? | ||
| It is a big one. | ||
| I'm sure people play on cocaine. | ||
| I would think cocaine would be a problem. | ||
| I've never done cocaine, but for what I understand, it doesn't last that long. | ||
| No, but they're taking breaks. | ||
| And I've seen, one time I've seen the guy was using cocaine instead of the powder for his cue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What?! | |
| That's an expensive powder right there, yeah. | ||
| He was putting cocaine on his fingers? | ||
| Yeah, and then doing like... | ||
| Oh my god Yeah Yeah Cocaine for baby powder Oh my god, that's insane! | ||
| But he was fucked up, like completely. | ||
| Was he playing well? | ||
| He was playing decent. | ||
| I mean, he's a decent player. | ||
| I don't know his name, but he was just an action junkie. | ||
| Well, like I said about that book, Buddy Hall, I think it's From Rags to Riflemen is the name of the book. | ||
| I have a copy of it, and it's a very old book, and the way it was made, it looks like it was self-published, like the font would be different sizes on different pages. | ||
| It's a rare book. | ||
| You can still find it, like sometimes on AZ Billiard, someone has a copy of it for sale, but it's pretty valuable now. | ||
| But they all played on amphetamines, and they would all play for days and days and days, but it fucked a lot of people's lives up. | ||
| Oh, of course. | ||
| Because they all got addicted to that stuff. | ||
| Of course, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I've played a lot of matches that lasted more than 10 hours. | ||
| And for me, it's really, really tough because I never do anything like that. | ||
| I drink water and maybe I'll drink Pepsi if I feel that I need some energy, some sugar. | ||
| So, yeah, of course, it gives them big advantage in matches like that. | ||
| There was a top player in New York in the 1990s. | ||
| He had a bunch of different names. | ||
| One of them was Water Dog. | ||
| Other times they called him Buffalo Bill because he had this kind of crazy mustache. | ||
| I think I've heard about him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was an elite player, but he was a heroin addict. | ||
| So, he would go to the bathroom, and everybody knew what was going on. | ||
| He would go to the bathroom and lock the door, and he would be in there for like 10-15 minutes, and then he would come out, and he would sit on the stool. | ||
| He'd sit on a billiard stool like this. | ||
| I mean, sit there for like 20 minutes, just like this, like... | ||
| Just gone. | ||
| Just gone in the world of heroin. | ||
| And then he would get up from that and he had shark eyes. | ||
| They were like, the pupils were like fully dilated like a gerbil. | ||
| Like you weren't even talking to a human. | ||
| He didn't even see you. | ||
| And he would get on the table and he couldn't fucking miss. | ||
| And there was a table at Executive Billiards. | ||
| It was tight, tight tables. | ||
| Table one. | ||
| And that's the table where everybody gambled if they played one pocket or straight pool. | ||
| There were ridiculous pockets. | ||
| There were like four inch, but it was a gaff pocket where whoever made the shims, they were all fucked up. | ||
| They didn't line up that good. | ||
| So there was like, they were rough on the corner. | ||
| So if you could like clip the edge a little, you're fucked. | ||
| You're not making the ball. | ||
| And this guy couldn't miss. | ||
| I believe that it was wild because he was just like in this heroin fog With no nerves at all and he was just firing balls in and he was playing this guy named George the Greek and George the Greek was this character that was an old-school Hustler grifter gambler who he used to he used to race horses he would do those carriage races and And they banned him | ||
| from carriage racing because while his horse was winning, he stood up in the carriage and was trying to slow the horse down because people had gambled against him. | ||
| But he had a really good horse because he was the favorite. | ||
| To win because of this horse. | ||
| So he's standing up, pulling back on the horse, trying to slow him down. | ||
| And his story was always that he hired William Kunstler. | ||
| And William Kunstler is a famous attorney. | ||
| Kunstler. | ||
| Kuntzler's gonna get me out of this case. | ||
| These cocksuckers, they don't know what the fuck they're dealing with. | ||
| William Kuntzler's gonna get me back on that track. | ||
| And so George wind up actually opening up his own pool hall in White Plains. | ||
| But for a while, he was like hanging around executive billiards, and then he was a house man for a while too. | ||
| But he was playing this guy, Water Dog. | ||
| And he was playing him for... | ||
| They were playing for a lot of money. | ||
| It was like, I think it was somewhere in the neighborhood of five to ten thousand dollars. | ||
| For like games of straight pool. | ||
| So they play like 150 points for like $10,000. | ||
| And he was so angry because Waterdog would come out of the bathroom like this and then just couldn't miss. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he's like, this cocksucker, he goes with that fucking John and he's shooting up that shit and he comes out here and he can't fucking miss. | |
| And so he was doing this to try to get Waterdog agitated. | ||
| But he was just like this. | ||
| He didn't give a fuck. | ||
| George could be screaming in his face. | ||
| He just couldn't wait to get back to the table and just fire in balls. | ||
| It was beautiful to watch. | ||
| He had this just like, I've never done heroin, but I would imagine it must be wonderful. | ||
| Because the flow that he had around the table, it was something to watch. | ||
| It almost made you want to try heroin. | ||
| But he couldn't play without heroin. | ||
| And I didn't see him for years later. | ||
| And then it was 1994. And I had moved to Los Angeles, and I was playing in the Hard Times tournament. | ||
| Hard Times was the big pool hall in Bellflower, California, where all the pros would go. | ||
| You would go there on a Sunday night or Sunday day to play, and you could play Francisco Bustamante. | ||
| You could play Efren Reyes, Oscar Dominguez. | ||
| You could play Max Eberle. | ||
| All these top, top pros were there. | ||
| And Waterdog was there. | ||
| And I saw him, and I said, hey, man, what are you doing? | ||
| And he goes, yeah, I came here to play pool, but I need someone to get me in the tournament. | ||
| I'll go, I'll put you in the tournament. | ||
| You know, it was like, I don't remember what the entry fee was, 25 bucks or something like that? | ||
| You didn't have any money. | ||
| I said, I'll put you in. | ||
