Right — you're on. Terry's got two down by the far corner and he's not looking at them, he's looking at the hatch. Twenty-four shots between us and the hooter, so don't stand there measuring.
Squidger flat, edge of the wink, press and pull. Not at the wink. Onto it. Nothing on this mat pushes anything.
The lever
That's the whole shot and you want it now rather than in ten minutes. The squidger's rim goes down on the near edge of the wink and traps it against the felt. The far side of the wink has nowhere to go but up, so it bows. Then the rim slides off the top face and the bow lets go, and the wink leaves along the line of that bow. It is not thrown. It is bent and released.
Which gives you one thing you may not have expected: how far in from the rim you press is the only thing setting your angle. Not how hard. Not how fast. How far in. Drag long, drag short, it makes no odds to the angle at all — that's just energy. Two separate controls, and once you've got that you can loft a wink over a pile without losing an inch of your length.
| Entry, in from the rim | Leaves at | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| 0 – 1 mm | 70–78° | Straight up. Almost no ground covered. This is your shot over an intervening pile and nothing else. |
| 2 – 4 mm | 45–60° | Lob. Lands flat, dies on the nap, sits where it lands. |
| 7 mm (a third in) | 18–25° | Flat skidder. Four times the distance and you can aim it to a couple of degrees. |
| 9.5 mm + | — | Past centre. It won't bow, so it won't launch — you've just shoved it along the felt, and that's a foul. |
In. Further in. You're on the lip and you'll pop it straight up and land it where it already was. Come in a third and drag long. There — that's a shot.
Felt is not a table
Second thing. A wink coming down steep lands flat, sinks its rim a fraction into the nap and stops within a centimetre. Dead. A wink coming down shallow lands on its edge, keeps its spin, and rolls, and the nap steers it while it goes. Rolls to the edge, rolls off, out of play, stays out. It doesn't come back on and I'm not fetching it from under the tea urn.
And the mat wants brushing the other way. Look at the arc in front of the pot, that pale ground — that's been brushed against itself by however many hundred shots and everything that rolls through it bends. Allow for it. I do.
Squopping is the game
Potting is not the game. Say it in your head. Potting is what you do in the last minute with the winks you've already got free.
A wink that lands so it covers any part of another wink has squopped it. Three millimetres of overlap is enough; it doesn't have to be sat on it, it has to be over it. And the wink underneath is now completely out of the match, because the only disc in any pile you're allowed to play is the top one. Frozen. It can sit there for twenty minutes.
So the first half of a match is putting your colour on top of everyone else's colour, and if you spend it potting easy ones you'll finish with four in the pot and eight of your own squopped flat and Terry grinning at the hatch.
Piles have an order
A pile is a stack with a real order to it — bottom, middle, top — and the order matters more than the height. Play the top one off and you have handed the next player the one underneath, sitting there uncovered, waiting. That's why breaking a squop is worth more than making one. Making one takes a wink out of the game. Breaking one puts a wink back in and takes your opponent's shot away from him at the same time. Two for one.
Get a two-high pile apart and I'll shout. Not out of politeness. It's arithmetic.
Boondock, nurdle, and the pot wall
Three shots you'll want by the time you've had your dinner.
The boondock. When one of yours is under a pile too deep to get at, you don't play round it — you hit the pile flat and fast and send the whole lot down the mat. Yours goes with it, so you lose the position, but you get the wink back in play. It is the only answer to a deep pile and it costs every time.
The nurdle. A shot deliberately played to go almost nowhere: entry two or three millimetres, the shortest drag you can manage, and it finishes half a millimetre off the base of the pot. Nobody can squop it there without dropping their own wink in the pot on the way past. It looks like a fluff. It isn't.
Against the wall. A wink resting on the outside of the pot can't be squidged normally — there's no felt under the far edge to bow against. You crawl it up the wall in little lip-shots until it clears the rim. Takes three. Take the three.
Point four
Now. The yellows.
These came off our own eight-cavity tool this morning, first shift, and the yellows are running POINT FOUR proud. Spec is 1.6 millimetres. The yellows are gauging 2.0. That's cavity six running hot and short of clamp and nobody upstairs is touching the clamp pressure before Friday, so we play with them.
Point four doesn't sound like anything. On this mat it is three separate problems.
One: a yellow sits taller in every pile, so the pile it's in stands proud and a squidger's leading edge gets under it far too easily. Two: it's a bigger target side-on. Three, and this is the one that'll cost you — a yellow's centre of mass is higher, so going over the pot rim it tips on the edge instead of dropping flat, and it comes back out. Count them. It pots noticeably worse and there is nothing wrong with your squidging when it does.
You can hear it as well. Play a yellow with your eyes shut and it rings lower and duller off the squidger than a red does, because it's thicker. Point four. That's all it is.
Twelve to one
Don't lean on the near end, the pallets rock and you'll have the whole mat off. And that felt still wants brushing the other way, I've said.
Go on then. In. Further in.