I Was Scared to Play Pool. Now, I Love It.

Picture the dive bar pool player. He can walk in anywhere, plunk down his money, write his name on the chalkboard, and he’s in. He’s collected and focused, but not afraid to crack a joke or wince at a bad shot. He either just smoked or is about to smoke a cigarette. He’s old school: He might be wearing a newsboy hat or a loud, weathered button-down. He finishes his beer before it gets warm, swigging from his glass with his cue in hand. He’s so fucking cool that you might abandon your conversation with friends and find yourself pulled into the orbit of his game, alchemized into an audience member. Or could they be someone else entirely? 

I am not a good sport, but I’d like to be one. For most of my adult life, I had a line I’d trot out to ward off invitations to play any two-player games, like beer pong at parties or cornhole at barbeques: “I don’t play games.” I said it to sound confident and nonchalant, and because I thought it was funny. (I still think it’s funny.) But I also said it to mask insecurity. The unspoken second half of the sentence was, “I don’t play games… because I am bad at them.” Or, more like, “...because my lack of experience is going to drag this whole thing out, then I’m going to get progressively more embarrassed and standoffish, which will create a really fucked vibe, so please, for everyone’s benefit, ask someone else, Michael.”

The last time I tossed off this little bon mot I was standing with my arms crossed in an Atlanta dive bar full of pool tables and my boyfriend’s oldest friends. His best friend’s wife, Anna, asked if I played pool. I gave her my canned response. “Of course, you don’t,” she said, smiling. “Girls don’t get to play games.” I thought about the last time my boyfriend, who adores pool, tried to teach me to play pool back in New York. After a few minutes of him patiently readjusting my hands and my swing, a strange man walked by and openly laughed at how shitty my shot was, and I got pissed and gave up. The broad, ugly dynamic, Anna explained, was that we stay “bad” while men use our continued lack of skill as an excuse to exclude us. I found her insight so moving and revelatory that it made me want to cry.

A few months later, I couldn’t get Anna’s words out of my head. I felt embarrassed about feeling embarrassed. I wanted to participate, to learn something new, to have unselfconscious fun playing a game that so many people love. Something had to give. So, I signed up for a pair of lessons with Thorsten Hohmann, the professional player who is the house pro at Amsterdam Billiards in New York City.

Amsterdam was cavernous and a little dim, even at 11 in the morning, our appointed lesson time. A few pairs and lone players occupied the green felt-topped tables that filled the space. A slim man in a huge T-shirt and headphones in his ears set himself up for various shots. Hohmann, dressed in a black knit blazer, teaches from a designated table with a projector built into the ceiling, which he uses to superimpose a grid onto the table. We shook hands, and he offered me a bottle of water. I was nervous to meet him, but, like all good teachers, he was friendly and disarming. Fresh off a competition in Poland, he talked about his delayed flight back to the city and showed me a few photos from the tournament on his phone: brightly lit pool tables in the center of a large room with stadium seating and spectators lit in reds and blues. 

According to Hohmann, a pool player of 32 years and professional competitor, pool is the largest participatory sport in the world. Everyone plays pool, he informed me. Not just cool guys. Still, I was starting from a place of total ineptitude. Before I could consider myself a player, I needed his help to guide me somewhere more comfortable—basic competence. 

To assess what he was working with, Hohmann had me hit the cue ball. My arm jerked; the ball jumped a few inches. “OK,” he said. Then, he lined three balls up across the length of the pool table to determine my line of vision. I squatted behind the short end and peeked over the edge, centering the balls so that only one was visible. He snapped a picture in which I can only describe my look as “billiards gremlin.” The lesson had begun.

Determining one’s line of vision is key at the offset, Hohmann explained, because you need to know how to center yourself in order to make a straight shot. Mine happens to be in the center. He showed me pictures he’d snapped of other students who favored their left or right eye instead, which means they need to position themselves differently than I do, even if we’re looking to hit the same ball from the same angle. 

Once we figured out how I needed to look at the balls on the table, Hohmann got to work on my stance. You assume the position as follows: Right foot lined up with the pool cue, left foot just in front, hip’s distance apart. Bend at the waist and lower the chin as close to the table as possible. Torso over the cue. Right arm towards the base of the cue at a 90-degree angle—you swing from the elbow, not the shoulder. Left hand spread on the felt, fingers tented, thumb and pointer connected to form a channel for the cue to slide down.

Ideally, I’d assume this stance in one fluid motion, as Hohmann does. But I constructed my stance piece by piece, body part by body part, while he made adjustments—gently pulling my elbow away from my body or reminding me not to bend my knees to get closer to the table. He complimented my ability to follow his instructions. I credited that to a recent spate of barre classes, where you make tiny tweaks to plie up an inch, down an inch for maximum impact.

For the rest of the lesson, which lasted a little less than two hours, Hohmann taught me where and how to hit the cue ball for various kinds of shots. I stanced up, hit the ball as instructed, and waited for his feedback. When I made a shot or stopped the ball in the grid where he’d told me to aim, he hit me with a “Great!” and popped his hand up for a high five. I was elated. He demonstrated the different ways a cue ball can move: sliding, rolling, or back-spinning, which we agreed was too advanced to cover in a couple of sessions. I learned how to set up a shot in three looks: First at where I wanted to strike the cue ball, then at the spot where the cue ball would connect with the object ball, and finally at the pocket where the object ball needed to land. I left Amsterdam feeling giddy and wanting more. I texted my boyfriend, “Pool fucks!!!” He replied, “Hell yeah.”

The next day’s lesson started with a quick review of the basics, after a little small talk about travel—pool competitions have taken Hohmann all over the world, transplanting him from his native Germany into New York. “They play pool everywhere,” he told me. He showed me more photos from a competition in the Maldives: “Pool in paradise,” he said. I laughed. The bulk of our lesson on day two was about hitting the object ball from an angle—a scenario that was about as close as we got to actual gameplay. Using his projector, he arranged the cue and object balls at various angles and told me how to change my target to get the ball into the pocket with the cue ball 10, 20, or 30 degrees away. 

While we moved around the table, Hohmann and I chatted about Amsterdam and the people he meets in his line of work. “Every time the Weeknd is in New York, for a show, this is his table,” he told me. Joe Rogan also apparently favors Amsterdam Billiards, and is such a fanatic that he keeps a pool table in his recording studio. Hohmann’s regular clientele ranges in terms of age, race, and gender, but they’re typically recreational players taking lessons to get better at a game they already love. “If you need a lawyer, I know lawyers in the city,” he said. “I teach them all!” 

After an hour of playing around on his pool ball obstacle course, he brought the lesson to a close: “That’s all I can teach you for today,” he told me. “You’ve made more progress in a few lessons than some people make in weeks.” It sounds like I made that up, but if you take a lesson from him—and if you’re in New York City and looking to spend $150 an hour, I highly recommend it—you can let me know if he tells you the same thing.

Of course, even three hours’ worth of lessons with the best instructor (and Hohmann really was the best) did not transform me into a champion player. The next day, my boyfriend and I hit a dive bar in Massachusetts—shout out to Bogie’s Steak & Ale!—for my inaugural game as someone who could actually hit a ball. I didn’t sink every shot, but for the first time, I was in it: loose, competent, confident, having fun and asking for a rematch. “It’s like night and day, seriously,” he said, unprompted, when we were watching TV in bed a few hours later. It felt good to hear, because I knew he was right, and I’m only going to get better.

Katie Way is a senior staff writer at VICE. Follow her on Twitter.