3 ms·

Wow, that was an obscure and surprisingly entertaining analogy. How'd you learn of that?

• mechanical_fish 15y ago
  The best part of a good grad school is that, when it comes time to procrastinate, you'll have a card to a very good library. Billiards is actually easy to learn about: Pick up any book by Robert Byrne (the canonical one is Byrne's Standard Book of Pool and Billiards; it can be found all over the place) and he'll be telling you all about it by the second half of the book; he can't help himself. Hoppe got name-dropped in there somewhere. I should emphasize that my judgement of Hoppe's stroke quality is entirely my own (though it does jibe with the anonymous editors of Wikipedia) and is based on one or two videos like this one on YouTube. It is entirely possible that Hoppe was exaggerating his sloppy-looking stroke for the cameras; this was an exhibition after all. (I can't actually play billiards, by the way, and I'm a bad pool player. You know how there are things which are more fun to read about than actually do? Billiards turns out to be like that for me: I'm not driven to practice. So many hobbies, so little time...)