Shuffleboard and pool

 Sb and I play the shuffleboard (and pool sometimes) pretty much every time after the gym sessions.

I like shuffleboard, playing it with somebody around the same-ish parity is fun, plus the board at his apartment is long and real slippery so it's always interesting to go with the riskier moves. Butwhen everybody's playing risky, the scores kinda' get low, the pucks go out of the board and it's a snoozefest.

So we came up with a couple of extra rules that make the game extra fun and strategic, at the cost of making it slightly difficult to calculate the scores after the game is over. The one minor downside or the upside depending on your persuasion is that you really don't want to mess things now, not because you'll get lower scores but because the point calculation gets complicated and you'd rather reallly keep it more simple. The rules are, if the puck goes out of the board it's negative one score, if it makes it to the other half of the board it's .5 (even if it doesn't make it to the '1' score), if it doesn't it's a negative one. Doing the arithmetic in the middle of excitement is a bit of a downer truth be told.

And then we played pool, like we sometimes do. Everytime I play the game with someone new I have to pretend it's the first time I'm playing because I'm so very bad at it, embarrassing, and I don't enjoy it at all. The last time we played it was painful and we were just waiting for it to end. This time around Sb's improved but he didn't improve by much. My performance showed no improvement.

Pathetic.