Playing Pool in Gibraltar

Gibraltar Seniors Team at EBA European Pool Championship 2018, Bridlington It's been a mad hectic couple of weeks travelling, playing pool, then trying to settle down to normality afterwards. There's always a build up to an international tournament. Besides being caught up with league matches, the GibOil Cup and Plate tournaments coming to a head and trying to fit in extra practice, there's the tension and the anticipation at playing some of the world's best players. The chill, the grey skies and cold rain of the Yorkshire coast did not dampen our spirits as the Gibraltar team headed for the venue that first morning. We had left behind blue skies, temperatures well into the twenties and a city making its first moves to the annual beach season, but we shrugged off the chill of a typical British spring morning and strode into the opening ceremony heads held high, proud to be waving the Gibraltar flag. The excitement ran through all the players like a current o...

The Royal Oak pool player - winners of the 2019 GibOil Plate. A great team with which I was privileged to play. Let's celebrate the victory first and foremost. And what a match it was: 5 - 4 to the Royal Oak who battled it out in the final against the Hackney Carriage. Reaching the final of this annual Gibraltar pool competition is an achievement in itself; it is the result of several months of regular matches against some pretty good teams. Gibraltar's is a small community and the pool family just a tiny part of that small community. We all tend to know each other and at some point in the year we are likely to play each other. We can get to know each other's games quite well. This in itself poses quite a challenge, especially in your individual competitions - you can get complacent, or, on the contrary, you can feel a bit intimidated if you're up against a player that you feel is more skilled than you are. The Gibraltar Seniors team at the EBA World Cup at B...

Event poster signed by the visiting players, courtesy of Paul Heard The EBA European Championship was looming closer as a dreary February led into March.  I have been getting regular practice, although as usual, never as much as I would like, and I have been taking regular exercise - well, walking the dog once a day.  But it was the visit to Gibraltar last weekend by the IPA Professional World Series that made the best warm up to a tournament I have ever experienced. Cue sports enthusiast and a good pool buddy, Paul Heard, of Premier Cue Sports in Gibraltar, had been negotiating with the IPA since the middle of last year to bring the World Series to Gibraltar.  The event created included the professional Gibraltar Final, the Gibraltar Open, a team competition between Team IPA and Gibraltar Select and a light-hearted Last Man Standing competition which all took place during Easter weekend in what was a festival of pool as well as a tremendous success.  ...

Photo "Eight Ball Pool" by ArtJsan courtesy of www.FreeDigitalPhoto.net It's over.  The summer, I mean, not my pool playing days.  Not only have the heavens opened to provide us with a long-overdue clean up of the streets, but the glamour of travelling to international competitions of the late summer is now over.  The pool playing season has started, and here we go, head down, cue lined up and...shoot. It was, though, if you can hold with my reminiscing a moment, a bloody good summer.  The EBA 2015 Nations Cup in Killarney was a brilliant event.  The location couldn't have been more perfect: what a lovely place Killarney is, and what friendly, welcoming people.  The venue was superb and what all competing pool players need when travelling is their physical comforts made easy so they can concentrate on their game. I couldn't fault the Gleneagles Hotel, nor the organisation of the tournament.  And then there was the fun.  I met some genuine...

Photo: "Pool Game" by Serge Bertasius Photography from www.freedigitalphotos.net   Thirty-five years is a long time.  Too long for keeping up with skills learnt in my mid-teens.  Still, I loved the sport and in the depths of the stress of family life and work, home and finance and all that modern, rat-race stuff, I needed to get back to something I loved doing. At the age of 14 or 15, a friend of mine invited me up to the local snooker hall where I lived in Medway.  It was the snooker hall upstairs from Burtons on Gillingham High Street - not the most salubrious place in town - but the place where I was introduced to a sport I was to grow to love.  For a fairly quiet lad, it was a bit of a venture out to me, but I quickly warmed to the place and found that snooker came easily.  That's not a boast, being good at snooker was very tough, but I got the hang of the game pretty quickly, and pretty quickly I was beating my mates.  I had the ability to ...