| He goes, yeah, but we gotta go get some shit. | ||
| I go, what do you mean? | ||
| And he goes, he goes, I gotta get my shit. | ||
| I go, where do you have to go get it? | ||
| He's like, South Central. | ||
| I'm like, okay, well, go get it. | ||
| He goes, I need someone to drive me. | ||
| I go, I'm not driving you there. | ||
| Because, like, back then, if you got arrested for buying drugs, they would take your car. | ||
| So I had a 1995 Toyota Supra. | ||
| It was the shit. | ||
| It was a Supra Turbo. | ||
| Did you ever see one of those? | ||
| I can imagine. | ||
| Oh, they're beautiful. | ||
| It had a wing on the back of it. | ||
| It was my pride and joy. | ||
| It's like I'd never had a nice car in my whole life. | ||
| And then all of a sudden I had this, like, I was on television. | ||
| And I had this new car. | ||
| And he was like, we've got to go get some shit. | ||
| I'm like, I am not. | ||
| That's the car. | ||
| That's what it looked like. | ||
| Mine was silver. | ||
| It was beautiful. | ||
| That's exactly what my car looked like. | ||
| Oh, I love that car. | ||
| I still love that car to this day. | ||
| I might go buy one. | ||
| But he was so angry at me that I wouldn't take him to go buy heroin. | ||
| I'm like, dude, I can't. | ||
| They'll take my car. | ||
| They're not going to take it. | ||
| I go, how do you know? | ||
| You don't even have a fucking place to sleep. | ||
| Like, they'll take my fucking car. | ||
| I'm not taking you to buy heroin. | ||
| So I put him in the tournament with no heroin. | ||
| And he couldn't make a ball. | ||
| Well, of course. | ||
| It was so sad. | ||
| He was angry. | ||
| Like, he was just missing and just fucking... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, like you said, there's a lot of players like this, especially playing all these action matches. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's no rules. | ||
| Do you ever notice those players who are top players who play really well on drugs, then they try to enter into a tournament with no drugs? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you see the difference? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| You can see they just play completely different. | ||
| But it makes you want to try drugs, doesn't it? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, you shouldn't. | ||
| Well, you play so good without it, why would you? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I kind of found a way how to get better without them. | ||
| Well, just constant practice and technique. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you meditate at all? | |
| Sometimes I do, and I think it's helpful, but I need to do it more. | ||
| Especially when I lose. | ||
| You know, pool is a mental game. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| You can lose a tournament without making any mistakes, and especially with pool players not making a good living, it can be super mental. | ||
| And I think meditating is really helpful to all the players. | ||
| Yeah, that's what people don't understand. | ||
| You could play really good and get bad rolls. | ||
| Like, you could miss, and every time you miss, you get lucky. | ||
| Yeah, or for example, you can get easier layouts. | ||
| After the break, you can get tough, tough layouts. | ||
| You can knock a nine in on the break. | ||
| Yeah, especially playing 9-ball, there's a lot of luck in the wolf. | ||
| Yep, yeah. | ||
| And when guys start losing like that, and they're down like seven, eight games in a row, you could see they tighten up. | ||
| They tighten up like a real world-class player, and they might miss a straight-in shot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it's so much pressure. | ||
| And especially these guys that are living hand-to-mouth. | ||
| Whatever they make that day is what they have for food. | ||
| And there's a lot of pool players like that. | ||
| A lot of pool players like that. | ||
| Which, on one hand, there's a beauty to that. | ||
| This is the beauty, is that they really just love the game. | ||
| They could just sell cars. | ||
| And a lot of guys have, right? | ||
| A lot of guys have gone on and just quit. | ||
| Dennis Hatch, he wound up becoming a car salesman. | ||
| Dennis Hatch was a fucking killer. | ||
| Dennis Hatch was around back when I was playing. | ||
| There was a place called West End Billiards. | ||
| I think it was in Elizabeth, New Jersey. | ||
| See if that's true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But it was a sketchy neighborhood. | |
| Fucking sketchy. | ||
| Every time you go there, you would go outside every hour or so to check on your car, just to get a look at it and look around. | ||
| It was super sketchy. | ||
| Went there and I'm playing and Steve Mizorak is there and Rodney Morris is there and Johnny Archer is there. | ||
| It was crazy It was that was my first experience as a young man with being able to enter a tournament Like if you're a guy like me who sucks you can enter a tournament and you might play the number one player in the world Yeah, that's the beauty of the game. | ||
| It's a beautiful thing. | ||
| Yeah And I would go there to those tournaments and watch those guys and just, there's no other sport like that where you could, nor the game like that, where you could be a low-ranked player and you would at least be in the presence on the table with one of the greatest players that's ever lived. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, like I was playing right next to Steve Mizorak, and this was when, you know, Steve Mizorak was older, but it's still, my God, that stroke that he had, it was beautiful. | ||
| He just, he had this Effortless stroke. | ||
| I mean, it was just this perfect, classic stroke. | ||
| He was a left-handed guy, and he would get down on that ball. | ||
| And, you know, he was a big, fat guy. | ||
| So, like, he wasn't moving anywhere. | ||
| He didn't need any weights. | ||
| And he would settle down on that ball, and people would just watch him. | ||
| And you would see these guys just go, God. | ||
| I always say that pool is an art form that only the people who practice can appreciate. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, most people don't understand how hard it is, how tough it is. | ||
| They don't care. | ||
| Like, if I'm watching pool and my wife comes in the room and I'm watching pool, she's like, what are you doing? | ||
| I'm like, look at it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Watch this. | |
| Just watch this. | ||
| Just watch this. | ||
| Watch this guy. | ||
| Watch this guy's stroke. | ||
| She's like... | ||
