By Dominic Esposito
Every player who has played an important match knows that feeling of having nervous butterflies in their stomach. Suddenly, your breathing becomes short and erratic, your muscles become tense and begin to flinch, your blood pressure rises, your pace of play is completely unsettled, your palms may sweat, and worst of all, your ability to think clearly becomes clouded and replaced with countless "what if" thoughts. Your impending doom is predictable and more often than not, you do actually bomb out at the billiards table.
But wait a moment and consider. Did you ever wonder what was happening to the other player while you were in your own living nightmare? Were they as calm as a cucumber or unnerved all that time too? It's likely they were a nervous wreck inside, also. But you couldn't tell in your own anxious condition and just maybe they couldn't tell you were either.
So answer this question next, dear pool shooter, if you had known that they too were a nervous wreck, would you have been calmer and ended up by giving them the beating of their life in pool? Of course you could have been. So then, what can you do to better prepare ahead of time and avoid becoming the "bigger nervous wreck" so you lose the next match?
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