I swear, some of these shots must have been faked. Even if so, it’s mighty cool pool.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He's written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic and fights the abuse of science, but his true love is praising the wonders of real science.
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September 11th, 2006 at 6:22 pm
I dunno, maybe that last one, but other than that they looked legit. But even the last one . . . with enough spin.
September 11th, 2006 at 6:59 pm
They’re real, I’ve seen shots like that before. :p I saw a video like that on Yahoo! exept it was a 6 year old performing shots like that. It’s pretty darn cool watch!
September 11th, 2006 at 7:07 pm
I remember watching Cliff Thorburne (I think) doing most of those on British TV when I was a kid…
September 11th, 2006 at 7:12 pm
Based on my admittedly amateur pool skills, I’d say it’s all legit. Depending on how you spin the cueball you can make it stop short, double back, or roll ahead and then turn 90 degrees left and right. I’m impressed with the amount of control these guys have.
The only one I had my doubts about was the one with the golf ball. But I’ll take it on faith.
September 11th, 2006 at 7:22 pm
Yeah, these are all real. But I bet that most of these probably needed more than one attempt.
September 11th, 2006 at 9:35 pm
I have seen similar tricks performed by pro players before, I’d say they are real.
I should film my famous “blue-streak-on-the-cloth” and release that on the web.
September 11th, 2006 at 9:59 pm
They’re probably all real. Just keep in mind that for the more “impossible” looking shots, there were probably tens of attempts that *didn’t* make the video.
September 11th, 2006 at 10:15 pm
Billiards meets miniature golf meets Salvador Dali meets Cosmos…
My brain hurts now.
September 12th, 2006 at 12:36 am
You wanna see something even more spectacular (by my opinion : )
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3soIWlWqhKA
CAN THROWING!
September 12th, 2006 at 12:53 am
Check out this awesome “can throwing” movie! You won’t believe this if you didn’t believe the pool video :]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3soIWlWqhKA
September 12th, 2006 at 9:58 am
The first shot, the triple bank shot is a standard learner trick for pool shooters. Learned that one 40 years ago,,,
GAry 7
September 12th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
None of those shots are unreasonable. I’ve done shots like that before. The golf shot is a bit of a dandy, but for all we know, also lucky.
Not that I’m an amazing pool player or anything, but once you figure out things like backspin and jump shots (easy), 3 bank shots (not quite so easy) and putting rotation on the ball (hard) you can pull off all kinds of mind-blowing shots.
September 13th, 2006 at 1:06 pm
I’ve been playing pool for quite a long time and I’ve seen Mike Massey perform his show twice (live). Most of the shots in the video are well within Mike’s and other pro trick shot artist’s ability.