| Well, you have to try to understand how tough it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You also have to have experienced like the feeling of making a really good shot to know how beautiful it is to watch someone just do that over and over and over and over again. | ||
| So it's not good that these guys are living hand-to-mouth, but the beautiful thing is that they're doing it just because they love the game. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| They love that game. | ||
| Otherwise, I don't see any other reason why they do it. | ||
| There's a few disciplines that I really appreciate because the people that are doing it are only doing it for the glory of the pursuit of excellence. | ||
| Wrestling is another one. | ||
| Like, amateur wrestling, there's no money in amateur wrestling. | ||
| There's no money in it. | ||
| There's no professional venue. | ||
| Other than mixed martial arts, when guys leave wrestling, they generally, if they're the elite of the elite, they might go on to coach. | ||
| You know, guys like Mark Schultz or Daniel Cormier, they go on to coach kids or coach colleges. | ||
| But for the most part, they're doing it just for the glory and the love of the sport. | ||
| And it's great. | ||
| It is great, man. | ||
| That's one of the things that I want to try to do when I want to try to host these matches, is try to get people to appreciate what I'm appreciating. | ||
| And it's very hard to do. | ||
| Not just to do, but to get people to appreciate it. | ||
| Well, it's tough to explain what they have to understand. | ||
| Because it's, like you said, you will have to be doing the job. | ||
| You will have to be doing the right commentary for that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's possible, I think. | ||
| I think it's possible. | ||
| I think I can get people to pay attention if I can do commentary and talk a little shit and have fun and make it fun, make it funny. | ||
| And my friend Tommy that I'm gonna do with, he's a very good player too. | ||
| He was a top player when he was younger, but then realized, hey, there's no fucking future in this. | ||
| He was playing this guy, he told me this story, he said he never forgot it. | ||
| He was like 21, 22 years old and he's He's a fucking stone cold killer. | ||
| I mean, he's playing big money gambling matches. | ||
| Like, Tommy easily could have gone on to be a really good pro. | ||
| Easily. | ||
| Like, he was really... | ||
| He could break a run five, six racks in a row. | ||
| Excellent cue ball control. | ||
| Great shot maker. | ||
| But he was playing this guy, Neptune Joe Frady. | ||
| And Joe Frady was another guy who played at West End Billiards back in the day in those pro tournaments. | ||
| And he was one of those guys who always had a cigarette. | ||
| The cigarette was in between his fingers while he's holding the chip. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he'd play with his mouth open. | ||
| So he was like this older guy, he was bald, had his pot belly, and he would get down on the ball, droned out with a cigarette in his hands with his mouth wide open, like this, and just a straight murderer, just a killer on the table. | ||
| And Tommy was playing this guy. | ||
| And he was like, look how good this guy is, and he doesn't have a fucking pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. | ||
| And that's what he said. | ||
| He said, I realize I can't do this. | ||
| I don't want to be that guy when I'm his age. | ||
| I don't want to be this guy who's amazing at pool, but he's fucking just perpetually broke with no options and no future. | ||
| I mean, yeah, that's what most pool players, I'm pretty sure that they think nowadays still, like, do I really have to do this? | ||
| Do I have to really go through this? | ||
| Or maybe I should change my lifestyle and do something else. | ||
| I went through it and I'm 22. I imagine all this 35, 40-year-old players. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| I thought that very much so when I was a young man when I was doing martial arts because I was competing for free. | ||
| I was doing amateur Taekwondo tournaments. | ||
| They were very dangerous and it was free. | ||
| I wasn't getting any money. | ||
| I was traveling so it cost me money to travel these tournaments. | ||
| And you're watching people get knocked out and watching people get concussions and head kicked and shit. | ||
| And then I got an offer for a kickboxing fight. | ||
| It was like a professional fight and it was $500. | ||
| And I remember thinking $500. | ||
| I have to train for like six weeks. | ||
| I have to run. | ||
| I have to hit the bag and spar and do rounds. | ||
| And if I win, I get $500. | ||
| And there was no UFC back then. | ||
| And professional kickboxing was very small. | ||
| It really wasn't successful in America. | ||
| It never took off. | ||
| And I realized, like, I gotta find something else to do. | ||
| I can't do this. | ||
| It was also, I was worried about brain damage too, but it was, that's a little different than pool. | ||
| It is, it is. | ||
| It's like, if you lose, you get kicked in the face. | ||
| Yeah, I can't, I can't. | ||
| That's not for me. | ||
| But it's that thing where I felt like I was really good at something that wasn't even profitable. | ||
| I think where you're at right now with Poole is different because my personal belief is like the stuff that's going on right now with Matchroom Poole and with a couple of these other companies that are putting on these streaming shows and I think you're at the right time where you're a young guy where Poole is because of the internet there's enough people following it where it's starting to emerge And then things like the Moscone Cup, | ||
| where people see it's so exciting, that I think there's some momentum now. | ||
| I think you're catching the wave at the exact right time. | ||
| Yeah, I think so, too. | ||
| That's why I keep playing. | ||
| I think so, too. | ||
| Do you have goals? | ||
| Do you have aspirations? | ||
| What is your goal with the game? | ||
| So, I mean, I used to have goals every year based on my schedule. | ||
| It used to be like to win the World Championships and I used to always have goals for every tournament I went to, of course, but this year it's been different. | ||
| I've been playing everything and everywhere I could have in the United States. | ||
| I flew in the beginning of March and I played literally non-stop pool for six months straight, just being on the road constantly playing in the bars and playing all the smaller events. | ||
| It was miserable, but at least I was playing and I think it was smart coming here because I was still playing pool and that's what kept me in stroke. | ||
