Billiards
Cue sports are a wide variety of games of skill played with a cue stick, which is used to strike billiard balls and thereby cause them to move around a cloth-covered table bounded by elastic bumpers known as . Cue sports, a category of stick sports, may collectively be referred to as billiards, though this term has more specific connotations in some English dialects. There are three major subdivisions of games within cue sports: * Carom billiards, played on tables without , typically ten feet in length, including straight rail, balkline, one-cushion carom, three-cushion billiards, artistic billiards, and four-ball * Pocket billiards (or pool), played on six-pocket tables of seven, eight, nine, or ten-foot length, including among others eight-ball (the world's most widely played cue sport), nine-ball (the dominant professional game), ten-ball, straight pool (the formerly dominant pro game), one-pocket, and bank pool *Snooker, English billiards, and Russian pyra ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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World Confederation Of Billiards Sports
The World Confederation of Billiards Sports (WCBS) is the international umbrella organization encompassing the major cue sports (billiards-type games), including carom billiards, pool games of several varieties, and snooker.WCBS official website accessed May 12, 2007. It is sometimes called the World Confederation of ''Billiards'' Sports; the logo on the site uses the singular form of the name, while copies of the organisation's founding documents on the site use the plural version The confederation was formed in Yverdon-les-Bains, , on January 25, 1992. [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Nine-ball
Nine-ball (sometimes written 9-ball) is a discipline of the cue sport pool. The game's origins are traceable to the 1920s in the United States. It is played on a rectangular billiard table with at each of the four corners and in the middle of each long side. Using a cue stick, players must strike the white cue ball to nine colored billiard balls, hitting them in ascending numerical order. An individual game (or ) is won by the player pocketing the . Matches are usually played as a to a set number of racks, with the player who reaches the set number winning the match. The game is currently governed by the World Pool-Billiard Association (WPA), with multiple regional tours. The most prestigious nine-ball tournaments are the WPA World Nine-ball Championship and the U.S. Open Nine-ball Championships. Notable 9-Ball players in the game include Luther Lassiter, Buddy Hall, Efren Reyes, Earl Strickland and Shane Van Boening. The game is often associated with hustling a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Billiard Table
A billiard table or billiards table is a bounded table on which cue sports are played. In the modern era, all billiards tables (whether for carom billiards, Pool (cue sports), pool, Russian pyramid, pyramid or snooker) provide a flat surface usually made of quarried slate, that is covered with cloth (usually of a tightly woven worsted wool called baize), and surrounded by vulcanized rubber cushions, with the whole thing elevated above the floor. More specific terms are used for specific sports, such as snooker table and pool table, and different-sized billiard balls are used on these table types. An obsolete term is billiard board, used in the 16th and 17th centuries. Parts and equipment Cushions Cushions (also sometimes called "rail cushions", "cushion rubber", or rarely "bumpers") are located on the inner sides of a table's wooden . There are several different materials and design philosophies associated with cushion rubber. These cushions are made from an elastic material suc ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Straight Pool
Straight pool, which is also called 14.1 continuous and 14.1 rack, is a Cue sports, cue sport in which two competing players attempt to as many s as possible without playing a . The game was the primary version of Pool (cue sports), pool played in professional competition until it was superseded by faster-playing games like nine-ball and eight-ball in the 1980s. In straight pool, the player may and attempt to pocket any object ball on the table regardless of its number or color until only one object ball and the remain, at which point the other fourteen balls are re-Rack (billiards), racked. At this point, play resumes with the objective of pocketing the remaining ball in a manner that causes the cue ball to into the rack, spreading out the balls and allowing the player to continue the . The goal is to reach a set number of points that is determined by agreement before the game begins; traditionally 100 points is needed for a win, though professional matches may go higher. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Cue Stick
A cue stick (or simply cue, more specifically billiards cue, pool cue, or snooker cue) is an item of sporting equipment essential to the games of pool, snooker and carom billiards. It is used to strike a ball, usually the . Cues are tapered sticks, typically about 57–59 inches (about 1.5 m) long and usually between 16 and 21 ounces (450–600 g), with professionals gravitating toward a 19-ounce (540 g) average. Cues for carom tend toward the shorter range, though cue length is primarily a factor of player height and arm length. Most cues are made of wood, but occasionally the wood is covered or bonded with other materials including graphite, carbon fiber or fiberglass. An obsolete term for a cue, used from the 16th to early 19th centuries, is billiard stick. History The predecessor of the cue was the mace, a lightweight implement resembling a golf club, with a foot designed primarily for shoving rather than striking the cue ball. When the ball was ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Eight-ball
