Explorance Employees are Chasing the 8 Ball

In 2013 Explorance opened the Blue Lounge in our head office and within it can be found, among other things, a pool table. After our first annual pool tournament that year, the 2014 tournament has begun with a different flavour.

We began with polling every employee, using our Explorance Blue Survey software, showing that there is an exception to the rule about the shoemaker not shoeing his kids. This allowed each employee to join the tournament if they were so inclined. If they joined, they got to pick their cue name, like: TopSpin, Mad Hatter, Pockets MgGurk and Super Blue.

Next the committee organizing the event decided to have a total company round robin so that everyone gets to play against everyone. This is a terrific idea as it allows us to mix with other parts of the company with whom we do not interact regularly. So someone who works in Support can play against someone who works in Marketing, for example.

There is no fixed schedule for this round-robin tournament; showing up in the lounge at certain times of day we can encounter a fellow employee and strike up a game. Lunch time and Friday afternoons seem to be the most popular times to play.

Scoring gets marked on a large poster that shows the grid of scores. In brief, three points are won by the winner, plus one point for each of the opponent’s ball left on the table. Later this year a finals tournament will take place where the players that have the top 16 scores will advance.

To decide who breaks, each player has to strike a ball, bounce it off the opposite side and whichever ball ends up closest to the close side gets to break. Some of us strategize the loss of the break, especially when we recognize that the person against whom we are playing is either really good, or really bad.

At the time of this blog posting about a third of all possible games played have been played. Some of us have already reached 50 points while others of us have fallen somewhat shorter. I’m somewhere in the middle having won about half of my games.