| For next year, the goal would be to show my best game on all of these official events because I'm finally back. | ||
| I can't leave the country because I'm applying for a green card, but I believe once everything gets approved, hopefully, Second half of the year I will be able to go and play all these bigger events outside of the United States. | ||
| And that's once you get a green card? | ||
| Yes, so I need to get what's called travel authorization and then I'll be able to leave the country. | ||
| Are you going to apply for U.S. citizenship? | ||
| Once I get a green card, maybe I... Come on, bro. | ||
| Become American. | ||
| I didn't think that far, but there is a chance. | ||
| Don't you want to be American? | ||
| A lot of people want me to play for American Moscone Cup. | ||
| That would be crazy! | ||
| I think it would be good for the sport. | ||
| I mean, it would be a huge thing. | ||
| I think it would be great. | ||
| I think people don't realize how tough it is. | ||
| I mean, to get a citizenship, you need to spend at least five years. | ||
| And then there's a thing called, if you change the country that you play for internationally, I think there is a quarantine that you have to go through. | ||
| I think you can't play two years in any big international events if you want to switch the country. | ||
| And so it's seven years for me to become a player representing the United States. | ||
| But by then you'll be in your prime. | ||
| Hopefully. | ||
| 29 years old? | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| You'll be in your prime. | ||
| Because you think about the elite players. | ||
| The guys that are the best, a lot of it's between 26 and 33, 34, 35. Then when they get older, it starts to slide. | ||
| It's very rare. | ||
| Dennis Okolo is still one of the very best players in the world, and he's in his 40s, right? | ||
| Oh, yeah, Dennis. | ||
| I mean, Dennis is not a great example. | ||
| He's sick. | ||
| It's unbelievable what he does for his age. | ||
| He's sick? | ||
| Like physically sick? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, sick, like unbelievable. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| And then Bustamante, he's 50. He's still one of the best players in the world. | ||
| Yeah, I just watched his match on the stream the other day. | ||
| He was playing Darren Appleton, I believe, in the Philippines, and it was unbelievable to see. | ||
| Yeah, he's still one of the very best players in the world. | ||
| And I have a framed photo of him outside here from the bicycle club. | ||
| Which was a casino in Los Angeles, and I think the tournament, I went to see the tournament, it was like 1995, back when he had a mullet. | ||
| He had kind of like spiky hair and a mullet, and he had this break that was like one of the craziest breaks that anybody had ever seen. | ||
| Like he had the best break in the world at one point in time, where he would have his finger on the rail, he'd break off the rail on the side rail, and the cue would slide out of his hand. | ||
| And then back through. | ||
| Oh yeah, there's two Russian players that do the same thing. | ||
| Have you ever heard of Evgeny Staliev? | ||
| No. | ||
| He used to be around that IPT time, so I'm pretty sure you saw him play. | ||
| He does the same thing. | ||
| He's a very unique player. | ||
| He is like the Russian Pyramid star. | ||
| Everybody who's involved in Pyramid world in Russia, they know who he is. | ||
| He won everything in his time. | ||
| And he was playing pool and went to IPT and finished fourth, I believe. | ||
| So he was a good player himself as well. | ||
| And when he was breaking, he used to lift his arm, kind of like Roberto Gomez, and whack him like crazy, crazy speed. | ||
| And every time he was breaking from the rail, he was doing the same thing. | ||
| The cue would always come out of the bridge, and somehow he would hit a certain spot on the cue ball. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know how Bustamante did it. | ||
| I would watch, like, people, they would play it, they would focus on it in the replays. | ||
| They would give you, like, a close-up of his fingers to show you, like, look how crazy this is. | ||
| Have you ever noticed that Bustamante aims? | ||
| Yeah, to the left. | ||
| To the left and then hits... | ||
| Wherever he wants to hit. | ||
| So his practice strokes, he's shooting left, like to the left side of the ball, and always low. | ||
| But then he might follow the ball, he might hit it with right English. | ||
| So what they say back when nobody knew the game that well, they're saying that he was hiding the way he was playing, and that's how he was hiding the tip position he was putting on there. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| I wonder if those guys got upset when people started using the measles ball. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So for people who don't know, they don't use that anymore in most tournaments, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the measles ball was a ball that they developed for television play where it had little red dots all over the ball. | ||
| So if you hit the ball with left-hand English or right-hand English, it was very obvious to anyone anywhere near because you could see the dots spinning to the left. | ||
| Whereas, sometimes guys would make a shot. | ||
| It was an incredible shot. | ||
| Like, what fucking English did he use? | ||
| How did he do that? | ||
| Like, what kind of spin did he put on that ball? | ||
| Because you really couldn't tell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Because it was just a white ball. | ||
| And unless you were, like, right on top where you could see the tip positioning when he struck the ball, you really didn't know. | ||
| Yeah, it's insane the way he plays. | ||
| It's unique. | ||
| Well, there's so many Filipinos came over here and robbed everybody. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| And the best version of that is Efren. | ||
| When Efren first came over here, he had a fake name. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Efren, when he first came over here... | ||
| God damn it, what was his name? | ||
| It was like a Spanish name. | ||
| See if you can find it. | ||
| So he played his very first tournament under a fake name because he is... | ||
| God, I can't believe I can't remember it. | ||
| Generally, I can remember it. | ||
| But he played under a fake name because even though it was like the 1980s, he assumed that someone had been to the Philippines and knew that this guy was the king over there. | ||
| Can you find it? | ||
| Efren's... | ||
| just Google, Google, Efren played under a fake name. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, Cesar Morales. | |
