Sunday, March 16, 2008

Play Pool for your Tuition Fees

If neither your brains nor your muscles can gain you a college scholarship, you still got hope. Assuming you know how to play pool. The University of Akron, Ohio has founded a unique scholarship program for extremely talented pool players.

Founded by the UA alumni Barry Lefkowitz and a former billiards champion of the institute, the program will cover $1,000 tuition fees or books of three students each fall or spring semester. Due to his generous contribution to the university billiards culture, the billiards parlor is named after him.

If you reckon your pool shooting skill are scholarship worthy, you can reveal them at the upcoming Lefkowitz scholarship tournament scheduled to Saturday, March 29 at the Barry Lefkowitz Billiard Parlor. The 9-ball pool tournament offers $1,000 prize to the winner, $500 to the finalist and $250 prize to the semi finalist.

Unfortunately, no one pays you to play online pool yet...



Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Is Pool Bad for your Masculine Image?

Georgina Chang, the host presenter of the Guinness 9 Ball Tour on STAR Sports, writes to The Star Online about the low sex appeal of pool, especially when compared to more sweaty, muscular and masculine sports such as football, car racing and even swimming.

You must admit that her points are quite convincing. Pool players are not the typical alpha males, yet playing pool has some advantages to your self esteem.

On one hand, you don't have to look like this to play pool:

On the other hand, pool players get to wear suits and compete in air conditioned halls and they hardly ever face this kind of danger:

And to be serious for a moment, the level of concentration demanded from pool players is very high or in Chang's words: "They need a computer-like brain that works in lightning speed to compute and process the many permutations one can take to pocket a ball… under the pressure of just three minutes".