Learn All You Have Wanted To Know About Billiards
The game of pool is simple and common: you use a cue to knock billiard balls into
side and corner pockets around a table of quarried slate that is covered with cloth and surrounded by rubber cushions.
The purpose of the cushion rubber is to cause the billiard balls to rebound off the rubber while minimizing the loss of kinetic energy. Around the rail of the table are arrows which visually divide the table into 32 equal squares to aid players in shot accuracy.
The earliest known billiard table, in the royal court of Louis XI of France (1461-1483), was simply a piece of lawn brought indoors and placed on a large, everyday table. Since then though, pool table crafting has become an art and science with specially formulated materials and exact measurements with regulated standards.
Billiard cloth (sometimes erroneously called felt) is a specific type of cloth that covers the top of the table's "playing area". The 19-24 ounce billiard cloth, which is most often green in color (representing the grass of the original lawn games that billiards evolved from), consists of either a woven wool or wool/nylon blend called baize.
Most bar tables, which see high traffic, use the slower, thicker blended cloth because it can better withstand heavy usage. This type of cloth is called a woolen cloth.
By contrast, high quality pool cloth is usually made of a napless weave such as worsted wool, which gives a much faster roll to the balls. This "speed" of the cloth affects the amounts of swerve and deflection of the balls, among other aspects of game finesse and table appearance.
The earliest billiard balls were made of wood and then later clay (the latter remaining in use well into the 20th century). Ivory was favored for several hundred years, but was an impractical source because of the endangered situation of elephants which were killed for their ivory tusks.
Billiards balls' regulated weight is about 5.5 to 6 oz. Balls numbered 1-7 are called solids, while balls 9-15 are termed stripes because of the single stripe around the center of the ball. Though it looks similar to the solids, the 8 ball is not considered a solid.
The sixteenth ball, the cue ball, is not numbered. It is used as an intercessor between the cue and the numbered balls, which cannot be directly touched by the cue.
Pool games depicted on television lead to a variation in the usual color scheme of the balls. For the audience to be able to better distinguish between colors, the purple 4 and the brown 7 are made pink and tan, respectively and the cue ball often is shown with spots so that it appears to be spinning rather than gliding along the surface.
Coin-operated pool tables such as those found at bars and college campuses historically have often used either a larger ("grapefruit") or denser ("rock", typically ceramic) cue ball, such that its extra weight makes it easy for the cue ball return mechanism to separate it from object balls.
There are a couple of aspects of billiards that ought to be considered during and after play. During play, as a participant or viewer, appropriate etiquette should be observed, and afterward, the cues need to be cleaned.
Proper etiquette centers around a respect for the concentration of others. Basically, be quiet and conservative in movement.
As far as cleaning goes, you should clean your cue after every few sessions, depending on how long you play. Cleaning the cues lengthens their lifetime and makes playing more accurate and enjoyable.
There are a few ways to cut down on the amount of chalk that gets on the pool cue. The first is to use a pool billiard glove. This keeps chalk off of your hands which is the main way that it is transmitted to the cue.
You can also limit the amount of chalk that gets on the shaft by how you hold the cue while applying the chalk. If you hold the pool vertically when applying chalk it rains down on the cue; holding it at a slight angle reduces this effect.
by: Jack Landry
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