“I don’t think you’re gonna get DeYonker on the same shot more than one or two tournaments in a row before he’ll figure it out,” Chin says. He points to one of the sport’s newest practitioners, Will DeYonker, as an example of a trick-shot artist who has the uncanny ability to look at a new shot and master it quickly. A skill shot, on the other hand, requires a skilled shooter with a tremendous amount of technique and experience.Ĭhin agrees with this distinction, but he becomes most animated when talking about “knowledge-based” shots-those that nobody has seen before. The former involves arranging the balls in an ideal position so that they are sure to react properly when struck-even by a novice. Dave, as Alciatore calls himself, breaks those puzzles down into two basic categories: setup shots and skill shots. “It seemed like a magic trick, only there was nothing hidden-it was all there! It became a puzzle to me, and solving the puzzle was the challenge.” “When I get to the pool table, the 3-D map comes to life, and I actually know what direction the cue ball will go.”ĭr. “I first saw trick shots on ESPN in 2000,” he says. (Typical purses range from $2,000 to $30,000.) He also gives exhibitions and consults. Instead, he’s been seduced by the analytical challenges of trick shots, and follows his passion from tournament to tournament, competing with the best in the field for small money when compared to the dollars in mainstream sports like golf or tennis. Like many of today’s trick-shot artists, he has little interest in traditional pool. Chin, like Alciatore, has a doctorate, though Chin’s is in materials, not mechanical, engineering. Tim “The Dragon” Chin, a top competitor in the world of trick shots, was the special-arts champion at the 2014 World Pool-Billiard Association (WPA) Artistic Pool Championship. You can understand all the physics in the world and that’s still not going to help you.” If you don’t have the technique and the experience, it’s almost impossible. “Someone that hasn’t practiced these a lot can’t do them. “Think about that massé shot, or the jump shot,” Alciatore says, referring to Kohler’s sexy curve and Segal’s quadruple jump. They can instantly visualize complex shots that typical players would never dream of attempting-and then practice, practice, practice to perfect them. This analytical understanding, he says, comes intuitively to most trick-shot masters. You’ll hear how a cue ball “throws” the ball it strikes, how it transfers spin, how equilibrium controls a jump ball, and how different forces are at play during a massé (curve) shot. Speak with him about pool for five minutes and you’ll find yourself neck-deep in mathematical formulas. Students at Harvard are studying “Dynamics of Rational Billiards.” At Williams, “Geometry, Surfaces, and Billiards.” At Stanford, “Lagrangian Relations and Linear Point Billiards.”ĭavid Alciatore, a professor of mechanical engineering at Colorado State University, has written extensively on the sport-zeroing in on the science of trick shots-and even incorporates pocket billiards into his lectures on energy, friction, and rotation. They’re more like case studies out of a geometry class or physics lab. It even has its own tournament on ESPN: Tune into Trick Shot Magic and you’ll see the likes of Segal, a graduate of Carnegie Mellon, demonstrating four jump shots at the same time, or Florian “Venom” Kohler, licensed optometrist, performing a “sexy” trick shot that sends the cue ball over the knees of a model as she poses seductively on the table.Īnyone who thinks these feats are merely tests of shooting skills are missing the point. But nowadays, the sport has become an art form unto itself-separate and apart from traditional pocket billiards. Players would hang out in basements and pool halls, challenging each other with custom-made maneuvers. Welcome to trick-shot pool.įor years, trick shots were a novelty. The cue ball jumps in the air and lands on the felt, spinning and rolling backward, tapping each of 10 lined-up balls in succession before knocking the 8-ball into the corner pocket. In a billiards parlor in Hoboken, New Jersey, Andy “Magic Man” Segal leans over the back table, angles his stick in the air, and stabs downward.
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