Winning a Tournament

Tournament play is such a mental challenge and nothing comes easy but must be earned. No matter how well prepared you arrive at a tournament, due to all of the variables and conditions, you must expect that your game will be about 20% less than your home training game. This happens to everybody and creates some mental adversity that must be met with a positive attitude. Recently at a tournament one of the players faced trailing 4 games to 8 games in a race to 9 games. Winning 5 games in a row to create a come from behind victory, against a tough opponent, was a big lift when only moments before things looked bad. Lesser experienced players become frustrated and disappointed at the score deficit and are seldom able to pull off such a great victory during a crisis situation. The making of a great rally must begin before arriving at the tournament with a preplanned response for this very occasion. Nearly always you will be tested and confronted with adversity during competition so this circumstance needs to be anticipated. Remember, you could rarely ever win a tournament if every match went along without you finding yourself on the short end of a score. When you face this score deficit the planned mental focus is, this is your chance to do something great. Once I win this match it is very likely that I will move along through the next few rounds and finish very high or win this event. In the particular event that this occurred recently this player went on to win the whole event and even mentioned to me that the thought, "of this is destiny", during the finals that aided momentum for the victory. The next time that you find yourself trailing in an important match remember that you can not win all of the games on one stroke of the cue, so you must be willing to fight to win one game while applying maximum mental effort. You will be surprised that when you do not cave in to the score, how many times you can create a circumstance that you have a chance to pull off the upset. Sometimes the player ahead in the score feels that they will just fall over the finish line and will lose a small amount of focus. This is then compounded when you claw back a couple of games and they begin to feel anxious and try to regain the mental clarity that was there when the match began, however this is difficult to regain as you begin to "death spiral" over multiple games. Create something from nothing and you will see your win percentage exceed your expectations well beyond the average.