Are you sitting down? Good, because - get this - yesterday I actually left my basement and played pool in public.

What I did was, I went over to this Louisville Billiards Club place, and I practiced for about three hours.

My intention, going in, was to get on a 4x8 table. Past experience has shown me that it's pretty damn hard to miss a bank on a 4x8, once I get used to the optical illusion that causes everything to come up short. So I was just going to have some fun making banks for a while.

Once I got there though, I changed my mind. I had a sudden fear of getting lazy, and losing whatever physical progress I've made over the past few weeks.

So I grabbed the first 4.5x9 table instead.

Nobody approaches me to play. I suppose that was fine. They probably would have wanted to gamble, and I'm not into that anymore. I just used my time to work on noticing table differences and adjusting to them.

The table yesterday was weird. It was absolutely filthy, for one thing. And that filth probably caused the other thing. Balls banked off the short rails had an amazing tendency to go long. I mean, every damn time they'd want to go long. I guess this probably had something to do with how the balls weren't sliding as much as I was expecting them to. They'd pick up roll almost immediately after they left the rail, and that would affect the bank angle. For cross-table shots off the long rails, this wasn't noticable at all.

But I adjusted I guess. It took me a while.