raig daniels
The Last Rack
In 2002, I played in the U.S. Amateur Pool Tournament in Laurel, Maryland. To get there, I had to be one of the top players in the APA league and one of two winners from a qualifying tournament. Denver was one of only twelve cities in the country to host a qualifier, and ours was held at Shakespeare's pool hall.
The same pool hall I played in after getting laid off from Spiremedia.
The same one, only a few miles from my house.
This tournament would be my last hurrah with pool. I didn't know it yet, but Laurel would be the end.
Up to that point, pool wasn't just something I did — it was something I was. It was baked into me, a family pastime passed down through generations. I watched and played pool with my father, my grandfather, and even my great-grandfather.
* * *
I grew up with a pool table in the basement. For years, I told people I started playing when I was five, but the truth is simpler: the table was there the day I came home from the hospital. My parents bought the house — and the table — in 1974, the year I was born. If I started earlier, I wouldn't be surprised.
Out of everyone before me, my father was the most serious player. That seriousness became part of my upbringing. I don't know exactly when I started playing, but I remember him dragging a chair around the table so I could stand high enough to reach the felt.
He taught me the bridge first — how my left hand shaped the cue's path. A closed bridge — pointer finger and thumb wrapped tight, the other fingers planted. Or an open bridge — thumb pinched to finger, cue sliding clean across the top. I used both instinctively, depending on what the table demanded.
Then came angles. Cueball control. English.
He explained it like a clock.
Twelve o'clock to follow through.
Three to move right.
Nine to move left.
And six o'clock — the hardest shot — ripped the cue ball back toward you like it was on a yo-yo.
When you hit that shot clean, people noticed. Onlookers would yell, "Oh damn." Naturally, that became the one I obsessed over. It wasn't always the smart shot, but it was the one that announced you knew what you were doing. It got into your opponent's head.
My dad watched my progress with quiet pride. The guys came over to drink beer and play pool. Many nights, I was the opening act — five years old, standing on a chair, dropping balls and jaws at the same time.
I fell in love with the game — and with the praise.
The colored balls: solids and stripes, numbers floating in clean white circles.
The crack of the break.
The satisfying clatter of a ball running down the return track.
It was a bar table, so the balls fed back into the holding area — the kind that usually needed a quarter to release them. At home, no quarter was required — just a firm shove on the coin mechanism.
Blue chalk stained my fingers. A bottle of Johnson & Johnson baby powder was always within reach. Back then, we used it freely. Two taps — never more — dusted a cupped left hand. The cue slid through it, slow and smooth. The right hand guided; the left set the line. Powder bloomed, then settled — on felt, on wood, on skin: chalk, powder, and the musty Midwestern basement air.
To this day, the smell of baby powder takes me straight back to that room.
* * *
Each rack was a puzzle. Each break, a new problem to solve. Pool sharpened my spatial awareness. I didn't have language for it then — only results. I could see angles others missed. I could hold entire tables in my head.
For a while, pool stepped aside. Baseball. Football. Basketball. That carried me through freshman year. But by sophomore year, it was clear this five-foot-ten white kid wasn't going to dominate on the court.
Around that time, the smokers — the dirties, as everyone called them — gathered at Mr. G's corner store, which had two pool tables. These were my friends. I didn't smoke. I was the outsider who still played sports.
I quit basketball and started joining them for lunch. If you arrived early enough, you could squeeze in four games.
My parents gave me two dollars a day for lunch. The routine never changed.
Walk to the gas station.
Buy a Little Debbie Nutty Buddy for a dollar.
A Mountain Dew for fifty cents.
That left fifty cents for pool.
Enough for one game — unless you won.
If you won, you held the table. That was the goal. Keep playing. Earn recognition. Maybe catch the attention of a girl watching nearby.
By then, I was better than my peers. Good enough to challenge my father.
That's when he taught me the art of shit-talking.
Not as a lecture — more like a lion keeping a cub in check. He'd talk just enough to raise the stakes. Call the next crazy shot. Back it up. Or slip in a hustler's nudge:
"There's a lot of pressure on this one."
