Unlike pool, with its sterile perfection, Pi is unpredictable, it is irrational. We can attain an understanding of it without ever fully grasping its purpose or its true value. It’s an odd coincidence that my experience with pool would occur on Pi Day, given the contrast they provide me. Pi is baffling yet comforting. To know that Pi, a number inextricably linked to so many of the wonders and beauties of the universe, is as confusing and hard to understand as people certainly offers a small comfort to me.

It’s all mostly meaningless, so why not celebrate the meaningless by giving importance to an arbitrary marker of the passage of time? Which is my weird way of wishing everyone a happy Pi Day. And happy birthday to the remains of Albert Einstein.

I was sitting around with nothing to do, so I flipped to TSN and saw a billiards competition in progress. It was US vs Europe in nine ball two-man team play, and whoever won the game I had started watching won the series. After the break, where a few balls were sunk, there was no good line-up for the two ball. So the teams went back and forth tapping the two around the table hiding the cue behind other balls. Until one of the teams screwed up their safety shot leaving a reasonable line on the two. At this point, the announcers essentially called the game. Irrespective of the layout of the table at this point, it was a foregone conclusion that they had won the game, barring some horrendous unforgivable fuckup on their part.

There’s something very discomfiting about this certainty. Obviously, pool is a game of skill but most games of skill have a bit of chance, a bit of uncertainty. The wind can blow in the wrong way, even in closed environment games like darts. But it seems that in pool, there’s no chance left. The friction of the felt, the bounce off the rails, the angle of attack, the position of the stick on the cue, it can all be planned out too well. With enough practice, the game transcends its nature and becomes rote mechanics. I like pool, but I’m not very good at it. If I line up a shot exactly the same twenty times I’d probably only get what I want once, but professional pool isn’t like that.  Professional pool is precise, perfect, sterile. And, now that I’ve shaped this opinion, utterly uninteresting to me.