healthy respect for logic

To quote or paraphrase (I'm not sure which) Jeremy from Sports Night: I have a pretty healthy respect for logic. That is why I was so frustrated with my 8-ball team last night.

Before last night there were six players on my team. Five play every night. One guy had to work last night, and I found out on the way to Dooly's that another one had to quit the league. So I was short a player. Happily, I was able to arrange for a spare. Not having a spare is bad, because you have to play short and it's very difficult to pick up any points that way.

I don't think I can adequately explain my frustration without getting into some detail about the way we keep score. There are five rounds of 10 games (five guys play five other guys two games each). You get 10 points for a win and one point per ball sunk for a loss. The team that scores the most points in a round wins that round and counts two points toward the night. Five rounds times two points is 10, plus two points are given to the team with the best score overall. So there are 12 points available every night.

The league is handicapped. Each player has a handicap which is their average rounded to the nearest half. You sum the handicaps and spot the team with the lower total.

My team's handicaps last night: 9.0, 8.0, 7.5, 7.0, 6.5 (the spare).
My opponents' handicaps last night: 8.0, 7.5, 7.0, 7.0, 6.5.

The handicaps do not linearly correspond to skill level – a 9 is an elite player, think top ten in a city of 100,000, and there are only a couple of them in the league. An 8 is very good, and a 7 is about average. The other team had a total of 36, we had a total of 38. So we would normally have spotted them four points a round ([38 - 36] x two games).

Now, when you play a spare, you have to count his handicap as 3 higher than it is – the idea being to deter teams from playing a spare in place of a worse player if they don't really have to. So the 6.5 was treated as a 9.5, our total handicap was 41 and our spot was 10 points a round instead of four.

My team lost it. Actually, to be fair, my two best players lost it, and the other guy didn't really care that much. The match was a mismatch; we should have walked all over them. Six more points a round should not have made any difference, but it made them tank. We lost 10-2.

Here's where the healthy respect for logic comes in. We were straight up outplayed. We lost the overall points even before the spot was applied. There was only one round where the other team failed to cover the spot – where we would have won except for those extra six points. But all these two guys could talk about was how a 10-point spot was too big a hole to dig out of.

My 9.0 shot 82 (an 8.2 over 10 games) and didn't come close to running out a table all night (which is what 9's do – this one usually runs two tables a night).

My 8.0 shot 56.

But all they could blame was the 10 points. Because the alternative was to blame themselves.

Now that I think about it, this is fairly common human behaviour, especially at a pool table. It's difficult to take responsibility for a poor performance – excuses come very easily. It's something I'm trying to combat in my own game.

Anyway, this story doesn't really have much of a denouement (thank you Mr. McLenahan for grade eleven English :D) but it feels good to get it out.

Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!! :)