| Cesar Morales. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| So that was his name. | ||
| So he came over here under Cesar Morales and robbed everybody. | ||
| And then when he came back, he was Efren Reyes. | ||
| And everybody was like, oh, we got fucked. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Cesar Morales stuns the field at Reds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And this was back when he was playing with a $5 pool cue. | ||
| He had a pool cue. | ||
| That looks like a Dennis Hercola on the left. | ||
| It does look like him, but I don't think it is. | ||
| Because Dennis is quite a bit older. | ||
| Yeah, younger. | ||
| Younger rather than that guy. | ||
| But that was in Houston. | ||
| And what year is that? | ||
| 85. 1985. Yeah, so he stuns the field. | ||
| They came over here and fucked everybody up. | ||
| They had no idea that he would go on to be the greatest of all time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wade Crane. | |
| Wade Crane was a bad motherfucker. | ||
| Dave Matlock. | ||
| Look at all these guys. | ||
| Yeah, Mike Gugliassi. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Bobby Hunter. | ||
| Danny DiLiberto. | ||
| All those names. | ||
| Yeah, Wade Crane also had a fake name. | ||
| He called himself Billy Johnson. | ||
| Yeah, Billy Johnson was Wade Crane's road name. | ||
| Well, when the internet wasn't around, there was a big thing, I think. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Well, that was his... | ||
| He would go around playing as Billy Johnson because everybody had heard of Wade Crane. | ||
| And so he would just show up places and, you know, people had no idea, and then he would rob them. | ||
| That's perfect, yeah. | ||
| Well, there was a great book called Playing Off the Rail. | ||
| Have you ever heard of that book? | ||
| Uh-uh. | ||
| Playing Off the Rail was a book by this guy David McCumber, who at one point in time was Hunter S. Thompson's editor when he was writing for a newspaper. | ||
| And they took this guy, Tony Anagoni, who was a really good pro. | ||
| And they went on the road with like $35,000 so like like like tape the money to his body and shit in some places and They they did it for a book and the book is still available. | ||
| You can still find the book somewhere It's it's well worth it if you're a pool player if you're into pool to get this book because it's really David McCumber is a really good writer. | ||
| It's really well written and Tony Anagoni became a friend of mine and And I actually did commentary with him once on a match back in L.A., back in the day. | ||
| And I became friends with him and played with him a bunch of times. | ||
| And tragically, I think about a year and a half or so ago, he took his own life. | ||
| He jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. | ||
| Yeah, very sad. | ||
| But in that book, they went to Chelsea Billiards. | ||
| They went to all these different places where they hustled. | ||
| And they just set up matches and set up games and played people. | ||
| But it just gives you this kind of taste, especially because McCumber is such a good writer. | ||
| It gives you this feeling, this really interesting depiction of what that life is like. | ||
| These guys that do things like that, like Wade Crane did when he called himself Billy Johnson. | ||
| That is a whole subset of Americana where these guys would travel around, stay in shitty hotels, and gamble. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's it's kind of the same picture nowadays, too. | ||
| Yeah, there's still a lot of that. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's It's fucking cool. | ||
| You know, it's a it's a really cool part of like this Subculture that people don't know about and I've always admired people who did it I always I always thought that was a cool way to live your life. | ||
| It's a crazy reckless But the people that did it, they were such fucking characters. | ||
| They were such interesting people. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, all of them. | ||
| It's a crazy lifestyle. | ||
| I don't know if I would recommend it to my kids, but... | ||
| No. | ||
| But it's... | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| Maybe you would, if pool becomes something really big, you know, if pool does grow to the point where there's million-dollar purses... | ||
| Absolutely, but not the gambling side. | ||
| I went through a lot of that, and it's shady. | ||
| Did you ever get in a situation where people pulled out guns or people were robbing people? | ||
| No, but my friend did in the Philippines. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| Well, he beat the guy out of a small amount of money, and the guy didn't want to pay him. | ||
| And he wasn't even, like, pushing him to pay. | ||
| He was, like, 100 bucks. | ||
| But he was the only foreigner in the building, and he had a guy with him that took care of him and kind of made games for him. | ||
| And that guy started saying something in Tagalog in their own language. | ||
| And the guy pulled his gun and, like, started shooting in the air, like, trying to say that I'm not playing here. | ||
| He was like an authority or something. | ||
| For a hundred bucks? | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Imagine what he'd do for 51,000. | ||
| Gambling junkies. | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing. | ||
| Gambling junkies. | ||
| It's not about the money for him. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And there's so many of those guys that are connected to underworld characters. | ||
| There's all these, you know, wild gamblers that are, they're almost all at least one step removed from criminals. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| If they're not criminals themselves, they might have a criminal who's a backer. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of drug money involved, I think, in gambling. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| There was always guys that were backing people back in my day when I was hanging around New York where there were these guys that were drug addicts or drug dealers. | ||
| They were selling coke. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they had that money and that was how they burned the money. | ||
| They would come in and gamble it. | ||
| Yeah, do the same thing tomorrow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I remember one time we went to Harlem to play this guy because these pimps, they would have a ton of money and they would play big money one pocket. | ||
| And so we went down to Harlem, and here I am, this dorky, fresh... | ||
