Ine Helvik

I was so close, but I rattled the 6 ball and scratched in the side on 6-6… That’s life. I played a 13 year old pool prodigy. 13 do not mean she is a novice though; she has been playing for many years already. And she knows how to hit the balls, that’s for sure.

I started friday playing against Severine Titaux ( FRA) and this was not a good match. Neither of us played well, but I got it in the end. That meant I had to play against the chinese darling Liu Sasha. She is no 2 in the world and recently won the China Open so her confidence was boosting. I played really well, but the conditions and audience got to me and I missed two important balls because of that. I lost 7-3 and that was it for friday. Saturday I was to play this 13 year old Jiang Teng from China and that was a good match. I was up 3-0 and 4-2, but she closed the gap and we went hill-hill before she closed it with ball in hand and 4 balls left on the table.

The conditions here make you play different shots than what you would normally do. It is so warm and so humid that the balls are really sticky and does not react like they are supposed to. Also the audience are not behaving very nice when you play against chinese players. They move in your shot, takes heaps of pictures while you are down aiming and they are only about 2 meters away. You have got constant distraction and your draw shot does not work or if you have to hit the rail and that means a new variable. When you first start to doubt your shots you get even more unsecure because nothing works like is supposed to. This is really hard and you really need to work with yourself to pull through. Us europeans are just not used to this and the results show it. We only had 4 western players left in the last 32, the rest of us, including Jasmin Ouschan, were out.

We had Karen Corr, Alison Fisher, Kelly Fisher and Ana Mazhirina left in the last 32. By the QF we were down to only Alison Fisher and we are all going to be there when she plays tonight to show our support. Our last standing hopeJ

Still no pictures, I am not able to upload any. I will post them when I get back home to Norway.

All the remaining matches are on livestream:  http://news.my147.com/2013/08/48249.html

Tuesday Lyndall Hulley, Taylor Meyer, Alison Chang and I are going to Beijing to be tourists for a couple of days. I am looking forward to that, we are going to the wall again, which is always nice. I hope my cold is gone before Wednesday, I would not walk the wall with a bad cold. It is hard enough alreadyJ

I think this will be my last post from China, it is not easy to log onto my blog from here. WordPress is blocked, so I need to use a vpn tunnel and that does not always work.

Thanks for readingJ

Take care

IneJ

PS, I got in the money, $ 750 to help pay for the trip. Everything helps:)