Real Purpose of Single Person Practice Games

I just realized the real use of single person practice games like Fargo. These are games that you play alone that simulate competition by having varying situations and a score. Practice games are different than other forms of practicing in that they give a real feeling of competition. You can aim for high scores in any form of practice, but that doesn't feel like competition. Playing Fargo does.

If you'll excuse me, I'll digress from the main point for a while.

Practicing is a process in which you try to improve your skills. Typically you repeat something, say some sort of a shot, over and over again until you learn it a bit better. Because you're free to do so, you might fine-tune aspects of your stroke during a practice session. It's basically a stress-free environment to experiment and fine-tune. Part of the process is to just repeat something so that you remember it better. For example, you can practice your cue ball control by setting up a shot and aiming the cue ball to stop at a certain spot. When you isolate a part of the game, it's much easier to gain control over it.

This much should be pretty much obvious.

But what does it mean for single person practice games?

First, it should be obvious that it's not the best way to practice finer aspects of a shot. It's much more efficient to setup a particular shot and repeatedly execute it. The same goes for position play and pretty much any particular aspect of our overall ability. The same goes for executing a longer pattern on the table. It would be more efficient to setup the pattern again, if something fails. With practice games you just play.

This is not to say that playing single person games can't be good practice. They do improve your skills for sure and the heightened concentration typically implies that you're not just banging balls. Or if you can't bring yourself to playing alone, and wanted to do more of that, maybe this type of game encourages you to practice more.

However, the aspect these practice games can help the most is a bit more elusive. You see, the game of pool billiards is all about consistency. For players above certain level, many of the shots are actually pretty easy. In theory. You know what you should do but somehow a lack of concentration, careless preshot-routine, or whatever, sneaks in and you miss a shot. If you could arrange an interview after each missed shot in the pool world, I'd bet that most of the answers would be something like: "it was an easy shot, I don't know how I missed it."

Sure, some of the shots are just too difficult or low-percentage for one's own skill level, but those are not the shots we complain about. When we miss a difficult shot, we just shrug our shoulders and say to ourselves that it just was too difficult of a shot for us. The shots we do complain about are those that we feel we should be huge favorite to be successful at. Now, we often don't recognize the fact that we will miss a shot just by chance even if we should make it majority of the time. If I'm a 90-10 favorite to make a certain shot, I'm still going to miss it one out of ten times.

But the more important lesson here is that most of us regularly miss shots that we should make. And I'm not talking about choking in pressure or anything like that. I'm saying that even in a regular tournament match in which you have just the right amount of pressure, you still miss shots that you later complain that you shouldn't have missed. And the reason you state is some type of lack of concentration.

The beauty and pain of practice games like Fargo is that you make the very same "easy mistakes" in your Fargo run as do you in competition. You start with a good rack or two and then you miss the first shot, because you didn't focus correctly. And since the scoring system gives you instant feedback, the score of zero for this rack, you notice your error painfully clear.

Which brings us back to the real purpose of single person practice games: they offer an environment in which you can practice maintaining focus and concentration. Furthermore, you can experiment with different methods that might help you maintain your focus better. With these games you can practice your consistency. If you're not consistent, you know you need to work on it. And since it is a practice environment, you're free to experiment with different methods and ideas. In a real competitive situation, your focus needs to be on winning the game.

Single person practice games are a platform for experimenting and practicing consistency.