{"id":150,"date":"2013-04-29T18:20:47","date_gmt":"2013-04-29T16:20:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.matvoz.com\/blog\/?p=150"},"modified":"2013-04-29T18:20:47","modified_gmt":"2013-04-29T16:20:47","slug":"the-rise-and-fall-of-naive-romantics-in-my-daily-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.matvoz.com\/blog\/2013\/04\/the-rise-and-fall-of-naive-romantics-in-my-daily-life\/","title":{"rendered":"The rise and fall of na\u00efve romantics in my daily life"},"content":{"rendered":"

I believe that every time we see something that we don\u2019t understand yet, we tend to see it in a more na\u00efve romantic way. Below are two examples how I had to change my mentality about chess and billiards if I wanted to improve my game.<\/p>\n

Let us first focus on the game of kings \u2013 chess. At first, I\u2019d struggled even for moving the pieces around<\/strong>. I was a few years old and my grandfather tried to teach me how to play. After many games, I\u2019d improved my game but still waited for my turn, thought for a moment what to do, and then made my move. In my mind, playing chess was still a wild guess, it depended greatly on the luck<\/strong> and on the lack of concentration or feeling the opponent had.<\/p>\n

\"chess\"<\/p>\n

Years passed and just when I thought that I am getting the hang of it, somebody came along, who read a bunch of books about chess, who knew all the standard openings by heart and beat the romantics of chess from me in a second. Yes, talent is a good asset, yes experiences matter A LOT. But without the hard realistic systematic approach to the problem, you just can\u2019t advance over a certain point<\/strong> that easy. I joined the chess club soon after that match.<\/p>\n

What about playing billiards?<\/p>\n

You have a stick (called a cue), a white ball (cue ball) and between two and fifteen playing balls (depends on the game you are playing).<\/p>\n

At the beginning I took the stick, went to the white ball, fake the aiming from the white ball to the target ball (I didn\u2019t have a clue how to aim), made a few swings towards the white ball (I saw people do it on the television) and then hit the white ball as hard as possible. If I was lucky, I hit the white ball. If I was even luckier, the white ball hit the target ball without a foul. If I was extremely lucky, the target ball went into the hole (I pocketed the ball!)<\/strong>. I had no idea, why the white ball went where it went and I didn\u2019t know which ball to target next before the pot.<\/p>\n

I thought that practice was for losers so I never practiced by myself. After many games played, I was able to hit the white ball almost every time. I knew how to add some english (how to make the white ball spin to one side) and I even had a solid three balls streak (I could pocket three balls consecutively before I missed the fourth one).<\/p>\n

\"billiards\"What I saw in billiards at that time was a combination of luck and feeling. I didn\u2019t care if the balls weren\u2019t all touching each other before breaking them, I just hit the white ball as hard as I could and hoped that I will be lucky. When I played, I only used my gut feeling for each shot<\/strong> (when to apply spin, how hard to hit the white ball, where to hit the white ball\u2026).<\/p>\n

Just when I thought that I am getting the hang of it, somebody came along, who read a bunch of books about billiards, knew all the theories from how to stand by the table to best practices for a force-follow shot. From the first break of this crucial match up until about three minutes after, when I\u2019d lost the game I could see the na\u00efve romantics of billiards crush and shatter before my eyes.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is probably not necessary to point out that I immediately started searching for any kind of theoretical information about billiards.<\/p>\n

I still love to play chess occasionally and I still regularly play billiards, but the point of view has changed. Now I know exactly WHY I moved the horse rather than the queen and why the white ball went where it went.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t reinvent the wheel, try to understand it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I believe that every time we see something that we don\u2019t understand yet, we tend to see it in a more na\u00efve romantic way. Below are two examples how I had to change my mentality about chess and billiards if I wanted to improve my game. Let us first focus on the game of kings […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matvoz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matvoz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matvoz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matvoz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matvoz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.matvoz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":161,"href":"https:\/\/www.matvoz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matvoz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matvoz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matvoz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}