Billiards began as an indoor imitation of a lawn game, which is why the cloth is green. These stories run from lead huts on a pocketless French table to a heated slate in a carom final, by way of a prisoner's leather cue tip, a queen of Egypt who could not have played, and the two men who each ran more than five hundred balls without missing.
Every tile in a Billiards and Pool game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
The Games
nine stories
1The billiard game with no pockets at all
On the tile: Three Cushions
The world body for carom billiards, the Union Mondiale de Billard, publishes rules for a game played on a table with no pockets. The free playing surface measures 2.84 meters by 1.42 meters, and there are only three balls. To score at three cushions, the cue ball must touch cushions at least three times before it reaches the second object ball. When a player falls short, the referee says how many cushions were managed: no cushion, one cushion, two cushions.
Carom rewards keeping all three balls close together, so the rule makers began drawing on the cloth. The world rules describe cadres, quadrilaterals marked in chalk, pencil or ink, with smaller squares at the ends of the lines called anchors. In the 47 centimeter game, four lines divide the table into nine of these boxes. In the two-stroke version a player may not make two scoring shots inside one box without driving an object ball out of it.
In 14.1 continuous pool, better known as straight pool, every called ball is worth one point. The trick is in the name. Once fourteen of the fifteen balls are down, the world rules have those fourteen re-racked without the apex ball while the fifteenth normally stays where it lies. The shooter carries on. Pocket that last ball so the cue ball smashes into the fresh rack, and the turn never has to end. That is why the sport's high runs are counted in hundreds.
One-pocket looks like ordinary pool until you learn the assignment. Each player is given a single pocket at the foot of the table, and the first to score eight balls in it wins the rack. The world rules are blunt about the consequence: each ball legally pocketed in one of the foot pockets counts one point for the corresponding player. Drop a ball in the wrong hole and you have just handed your opponent a point.
5The game where a straight shot counts for nothing
On the tile: Bank Pool
Bank pool throws out the easy half of the game. Every score has to come off a cushion first, and the player must announce three things before shooting: which object ball, which cushions it will strike and in what order, and which pocket it will finish in. Stray onto an uncalled rail and the shot does not count. A short rack is nine balls and the winning score is five, which tells you how often the caller is right.
6The nine-ball rule that allows a deliberate bad shot
On the tile: The Push Out
Nine-ball's second shot comes with an escape hatch. If no foul was committed on the break, the player taking that second shot, the breaker included, may declare a push out to the referee, and two of the usual fouls are switched off for that stroke: the cue ball need not hit the lowest ball first, and nothing has to reach a rail. The cue ball can be nudged anywhere. If the push out is clean, the other player chooses who shoots next.
Pyramid, the Russian game that the world pool body carries as a discipline of its own, uses sixteen balls: fifteen white ones numbered 1 to 15, plus one colored ball that normally serves as the cue ball. Free pyramid, also called dynamic pyramid, drops that arrangement. Its rules say there is no permanent division into one cue ball and fifteen object balls, so on any stroke but the opening break a player may shoot with any ball on the table, and all the rest become targets.
A perfect snooker frame is a 147: fifteen reds with fifteen blacks, then the six colors. Yet the record stands higher, because the rules allow a free ball when a player is snookered after a foul, and that spare ball can be scored before the reds are touched. Jamie Burnett reached 148 that way in 2004. On March 20, 2026, in China, Ronnie O'Sullivan took a free-ball green and then a black for eight points before his first red, and finished on 153.
9The count a billiards referee has to say out loud
On the tile: Cannons
English billiards uses three balls, a red plus a cue ball for each player, and a cannon scores when the cue ball touches both of the others. A good enough player could repeat it from the same small cluster all evening, so the official rules cap consecutive cannons at seventy-five. After the seventieth the referee must announce it, in the rule book's own capitals: SEVENTY CANNONS. If the referee forgets, the player is entitled to five more anyway.
Sports Illustrated described how Willie Hoppe's father, a barber, used to taunt smart-aleck salesmen in poolrooms with a challenge: "I got a kid who could beat you." The kid was a veteran of competition at ten. At eighteen Hoppe won the world title from the Frenchman Vignaux in Paris, and he later played at the White House for an admiring William Howard Taft. The world confederation of billiards sports still describes him as a fifty-one-time world champion.
