When I left school in 1982 I used to play pool (and snooker) with a friend at the time, Dominic Duffy. He lived down the road from me. I used to enjoy playing on his six-foot table with him in his back garden. It was even better on lovely, hot summer days. It was fun.
In the 2010’s I used to play pool mainly at the Emerald Club in Green Lane, Small Heath and The Hunters Moon in Coleshill Road, Hodge Hill with my granddaughter Kasey’s dad, Andy Sayers. He is yet another friend that used to be. You see I am the same person I have always been, it is just everyone else who seems to end up not giving a shit and/or end up being so far up their own arse thinking they are better than me and become total twats for one reason or another. Guess what? THEY AREN’T!
Contents
About Pool
Pool is a classification of cue sports played on a table with six pockets along the rails, into which balls are deposited. Each specific pool game has its own name; some of the better-known include eight-ball, blackball, nine-ball, ten-ball, seven-ball, straight pool, one-pocket, and bank pool.
The generic term pocket billiards is sometimes also used, and favoured by some pool-industry bodies, but is technically a broader classification, including games such as snooker, Russian pyramid, and Kaisa, which are not referred to as pool games. In most parts of the world, it is commonly referred to as just “billiards”, analogous to the term “bowling” is commonly used to refer to the game of ten-pin bowling.
There are also hybrid games combining aspects of both pool and carom billiards, such as American four-ball billiards, bottle pool, cowboy pool, and English billiards.
Read more here.
The Etymology Of Pool
The etymology of “pool” is uncertain. The Oxford English Dictionary speculates that “pool” and other games with collective stakes is derived from the French poule (literally translated “hen”), in which the poule is the collected prize; alternatively, it could derive from the verb to pool in the sense of combining objects or stakes. The oldest use of the word “pool” to describe a billiards-like game was made in 1797 in a Virginia newspaper. The OED defines it as generally “any of various types of billiards for two or more players” but goes on to note that the first specific meaning of “a game in which each player uses a cue ball of a distinctive colour to pocket the balls of the other player(s) in a certain order, the winner taking all the stakes submitted at the start of the contest” is now obsolete, and its other specific definitions are all for games that originate in the United States. In the British Empire for most of the nineteenth through the early twentieth century, pool referred specifically to the game of life pool.
Although skittle pool is played on a pocketless carom billiards table, the term pool later stuck to all new games of pocket billiards as the sport gained in popularity in the United States, and so outside the cue sports industry, which has long favoured the more formal term pocket billiards, the common name for the sport has remained pool. The OxfordDictionaries.com definition no longer even provides the obsolete meaning found in the print edition and refers only to the typical game “using two sets [each] of seven coloured and numbered balls … with one black ball and a white cue ball” on a table with pockets.
The History Of Pool
With the exception of one pocket, games typically called “pool” today are descended from two English games imported to the United States during the 19th century. The first was English billiards which became American four-ball billiards, essentially the same game but with an extra red object ball to increase scoring opportunities. It was the most popular billiards game in the mid-19th century until dethroned by the carom game straight rail. American four-ball tournaments tried switching to carom tables in the 1870s but this did not save it from being doomed to obscurity, the last professional tournament was held in 1876. Cowboy pool is a surviving member of this group of games.
The second and more influential game was pyramid pool. By 1850 a variant called fifteen-ball pool became popular. Both games were supplanted by continuous pool in 1888, the immediate forerunner of straight pool (1910). New games introduced at the turn of the 20th century include Kelly pool and eight-ball. The distinctive appearance of pool balls with their many colours and division between solid and striped balls came about by 1889. Prior to this, object balls were uniformly deep-red and differentiated only by numbers. English pyramid pool and life pool players were the first to adopt balls with different colours. The stripes were the last addition.
Read more here.
The above articles were taken from Wikipedia and are subject to change.
Blog Posts
Links
SouthcottC’s page on Wikipedia – The image shown at the top of this page is the copyright of SouthcotC and here you can see his contributions to Wikipedia.