About 852 years ago, or maybe Sunday morning - whichever came first - I walked into the tournament room to see my name next to Shannon Daulton's on the pairings list. If you don't know who Shannon Daulton is, in particular who he is in the Bank Pool community, you probably shouldn't be reading a pool 'blog now should you?

Shannon beat me 3-1, and with my one game I once again beat the spread. I played pretty well and was quite happy with myself. The game I won was via a 5-and-out after his break came up dry. I'm quite happy that I was able to do that in front of the hundred or so people that comprised Shannon's fan club and were sweating the match.

The first game Shannon won by making a tough shot off of a pretty decent safety. The second game I missed this shot from my workout not once but TWICE:

I really have no clue how I missed this shot twice. With the score 4-4 in that game I also missed a fairly easy crossing bank that I really should have made.

The third game was the one where I banked five off his break. The last game consisted of me playing safety after safety, while Shannon made a ball each time, and featured what may have been the worst safety in the history of pool that left Shannon an easy cross-side for the win.

To read that simple description may make it sound like I sucked, but I really didn't. My safeties were mostly good and some of my shots were very impressive. My runout was executed well enough that I heard mumblings from the crowd. Then throughout the rest of the day I had complete strangers come up to me and tell me how well I'd shot.

Anyway, so that's that. I'm out of the tournament and free to sweat some matches without needing to go to bed early. I stayed until the completion of Sunday's banks action then came home very tired and with very sore feet.

Oh yeah before I forget - the answer to yesterday's pop quiz.

In this situation you're basically fucked unless you can either (a) run out, or (b) get the cueball frozen to the headrail and hope he misses.

What I did, since I had little faith in my ability to play an effective safety against the straight-back champion of the universe, was run out.

It's a little hard to tell from the image, but the three-ball is wired cross-corner, the two-ball will go straight-back but there's probably a kiss there, and one-ball is just a tough shot.

I ended up firing the three-ball in, pretty much stopping the cueball dead, leaving it a couple of inches off the rail. I followed up with two stop-shots on the one and then the two. The first shot was the one that took cojones, and I wouldn't have shot it against anyone but Truman.

I'd love to type some more but I can barely see the screen I'm so tired.