9/9/2023 0 Comments Black widow billiards hall![]() ![]() ![]() She’s not sure she wants to go pro, but she’s working toward bigger tournaments, like the one in Vegas. “ says she created a monster by inviting me to play,” Mata says. She wasn’t very good, she admits, but her drive to improve was insatiable. But the only pool halls near their home were inappropriate for little girls-so she didn’t start playing regularly until she was 23, when her brother’s girlfriend asked her to join her team. When she was a kid, her dad loved watching pool on TV, and she dreamed of playing professionally, too. She plays in a team league as well as on the women’s tour. She quit her job managing a Bay Area Target store when she convinced the owner of her favorite pool hall to hire her, so she practices nearly every day at work. For the past five years, her life has revolved around pool. A handicap system encourages women of all abilities to participate: the pro player who cofounded the event in 2007 has to win eight games to win a match, while newbies must win just five. But the California tour is not just for elite players-the women at Billiard Palacade range in age from their teens to their 70s, and the spread of skill levels is at least as wide. Top performers will qualify for the annual American Poolplayers Association Championships in Las Vegas in August, and several of the regulars travel widely for bigger competitions. The tour focuses on nine-ball billiards, in which players must use the cue ball to strike the lowest-numbered of the nine balls on the table. The event is the eighth stop in the West Coast Women’s Tour, a series with monthly events across Northern California. “So if I’m not on top of my game because I didn’t get enough sleep or didn’t eat right or didn’t have a good practice session last night, I’m going to have a rough day.”Īna Plotnikova racks the balls during the West Coast Women's Tour at the Billiard Palacade in San Francisco. “These girls are all my friends, but they’re also crazy good pool players,” Mata tells me, fresh off a streak of eight consecutive hugs with her competitors. Now it’s time to compete at the penultimate stop in what may be the most competitive regional women’s pool tour in the country. baking class at the City College of San Francisco, where she learned how to make pot de crème. But the funk is very real: she didn’t get much sleep last night because she didn’t get home from work-pouring beers and cooking hot dogs at another pool hall six miles uptown-until 2:30 a.m., and her shift had been so busy that she didn’t get much time to practice her game. Thirty-year-old Mata (Ren, to her friends) is one of 30 women at Billiard Palacade, a dark pool hall in Balboa Park, one of the last ungentrified neighborhoods in San Francisco, and there’s nowhere she’d rather be. So when she takes a break from shooting pool one Saturday morning in mid-January to tell me, still smiling, that she’s “in a funk,” I honestly can’t tell if she’s joking. She never stops grinning and stops talking only slightly more often. Renée Mata is a 4-foot-11 ball of irrepressible good vibes. ![]()
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