Eight-ball (also spelled 8-ball or eightball, and sometimes called solids and stripes, spots and stripes, bigs and smalls, big ones and little ones, or rarely highs and lows) is a discipline of Pool (cue sports), pool played on a billiard table with six Pocket (billiards), pockets, cue sticks, and sixteen billiard balls (a and fifteen ). The object balls include seven solid-colored balls numbered 1 through 7, seven striped balls numbered 9 through 15, and the black 8 ball. After the balls are scattered with a shot, a player is assigned either the group of solid or striped balls once they have legally pocketed a ball from that group. The object of the game is to legally pocket the 8-ball in a "called" pocket, which can only be done after all of the balls from a player's assigned group have been cleared from the table. The game is the most frequently played discipline of pool, and is often thought of as synonymous with "pool". The game has numerous variations, mostly regional. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Pool (cue Sports)
Pool is a series of cue sports played on a billiard table. The table has six Pocket (billiards), pockets along the , into which Billiard ball, balls are shot. "Pool billiards" is sometimes hyphenated and/or spelled with a singular "billiard". The WPA itself uses "pool-billiard" in its logo but "pool-billiards" in its legal notices. The organization compounds the words to result in an acronym of "WPA", "WPBA" having already been taken by the Women's Professional Billiards Association. Normal English grammar would not hyphenate here, and w:de:Poolbillard, the term is actually a Germanism. A general rules booklet on pool games in general, including eight-ball, nine-ball and several others. Of the many different pool games, the most popular include: eight-ball, Blackball (pool), blackball, nine-ball, ten-ball, seven-ball, straight pool, one-pocket, and bank pool. Eight-ball is the most frequently played discipline of pool, and it is often thought of as synonymous with "pool". The ge ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Billiard Ball
A billiard ball is a small, hard ball used in cue sports, such as carom billiards, pool, and snooker. The number, type, diameter, color, and pattern of the balls differ depending upon the specific game being played. Various particular ball properties such as hardness, friction coefficient, and resilience are important to accuracy. History Early balls were made of various materials, including wood and clay (the latter remaining in use well into the 20th century). Although affordable ox-bone balls were in common use in Europe, elephant ivory was favored since at least 1627 until the early 20th century; the earliest known written reference to ivory billiard balls is in the 1588 inventory of Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk. This is a revised version of ''The Story of Billiards and Snooker'', 1979. Dyed and numbered balls appeared around the early 1770s. By the mid-19th century, elephants were being slaughtered for their ivory at an alarming rate, just to keep up with the dem ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Three-cushion Billiards
Three-cushion billiards, also called three-cushion carom, is a form of carom billiards. The object of the game is to the off both while contacting the at least three times before contacting the second object ball. A point is scored for each successful carom. In most shots the cue ball hits the object balls one time each, although hitting them any number of times is allowed as long as both are hit. The cue ball may contact the cushions before or after hitting the first object ball. It does not have to contact three different cushions as long as it has been in contact with any cushion at least three times in total. History Three-cushion dates to the 1870s, and while the origin of the game is not entirely known, it evolved from one-cushion billiards, which in turn developed from straight rail billiards for the same reason that balkline also arose from straight rail. Such new developments made the game more challenging, less repetitive, and more interesting for spectators as wel ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Ground Billiards
Ground billiards is a modern term for a family of medieval European lawn games, the original names of which are mostly unknown, played with a long-handled mallet (the '), wooden balls, a hoop (the ''pass''), and an upright skittle or pin (the ''king''). The game, which cue-sports historians have called "the original game of billiards", developed into a variety of modern outdoor and indoor games and sports such as croquet, pool, snooker, and carom billiards. Its relationship to games played on larger fields, such as hockey, golf, and bat-and-ball games, is more speculative. As a broader classification, the term is sometimes applied to games dating back to classical antiquity that are attested via difficult-to-interpret ancient artworks and rare surviving gaming artifacts. History Dating back to at least the 15th century as a tabletop game, and in recognizable form to as early as the 14th, this proto-billiards game appears to have been ancestral to croquet (19th century), truc ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |