The match ends and you do not know what to take from it.
You won or lost, but you do not know whether you played to your ability.
Most players judge their performance by the result.
Not by their play.
This creates a problem:
you do not know whether you need to change something,
whether you played correctly,
or whether the game simply did not go your way.
This is not a matter of experience.
It is a matter of measurement.
In motor learning, performance is evaluated relative to your average:
what you do consistently over a large sample of attempts.
Without that, the brain uses the result as its criterion.
And the result is not reliable.
A simple tool:
For ten days, play twenty open layouts every day:
layouts without problems, which can be cleared.
Start with cue ball in hand and try to run out.
Measure:
how many of those layouts you clear.
You will have two hundred attempts in total.
That is your sample.
That is your average.
Do not change anything in the tournament.
Simply observe:
are you playing close to that percentage or not?
If you are close, you played at your level.
If you are far away, something changed in your execution.
The same can be measured in safety play:
– when you are left in a safety, count how often you escape without fouling,
– when you play a safety, count how often you leave your opponent without a direct hit on the object ball.
But if there is not time for everything, that one measurement is enough.
The same pattern appears in life.
In many areas, such as work, nutrition, practice and habits, we do not know where we stand.
We have not measured what we can do.
When it is time to evaluate the result,
we have no basis for comparison.
So we confuse the result with actual performance.
Simply put:
You cannot judge your performance without first measuring your average.
If you find this useful, keep it.
If not, move on.