Three cushion tip: watch balkline once in a while.
Three cushion tip: watch balkline once in a while.By Bert van Manen
Are you one of those 3-cushion players who could not care less about balkline, and never watches it? That is too bad. You can learn from this related discipline, even if you have no ambition of ever playing it. It may not be a brother to 3-cushion, but it is a blood relative. Let’s say: a nephew. And he knows things.
Balkline was invented (in the early 20th century) because players got too skilled at the free game, and spectators got bored. The Serie Americaine has half a dozen different "standard” positions, but to the outsider it all looks very repetitious. And it is. So balkline was meant to force players to solve problems again, and to come up with ideas. Which it did. It created a new carom language with a vocabulary so rich that the free game now sounds like a stammer.
47/2, 47/1 and 71/2 are a pure delight to watch when played by the great technicians. There is so much subtle skill, refinement and grace in those games; a run of 100 or 200 points can be like a story well told, or a beautifully choreographed dance. I am doing my very best to avoid the cliché "poetry in motion”, but there you have it, I can’t.
You may ask, with good reason: "Have the best balkline players not done to balkline what the best free game players once did to the free game”? Have they not killed it, by becoming to good at it? My answer to that question (and I say this as a three cushion player who stopped playing 47/2 some 20 years ago), is a resounding NO. The main reason: every high run in balkline is unique, one of a kind, a one-time event.
Sure, 47/2 matches are sometimes finished in 1 inning. Once in a blue moon, it also happens in 71/2 and 47/1 (roughly comparable to each other in their degree of difficulty, and MUCH more demanding than 47/2). The new and very young Dutch 47/2 champion Raymund Swertz finished 4 of his 7 matches in a single inning last weekend, and scored a general average of 134.61 (matches to 250). If he can convert the amazing fluency of his balkline to three cushion in years to come, we are in for a treat. The best balkline player of all time, Frédéric Caudron, recorded tournament averages even more baffling: 200.00 in 47/2, 111.11 in 71/2, 133.33 in 47/1. Watch him finish matches in 30 or 40 minutes, and you may start to think that the game is not that hard. Well, here’s the Holy Law of Sports: "If it looks ridiculously easy, it’s probably done incredibly well”.
Recently, I argued that Blomdahl had changed the game of 3-cushion, mostly by thinking about it more cleverly than had been done before him. In very much the same way, Caudron has changed balkline. He does not play it to a degree of perfection, never before achieved. Quite the opposite: he plays it WITHOUT STRIVING FOR PERFECTION like his predecessors did. And that is where 3-cushion players can pick up on his insights, and improve their own thinking.
Just a few decades ago, balkline players approached 47/2 as if it was the free game (with a handicap): you gather the balls, manoeuvre them "á cheval” on the line in a triangle, steal as many points as you can until you play the "rappel” to restore the triangle. You go systematically up and down that line, staying on one head of the table. If you play that to perfection, you’ll never even hear "entree”, to indicate that your two object balls are in the same balk. Not that anybody ever achieved that ideal, but it was what they (Marty, Vultink, Schrauwen, Hose, Bongers, Connesson and others) labored for: the perfect, structured, repetitive balkline run. Caudron ended that. His balkline (and his 1-cushion too, by the way), are intentionally more loose, margins are slightly wider, the balls are half an inch or an inch further apart. Of course he likes a perfect position á cheval on the line, and finds it more often than most of his peers. But it’s not a tightrope he cannot afford to fall off of. He is happy to improvise for stretches of 20 or 30 points, always in such a way that he has options to choose from. Striving for theoretical perfection often means, that you reduce your options to just one, and that is when you are most in danger of missing. As with Blomdahl, Frédérics results don’t lie. His way is better.
To continue that train of thought: there are even 3-cushion players who – in their mind – hang on to the old and romantic philosophy of striving for perfection. Strike the ball exactly right, place the second ball for position, hit the third ball on the correct side, treat all three balls as if they were puppets and you are the puppetmaster holding the strings. Their intentions are admirable. But in their hours of practice, they are working on an ulcer; in their matches, they are working on a heart attack. Forget it guys, let it go. You will never be in control of three rolling balls, it can’t be done. Play to the best of your ability, enjoy it, and accept the fact that a favorable or unfortunate roll of the ball, good and bad luck, are factors in this game of ours.
Not even Dick Jaspers, the hardest working compulsive perfectionist our sport has ever seen, plays 3-cushion like a puppetmaster. He cannot play position on half his shots (possibly more), because even for him it is hard enough to make the bloody point. Let’s not even talk about the preferred side to hit the third ball: many a time the top players just want to hit it, and they’ll gladly take any resulting position if they do. Caudron’s balkline may look like he has all three balls on a string, Jaspers’ 3-cushion is described by some as "machine-like”, but on both counts: it is not true. They improvise a lot, and sometimes they go from carom to carom, hoping for the best. Whether you play balkline or 3-cushion, do yourself a favor: don’t aim higher than those two.