"Don't miss that easy shot for the win."
Sometimes he said it before even walking up to the eight ball.
Naturally, I fired back. That rhythm lasted our entire lives. We only see each other once a year now, but the same pool table still sits in their house. We talk shit. Call ridiculous shots. My celebrations are loud and ridiculous. His are quieter — a wink, a nod — got that one, son — followed immediately by more shit-talk.
* * *
Around fourteen, something shifted.
My parents were in their late thirties. My brother Jason had a car. On many weekends, my parents went out with friends. Jason was often gone. I was left home alone. Trusted. Mostly responsible.
That's when I truly honed my craft.
Just me and the table.
Rack after rack. Chasing that flashy backspin shot. Late-game scenarios with only a few balls left, I'd pick one target and map every possible way to sink it.
Direct cut.
One rail.
Three rails.
Rail-first.
Two rails before contact.
Caroms.
Combinations.
Could it be done?
Again and again, I wasn't practicing to beat my dad or my friends. I was solving problems for the pleasure of solving them. Hours disappeared. Boredom never showed up.
The cue became my shield.
My weapon.
My confidant.
* * *
By thirteen, I was sneaking into bars. Sneaking is generous — I walked in during the day as if I belonged.
The Jet Lounge was close to my house, and that's where the real gambling lived. Not big money — but enough to make your stomach tighten. Grown men sized you up not by your age, but by your stroke. Hustling might be a stretch, but if I could scrape together a few bucks, I'd gamble. Fifty cents a game. A dollar if I were feeling brave.
The regulars didn't care how old I was as long as I paid when I lost, didn't boast when I won, and didn't whine about table rolls.
The Jet was my classroom. Smoke thick enough to chew. A jukebox that never rested. A crowd that spotted weakness before you chalked your cue. I learned more there than I ever did in school — how people bluff, how they brag, how they fold.
By sixteen, once I could drive, the Jet became routine. Saturday pool tournaments. Five, six hours in the bar, eyes bloodshot and stinging from secondhand smoke. I didn't flinch. By then, the smoke was just part of the furniture.
* * *
But the Jet wasn't where we spent most of our hours.
That was Cadillac Lanes — the bowling alley with three pool tables tucked into the corner. That's where the high school kids played. The games were different. More casual. No less competitive.
If you wanted the next game, you slid a single quarter onto the table, tucked just under the rail above the coin slot. That quarter was your flag. Your challenge.
The rail filled with silver stacks — little metal soldiers lined up in formation, each one waiting to knock you off the table.
It wasn't about money. It was about status.
The winner stayed. The challenger paid. If you kept winning, two quarters could last all night. The longer you held the table, the louder the room grew — kids leaning in, calling shots, the clack of balls echoing off the lanes.
Holding the table felt like holding court.
And I loved it.
Cadillac Lanes made you sharp.
The Jet Lounge made you dangerous.
Between the two, I learned every angle a cue ball could spin — and how quickly pressure changed people.
* * *
Around the same time, I started devouring biographies. Hustlers. Moguls. Musicians. Explorers. Anyone who bent the world in their direction. Not to copy the behavior — to learn the thinking.
Whether I knew it or not, I was training the same muscle — two quarters at a time.
Cadillac Lanes is where I got my first real taste of the hustler life I'd been romanticizing from books and from The Color of Money.
Our favorite group game was nine-ball rotation. Standard nine-ball rules — you shoot the balls in numerical order — but rotation opened the table to more than two players and added money balls. Our standard was fifty cents for the five and a dollar for the nine. Sink the five, everyone at the table paid you. Same for the nine. The bonus was if you pocketed a money ball early in the rotation — say, a four-nine combo — you collected the dollar from everyone, and the nine went back on the table. In a game with four or five players, you could walk away up ten dollars on a single rack.
That's where I met Clint. I think his name was Clint. Let's go with Clint.
Clint was in his late twenties and started showing up at Cadillac Lanes while we high schoolers dominated the back room. Not too strange — this was the bar area of a bowling alley. People drifted in.
