Does Effie have a flawed 1pkt game?
Does Effie have a flawed 1pkt game?
I have not responded on this thread until now because I didn't want it to seem that I was agreeing with Artie because we are in the make-up phase. Truthfully, Artie and I seldom agree on anything.
So what I'm doing is reprinting some posts that I made a while back on AZforum and here, to show that this was how I thought long before Artie brought the subject up. These are 3 different posts from 3 different threads that show my thoughts on the Efren subject. Efren doesn't need an Indian Guide to find his pocket, but he probably could use a GPS.
Post #1
Efren did not stay with Mike LeBron until after he did a one year stint at the Billiard Café in Chicago. Efren, Parica and Luat all hung there. I don't want anyone to be led to believe that Efren honed his pool and one pocket game in Philadelphia. It was Chicago, where he and I played almost daily. He learned one pocket from Billy Incardona (who also played him on a regular basis) and myself. Ask him. His learning and quick pick up of the game was not intentional. Nobody can stop that guy from learning. We started out with me spotting him 10 to 8, ten days later he was playing me 10 to 8. Chicago is also where Jose Parica learned bank pool by getting drummed on by the black bankers from the South Side and myself. In those days if you wanted to learn straight pool you went to New York, if you wanted to learn one pocket and banks, you came to Chicago. You probably wouldn't win, but you would learn.
Efren was watching me so closely when we were playing, and was absorbing knowledge at such an incredible rate that I had to put a cold deck on him. On certain key shots when he was most alert as to what I was going to do, I purposely shot the wrong shot, and sometimes had to give up the game to do it. I wanted to implant some wrong concepts into his fertile brain. I wasn't going to stand there and let him drain me like a sewer. I did a good job on him because he still does some of them.
Post #2
Efren played and gambled with me almost every day for over a year. I quickly determined that he was some kind of a genius, as I soon realized that he was draining info from me at an amazing rate while we played. I was also paranoid enough to see that he didn't want to just learn shots and moves, like most players, but he was seeking a foundation and inner understanding of the game. I think I could actually feel him probing into my brain when I was trying to solve a 1pkt situation. To defend against that, when a really difficult situation arose, and when I could feel him surreptitiously honing in on my thinking processes, I would sometimes purposely take the wrong path. This way he would think that he had found the info all by himself, and it gave the tainted concept more validity. It was quite different from me telling him what to do, whereby he may have had reason to question my honesty. Since this occurred when Effie was building his 1pkt foundation, I still believe some of the mis concepts are so deep-seated that he still sometimes falls prey to them. Unfortunately for his opponents, up until now he has had so much talent and ability, and is so much better than his opposition, that those minor flaws didn't show up often enough to make a significant difference.
Post #3
When I was playing Efren on an almost daily basis in Chicago back in the late 80's, it was obvious that he was soaking up 1pkt info at an alarming rate. Not wanting to be the pariah responsible for his greatness, I tried to inject as much bad info into his absorbing brain. One important thing I did, and this is where the "bravura" comes in, was when I had a lead and would go about cleaning up balls and shipping them up table rather than shoot a shot or move. I would make sure that I would do so in a most cowardly looking, self-demeaning, and abhorrent way, even tho in reality I felt no such compunctions. The reason was, I wanted him to look at shooting passive, clean-up shots with distaste, so he would continue to be aggressive when he had the lead, which would give me a better chance to win. He learned that infected lesson well. The downside of this was that he executed so well, and shot so much better than anybody else, this flaw wasn't exploited enough. As Grady once pointed out, if he is playing against someone with an equal speed to his, that disdain for playing the score would be fatal.
the Beard
Incidentally, I would have no problem telling Efren this to his face, and I already have many times. He is a great person, and he only laughs when I do it. He will also listen and consider any advice I give him about what he should have shot in a certain situation. I am one of the few humans that has that privilege with him. However, all that aside, if I can overlook that he didn't bet his own very often, and that he was lucky to not have to fade the great players of the 70s and 80s when they were in their prime, I have to concede that he is probably the all-time greatest.
But then I don't like One Pocket. my best game is 14.1, or Keno 