| I was your age. | ||
| I was like... | ||
| I was hanging around in Harlem in this, like, fucking heavy-duty, like, hardcore pool room where these pimps would go and gamble big money. | ||
| And they'd come in with flashy clothes on, and it was just such a scene, man. | ||
| It was such a scene. | ||
| It was so cool. | ||
| It was just so, just to sit there, I mean, I wasn't playing those guys. | ||
| I sucked. | ||
| But I was with my friend Johnny and this guy, Mount Vernon Tommy, who was like a real top player from the area. | ||
| And they were all, and this guy Juan, who was also this killer. | ||
| And they would, we would all go down together. | ||
| We'd take this drive down together to Harlem. | ||
| And at the time, The garbage workers were on strike. | ||
| So all the garbage was stacked outside. | ||
| So when they would take garbage out to the curb, nobody would throw the garbage out. | ||
| So there was six foot high piles of garbage that lined the whole street. | ||
| Not bullshitting. | ||
| So you'd walk down the sidewalk and rats would be everywhere. | ||
| I mean everywhere. | ||
| You'd see the garbage bags moving. | ||
| They would scramble in front of your feet. | ||
| I'm like, oh my god. | ||
| Like, I grew up in the suburbs of Newton, Massachusetts, right? | ||
| That's where I went to high school. | ||
| In this, like, very nice, you know, upper-middle-class neighborhood. | ||
| I was this fresh-faced little cute kid, and I'm wandering around with these degenerate gamblers in a pool hall in Harlem filled with pimps. | ||
| But I got out of there and I wouldn't trade those experiences for the world because it was so interesting to see that the subculture of these gamblers and pool players and all they cared about was like, who's the killer? | ||
| Like, who's the guy? | ||
| You know? | ||
| And they all had these crazy names and everybody had these cool nicknames. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nicknames, yeah. | |
| Oh my god. | ||
| It was such an amazing time. | ||
| But it's such... | ||
| That's what scares me about it. | ||
| Right now it's got, like we said, this resurgence. | ||
| But there was a time where I thought this could go away. | ||
| Pool halls were closing. | ||
| People weren't going to them anymore. | ||
| In L.A., they all went away. | ||
| And this is one of the reasons why it was really sad to me. | ||
| Because in L.A., the big pool hall in town was Hollywood Billiards. | ||
| And when I first moved to LA, I played the original Hollywood Billiards, but then there was an earthquake. | ||
| And Hollywood Billiards, the building got fucked up, so then they had to move it. | ||
| And then they moved it to this place that was, like, much nicer. | ||
| And then it became, instead of, like, this place where, like, it was a lot of players, then it became a place where people would take their dates, and they served good food, and they played nice music, and it kind of changed. | ||
| And then it went under. | ||
| And then there was no pool halls in L.A. None. | ||
| L.A. As big as L.A. is. | ||
| No pool halls. | ||
| You had the House of Billiards in Sherman Oaks, the House of Billiards in Santa Monica, which I don't even know if it's still there anymore. | ||
| And then you had Hard Times, which is quite a bit away. | ||
| There was like Bellflower, which is like 50 minutes drive. | ||
| Why do you think that happened? | ||
| When was it, like 2010? | ||
| It was just, yeah, it was somewhere around then that Hollywood Billiards went under. | ||
| Because that video of me doing Earl Strickland, that was at Hollywood Billiards. | ||
| That was at Hollywood Billiards, the new, nicer place, before it went under. | ||
| So you'd have like a few players that would go there, but... | ||
| The vast majority of the room was filled with lemons. | ||
| They were all just bail, you know, ball bangers and people on dates and, you know, girls with, you know, hot asses bending over pool tables trying to impress their dates, which is fine. | ||
| But, I mean, you need that to keep a pool room open. | ||
| But watching that place go under, I was like, God damn it, pool's dying. | ||
| Like, this is what it felt to me. | ||
| It was dying at some point, 100%. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, I got lucky when I was starting to play pool, pool started to kind of making a comeback. | ||
| And in Europe, I mean, I never knew how it is in the U.S. until, like, I came here probably two, three years ago. | ||
| Because all I knew is Derby City Classic, that's the only tournament I went to, and it's completely opposite to what the American pool scene is. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Derby's wild. | ||
| Oh, it's crazy. | ||
| If you've never experienced it, it's even tough to describe it. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| First floor is the tournament, and then you go upstairs, it's a completely different life. | ||
| I mean, you have people just live there in that action room for eight days, just playing nonstop, 24 hours. | ||
| You have the players that come in at like 3 or 4 o'clock because they were sleeping before just to come and play at 3 or 4 o'clock with people that have been playing for days and just trying to take advantage of them not sleeping. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, it's definitely different. | ||
| What kind of a neighborhood did you grow up in? | ||
| I grew up in Moscow, Russia, so it's like a megapolis, big city, kind of like New York style. | ||
| And so you were probably never around those kind of people? | ||
| I was never around any gambling until I came on the road with Alan and Jason. | ||
| Really? | ||
| So in Europe you never saw gambling? | ||
| They don't gamble in Europe. | ||
| All they do, they can bet a little Vader on like a sparring set. | ||
| They can play for like 50 euros just to make it more interesting and put a little pressure. | ||
| So small wagers. | ||
| Yeah, just to play and make it more interesting. | ||
| But gambling is really small. | ||
| It's getting a little bit bigger. | ||
| I saw guys play for like 20 grand last week in Romania on the stream, and then Switzerland, they gamble there. | ||
| But it's nothing compared to the U.S. Why do you think that is? | ||
| Because they treat the game completely different. | ||
| Here, people in general, even the professional players, they would rather play than practice. | ||
| In Europe, I feel it's different. | ||
| People would rather practice and get better and treat it more professionally, I would say, than here. | ||
| There's some really good players from Europe that do a lot of instructionals, like Niels Fein. | ||
| Nils was actually my favorite player. | ||