The night we met, I was holding the table, feeling untouchable. He watched a few games, then stepped up.
"The game appears to be eight-ball for a dollar," he said. "You want to play for five?"
This guy was coming on stronger than I was trying to get laid in those days. I declined, feeling the heat. He didn't blink.
"I'll play one-handed."
I agreed. He beat me. Didn't destroy me, but he was proficient enough with one hand to take the game. The next challengers had watched and wanted no part of him, so he raised the stakes on himself: one-handed, behind his back. He beat them, too. Then he broke down his cue, used only the shaft, and jumped the cue ball clean over a blocker that sat inches away.
My mind was blown.
I absorbed every trick and took them home to practice. The jump shot I was too scared to try on our family table — I wasn't about to rip the felt — but I wore out the Cadillac Lanes cloth working on it.
Clint and I became friendly the way people do when they share an obsession. But one slow night, the high schoolers had wised up, and the money dried out. Clint needed more juice.
"Come next door to Paulie's," he said. "I've got a money game set up. I need a partner."
I told him I couldn't get into Paulie's this late on a Friday. They'd never let me in.
"Don't worry about it. You're with me."
My adult chaperone, I guess.
I was nervous for two reasons. First, I didn't think they'd actually let me through the door — or they'd kick me out the moment someone looked too hard. Second, I'd heard Paulie's was a pool player's bar, and I didn't know if I could hold my own.
We walked into the dim light and the wall of smoke. Four pool tables on display, all occupied except one, where two men stood waiting for us. I unzipped my case, screwed my cue together, and listened to the terms.
Doubles. Eight-ball. Five dollars a player.
That might not sound like much today, but for a high school kid in a working-class town in the early nineties, five dollars meant something.
As the games went on, I realized I was equally matched with both opponents. But I kept missing easy shots. Nerves. Then it hit me the way a miscue does — that hollow tink.
I was the party trick.
I was the one-handed, behind-the-back variable. Clint couldn't gamble straight up with these guys anymore — he'd scared them off. So he brought me along to lower their guard. The high school kid dragging down his team just enough to make the bet feel winnable. Bait.
We won a few games. The guys figured it out soon enough — this kid wasn't dragging Clint down nearly enough for them to come out ahead.
We left before anyone got upset.
* * *
At the beginning of my sophomore year at Iowa State, I found the Billiards Club and tracked down the president. I asked him a million questions — what the club did, how to grow it, what it needed. More questions than I asked in any classroom at ISU. The president saw my enthusiasm, and since he wasn't all that interested in running it anymore, he handed me the keys.
I was getting it off the ground when I punctured myself with the stake, and my sophomore year ended before it really began.
After recovering from the surgery, broke and no longer enrolled, I needed a job. So, where was the first place I looked? The billiard store.
KD Billiards. The local shop for cues, cases, chalk — anything connected to the game. I met the owner, Ron, who tested my soldering skills and asked me to take apart a section of a pinball machine and put it back together — that intro electronics class I'd taken actually paid off. I got the job.
My main duties were installing and recovering pool tables, but the work also included repairing jukeboxes, arcade games, and pinball machines. That's where I fell in love with pinball. After hours, I'd play for free until someone kicked me out.
I was twenty at this point, and local bars were hosting pool tournaments — mostly on Monday nights, a way to put bodies in the building. So I started showing up. I'd been walking into bars since I was thirteen, so the etiquette was second nature by now. Be polite. Use your manners. May I get some change, bartender? Thank you, bartender. Don't attract bad attention. Don't make anyone's shift harder.
But now that I was nearly twenty-one, my confidence grew, and I started ordering beers for the first time. Nobody checked IDs on a Monday night, and I was becoming a regular at Cy's Roost. The cops did sweep through a few times. I was sweating, but they never checked.
I regularly placed in the top three and sometimes won those tournaments, and people took notice. That's when I was asked to join the pool league. I hesitated. League play meant competing at other bars. I was known at Cy's, but not anywhere else. No worries, they said. So I tried it.
