Last year he dominated the main tour winning four of the 6 events and topping the rankings by 32 points come the end of the year.

One of the things I asked him was what advice he would offer to any new players to the tour. His response was interesting and comes down to practice, he talks about players he see’s down his local club that just throw the balls out and run the balls. He said at the top of your game you know you can pot the balls so you should be working on weaknesses. He will spend a couple of hours perfecting the break (something that led to his success last year) where he will get someone to rack up for him say 100 breaks in a row. This is where you start to make your own luck or have a good chance of eliminating it altogether.

I think there is a difference, though, in how one approaches playing an opponent and how one practices, and it’s because the goals are completely different. The object of playing a match is to win and the object of practice is to improve.

In playing, shot selection is determined in part by many factors, how hard the shot choices are, what the pattern possibilities are and the difficulty of getting shape from ball to ball, how will I leave my opponent if I miss this shot, what are my opponent’s weaknesses and can I exploit them, should I play defense of offense this shot, etc, etc.

In practice none of that is relevant at all. You are simply focusing on doing some particular thing better than you have been doing it before. That’s why I don’t think just playing is a very good way to improve, because improvement has no place in playing. There is a small amount of improvement that comes simply from having made more shots, but it’s a very inefficient way of getting better.

Where I think honesty plays the biggest roll is in helping us understand what our skill level truly is, and especially what our weaknesses are, so that when we do get time to practice, we work on the right things. And we need to take the big picture approach to that, so we realize our weakness is getting position, say, rather than the inability to make bank after bank.

I look forward to future posts – keep up the good work.