| He's a great player. | ||
| Growing up, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I sent one of his videos to my friend Sean. | ||
| We're talking about the pause, where he's practicing strokes, and he's just got these rock-solid fundamentals. | ||
| But he was also a guy that didn't gamble either, right? | ||
| I believe he gambled. | ||
| I mean, I've heard the stories. | ||
| I don't know for sure, but when he came to the U.S., I believe he gambled. | ||
| One of the big ones was Ralph Suquet. | ||
| He would never gamble. | ||
| Ralph, I believe that. | ||
| Ralph would never gamble. | ||
| Same with Thorsten. | ||
| I don't think they would gamble. | ||
| But everybody was like, you know, they were upset. | ||
| Because here is this guy who's a world beater, one of the best players in the world, and all he would do is play tournaments. | ||
| So there was a thing, there was like a label on those guys. | ||
| Like, ah, he's a tournament player. | ||
| Well, it's the same thing today. | ||
| It's the same thing today. | ||
| I mean, I'm joking myself like I'm an action player. | ||
| I'm not a tournament player. | ||
| And, you know, they released the band and I'm a tournament player again. | ||
| I'm not an action player. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| What do you prefer? | ||
| I prefer tournament because that's the lifestyle that I grew up and I like it. | ||
| I know what I have to work for. | ||
| I can schedule my practice sessions. | ||
| Also, it's not dangerous. | ||
| It's not dangerous. | ||
| I mean, nowadays, you can make less money playing tournaments, but that will change. | ||
| But the thing is, some of these top players, they gamble, but the way they do it, they do it in a live stream, and they make it like a one-on-one tournament. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So a lot of matches I play, it's pay-per-view. | ||
| So I'm getting an appearance fee as well. | ||
| But still, it's completely different to tournaments. | ||
| I mean, I'd much rather play tournaments than gambling matches. | ||
| Would you rather play a tournament that's a short match, though? | ||
| Like a race to seven? | ||
| Versus a game like you were playing with that Filipino gentleman where you could play a race to 100 for three days. | ||
| No, of course the longer race would be better for me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Then the better player will win in the end. | ||
| Shorter races is okay because you can understand. | ||
| To speed things up and for the viewer it's boring to watch a longer race. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| But of course I prefer a longer race. | ||
| In the Moscone Cup, when they do one-on-ones, isn't it like a race to five? | ||
| A race to five alternate break, yeah. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| But they have 11 of them at least. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a lot of races. | ||
| The thing is, like, race to five is so quick. | ||
| It is, but when you have a lot of them, it will even things up. | ||
| In the end, the better player will still win. | ||
| And is it the Predator Tour that does the shootouts? | ||
| Yes, they have that strange format that they started with two years ago. | ||
| It's two races to four, and if you tie one to one after two sets, you do the shootouts. | ||
| So for people that don't understand what that is, they put the 10 ball on the spot, and you're behind the headstring, and you just see who makes the most amount of 10 balls in the row. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's exciting for a viewer. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's a lot of pressure there. | ||
| It's a lot of pressure. | ||
| Do you like that, though? | ||
| I like the pressure, but I hate losing it. | ||
| Because every time I lose, I want to understand why I lost. | ||
| And, you know, there's a good example. | ||
| So I played Ralph Suquet in Puerto Rico last month in that Predator tournament. | ||
| The first set, I won 4-0. | ||
| Played perfect. | ||
| And then I started off the second set. | ||
| I went up 3-0. | ||
| Playing good, you know, broke dry, and then maybe kicked one time, and I lost the set. | ||
| I lost 4-3. | ||
| And it's such a mental format that I was one wreck away from the win. | ||
| The match is never over with that format. | ||
| You know, it's... | ||
| It's tough to describe, and I ended up losing in the shootout. | ||
| I missed one ball in the whole match. | ||
| When you did the shootout, how many ten balls did you guys make? | ||
| I made three, and he made four. | ||
| So it's best of four shots, and he made four of them. | ||
| What happens if you both make four? | ||
| Then you move the cue ball back one diamond, and it's a sudden death. | ||
| So whoever makes the mistake first loses. | ||
| So it's one diamond behind the headstring. | ||
| Yeah, so you're playing from the first diamond of the long rail. | ||
| That's a lot of pressure for all your cheese. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Win or lose. | ||
| They do that in the finals as well? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I won three tournaments already that Predator series once, and one of them I played Carlo Beato in the finals, and shootout was decider there. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, for 25 grand, you have to shoot one single ball. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's not a bad idea. | ||
| No, it's not, but it's absolutely brutal to lose that way. | ||
| I can understand. | ||
| I mean, I don't think it's the best expression of elite pool playing. | ||
| I think the best expression of elite pool playing is like a race, a long race. | ||
| But I believe that formats like this should survive, and they should be there for the viewing side of you. | ||
| I think it's a good format as an alternative. | ||
| Just like I think the Moscone Cup is good as an alternative. | ||
| It's an interesting way to express pool. | ||
| But I think as a person who just loves the game, I want to see like a race to 15, something like that, where it's like a real set. | ||
| Yeah, the real battle. | ||
| I agree, I agree. | ||
| But in the end of the day, they're always trying to grow the game, and I think the viewership will help, and tournaments like this will expand. | ||
| No, I think so, too. | ||
| I mean, look, it's good that someone's doing anything. | ||
| It's good that Predator's doing that, and Matchroom's doing that, and all these independent streaming companies are doing that, like Omega Billiards. | ||
| They have streams. | ||
| What's next for you? | ||
| My tournament schedule is already packed for January, February. | ||