I did well. Well enough to get noticed even more. And then it happened. Players from another team figured out I was underage and ratted me out to the bartender. I was asked to leave and had to forfeit my games.
That's one way to win.
On the night of my twenty-first birthday, I went straight to Cy's Roost. The bartender, Paulie, asked what I was celebrating. I told him it was my twenty-first. He did the palm-to-forehead, not knowing I'd been drinking in his bar underage for almost a year.
* * *
After a couple of years in Denver, Tina and I had settled in. One Saturday afternoon, she and our friend Dena met at a bar near our apartment called the Toby Jug. Nothing special for them, but as I sat there, I noticed something. The pool players in this bar were good. This wasn't a bar with pool tables. This was a pool players' bar.
I hadn't played much since leaving Ames, too focused on getting my life together. But this place sparked something.
I came back days later, alone, cue in hand. My instinct was right. These were serious players. And one in particular stood out — Bob. Silver-haired, early fifties, holding the table as if he owned it.
I wanted a piece of him.
We battled back and forth all night, and naturally, a conversation followed. That night, Bob mentioned he'd played in the U.S. Amateur tournament that year. I was impressed. I'd always wanted a pool mentor — someone a level above me who could push me further. I chose Bob.
He was easy to like, and we hit it off instantly. He invited me to join his APA league, and I dominated. The highest ranking in APA is 7, but newcomers start at 4 — the handicap system lets players of all skill levels compete. Other teams complained about me being rated a four. Within a month, I was bumped to a seven.
Bob and I started meeting at proper pool halls, on the nine-foot tables. We'd show up around eleven in the morning and play until eight at night. Sometimes we'd push twelve hours. Bob's rule was simple: we always had to gamble. Not to profit off each other, but to keep things interesting. A dollar a game. I'd find myself up twenty, lose focus, and end up down ten — which forced me to lock back in. As Bob put it, "It might only be a dollar, but nobody wants to lose a dollar."
* * *
In 2002, Tina and I bought our first house in the Highlands, just north of downtown Denver. It was far from the Toby Jug, so I could no longer play in that league. But the U.S. Amateur qualifying tournament was held just down the street from our new place. Bob entered. So did I.
I qualified. Bob didn't.
I was handed a small trophy — the first of my entire pool career — and got a write-up in the local billiards paper. I was so excited I could barely sit still.
Tina and I traveled to Laurel, Maryland, for the tournament. This was during the height of the D.C. sniper attacks. We were a little uneasy, but nothing was going to keep me from the biggest stage of my life.
I wanted to win so badly.
My first match was early Saturday morning. The guy wasn't that good, but I kept missing easy shots. Shot after shot, the cue ball drifted where it shouldn't have. I lost. Double-elimination tournament, and I was already in the losers' bracket.
My second match was that afternoon. The opponent was better than the first. I missed easy shots again. I lost again.
Two matches and out.
I was gutted.
Tina and I decided to make the best of the trip. We toured D.C. and Virginia, trying to enjoy ourselves. But the sting followed me.
At the airport on the way home, I ran into the other Denver qualifier.
"How'd you do?" he asked.
"Two and out," I said.
"How about you?"
"I won it," he said. "I was drinking, having a great time, and I won the whole tournament."
That hit me like the crack of the balls.
He'd shown up loose. I'd shown up desperate. He treated it like another night at the bar. I treated it like the most important moment of my life. And the tighter I gripped, the worse I played.
I wanted it so badly that I choked.
Laurel taught me something I wouldn't fully understand for years: wanting something too much can be the thing that kills it. When you grip the moment too tightly, your hands shake. The cue drifts. The easy shots miss.
I didn't know it at the airport, but pool and I were finished. The game that built me — the confidence, the craft, the identity — had given me everything it could, and the lifestyle was catching up with me. Hours and hours in smoky bars, drinking too much, was not a healthy lifestyle. I live in gorgeous, sunny Colorado. Why am I spending beautiful days in dark, smoky bars?