| It starts with Turning Stone Classic in New Jersey. | ||
| Oh, that's a big tournament. | ||
| Yeah, official one, a ranking event, and then the tournament before Derby City Classic in Louisville, and then Derby City Classic, which is huge. | ||
| Then February, I have some smaller tournaments in Louisiana, some bar table tournaments, and... | ||
| Do you like playing on bar table tournaments? | ||
| No, I hate it. | ||
| I saw you posted something on your Instagram about playing in little kids' tables. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I hate it, but there's a lot of money out there. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| A lot of them. | ||
| So, you know what Calcutta is? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The Calcutta's on the bar table. | ||
| Let's explain the Calcutta. | ||
| The way the Calcutta works is, like, say if there's a bunch of people that are entering into a tournament, like 32 players, You can gamble by buying a player in the Calcutta. | ||
| Like if you were in a tournament and I could buy you. | ||
| And a lot of times it's an auction. | ||
| It's like someone says, I have $100 on Fedor. | ||
| And I'm like, I got $150. | ||
| And then someone will go, I'll give $200. | ||
| And then all that money gets piled up. | ||
| And if you own a player in the Calcutta, if you purchased a player in the Calcutta, when that person wins, you can get a pile of money. | ||
| And a lot of times they cut it with the player. | ||
| Like, they'll give the player a piece of the action so that they don't feel like, you know, they're getting fucked over. | ||
| Because sometimes the Calcutta is bigger than the actual prize. | ||
| Always is. | ||
| Always is. | ||
| I mean, yeah, always. | ||
| Especially on a bar table. | ||
| Bar table can be huge sometimes. | ||
| Like, sometimes it will go over 150, 200 grand. | ||
| And what is the culture of the bar table tournaments and bar table pool rooms? | ||
| How much does that differ from the big table rooms? | ||
| Usually it's just the bars. | ||
| They're in bars. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's like louder. | ||
| Super loud. | ||
| Music. | ||
| Smoking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All that. | ||
| Characters. | ||
| I've had bad experience. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I went to East Moline, Illinois this year. | ||
| We were playing on valley bar tables. | ||
| That's like... | ||
| Coin operated. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Bar tables was like five and a half inch pockets. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| With dead rails and smaller balls. | ||
| I mean, it was like absolutely crazy. | ||
| And yeah, that was one of the places where I didn't really want to go out on the street. | ||
| I just wanted to be in the corner of the pool hall and just waiting for my match. | ||
| What was the bad experience about it? | ||
| I was just feeling that something could happen to me. | ||
| I don't know, it's tough to explain, but just the vibe of the pool room and the vibe of the city, I didn't like it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it's in the middle of nowhere. | ||
| It was tough to get there. | ||
| I had to take a taxi from St. Louis, a four-hour drive, and it wasn't worth it. | ||
| I won't ever go back there. | ||
| It's interesting that some guys become known for being bar table killers. | ||
| Like Dave Matlock was always known as being a bar table killer. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's a different game. | ||
| It's a different game. | ||
| It's like a ten-footer, seven-footer, nine-foot ball. | ||
| It's different. | ||
| Seven-footers are a good equalizer because an amateur can play good on a bar table and he would absolutely suck on a nine-footer. | ||
| And, you know, you will have more players signing up for bar table tournaments because they will have a chance to beat me on paper. | ||
| So I think that's why they're bigger in the US. And that's part of the problem why pool is not there comparing to Europe. | ||
| We don't play on the seven-footers at all. | ||
| And also, it's treated with more respect over there. | ||
| Yes, that too. | ||
| Both in preparation, in the way people train and practice. | ||
| It seems like European players, when you watch them, they have a much more uniform approach than American players. | ||
| Like a lot of American players, their styles vary so differently. | ||
| The way they stroke the ball, the way they move around. | ||
| Yeah, but it's changing slightly. | ||
| Especially after Johan Reising was a captain for Team USA and worked with them for a couple of years, I think he kind of gave them an understanding of how it could be done. | ||
| And players like Tyler Steyer and Shane Wolford, you know, young guns. | ||
| Tyler plays very much like a European player. | ||
| He looks like he could be playing for... | ||
| Yeah, he's very methodical. | ||
| He works hard, he practices, and I think he's a very good ambassador for all the players that you can look up to. | ||
| So your goal, you must want to be number one in the world, right? | ||
| I want to be, but it's not my goal. | ||
| What is your goal? | ||
| My goal is just to be, to just get better. | ||
| I don't have a certain goal that I want to reach, like being number one or win. | ||
| I won a world championship already. | ||
| I want to win it again, but is it my primary goal? | ||
| No. | ||
| Especially not knowing my schedule right now, I just want to play as good as I could and practice and get better every day. | ||
| Well, I think with that goal, that could lead you to be the best in the world. | ||
| I mean, you're right there. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Maybe I am already. | ||
| You might be. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| You're certainly in the conversation. | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| And you're only 22, which is pretty wild. | ||
| And you're the first pool player I've ever had on this podcast. | ||
| So congratulations. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| For that. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| And all right, man, let's wrap this up. | ||
| Thank you for doing this. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| It was great to meet you. | ||
| It was really fun to play with you. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| And I wish you all the best of luck, and hopefully you'll keep on trucking. | ||
| Well, thank you, Joe. | ||
| It was a pleasure. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Bye, everybody. |
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