Masako Katsura, known as Katsy, learned in the billiard halls of Tokyo, and Japan's foremost champion, Kinrey Matsuyama, coached her in three-cushion billiards. In exhibition she was noted for running 10,000 points at straight rail. She moved to the United States in 1951 and was invited into the 1952 World Three-Cushion Championship, the first woman ever included in any world billiards tournament. She finished fourth at the 1954 world championship in Buenos Aires, and toured the country with Willie Hoppe.
Ruth McGinnis started playing at seven in her family's barbershop in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, and at about ten she ran 47 balls. From 1933 to 1939 she lost 29 of 1,532 matches, and she logged close to 28,000 miles a season on exhibition tours. Her best run was 128. In 1932 she explained that she played men because there was no competition among women. In 1948 she became the first woman to compete for the world pocket billiard title.
For 65 years nobody beat 526. On Memorial Day 2019, at Easy Street Billiards in Monterey, California, John Schmidt ran 626 balls at straight pool, and it took him just under four hours. His team filmed the whole attempt so the run could be verified afterward, which matters for a record set in exhibition rather than in a tournament: there is no scoresheet, only witnesses and tape.
Joe Davis won snooker's World Championship fifteen times in succession, the last of them after the Second World War, and the governing body still calls him the grandfather of snooker. He was variously called the Sultan of Snooker and the Emperor of Pot. He did all of it unable to focus with his right eye. In 1956 he published How I Play Snooker, which Steve Davis, a six-time world champion and namesake, later described as the bible for all players.
Snooker's World Championship had been a British preserve for half a century when Cliff Thorburn of Canada won it in 1980. The governing body calls him the first non-British champion, discounting a boycotted 1952 final won by the Australian Horace Lindrum that its own history says virtually nobody recognized. Three years after his title, at the Crucible in Sheffield, Thorburn compiled the first 147 the theater had ever seen, against Terry Griffiths. A second Canadian, Kirk Stevens, made one at the Masters the following year.
7A perfect frame in five minutes and eight seconds
On the tile: Fastest 147April 21, 1997
On April 21, 1997, in the first round of the World Championship at the Crucible, Ronnie O'Sullivan cleared a whole frame against Mick Price without appearing to stop. For years the record was published as 5 minutes 20 seconds, calculated from BBC footage. Guinness World Records says that figure was wrong: measured from the moment O'Sullivan first struck the cue ball, the maximum took 5 minutes 8 seconds, roughly eight and a half seconds for each of its 36 shots. World Snooker now acknowledges the shorter time.
A Belgian government profile calls Raymond Ceulemans the most rewarded player in the history of carom billiards: 35 times world champion, 48 times European champion and 61 times Belgian champion. He was nicknamed Mister 100 after his hundredth title, won in Las Vegas. His world titles began in Germany in 1963 and ended in Luxembourg in 2001, when he was 63. King Albert II of Belgium made him a knight, an honor the profile notes few athletes can claim.
Reanne Evans won the World Women's Snooker Championship ten years running, from 2005 to 2014, and added an eleventh in 2016. Ng On Yee of Hong Kong, a three-time champion, then took the next two. In 2019, in Bangkok, Evans beat Thailand's Nutcharut Wongharuthai 6-3 for what the world snooker federation called a record-extending twelfth title. Evans said the end of her long run had been "frustrating and gutting," and that the twelfth meant more for it.
Under the World Pool-Billiard Association's equipment specification, a tournament table's bed is slate at least one inch thick, cut into three pieces of equal size with a wooden frame beneath them. The surface must stay flat within twenty thousandths of an inch along its length, and it may not sag more than thirty thousandths when a 200-pound load sits at its center. After leveling, the joints between slates must line up within five thousandths of an inch.
Players call it felt. Iwan Simonis, the Belgian mill that weaves worsted wool cloth for tournament tables, says its fabric is not a common felt but a precisely woven one. The world body's specification is just as particular: nap-free billiard fabric of 80 to 85 percent combed worsted wool with 15 to 20 percent nylon, and 100 percent combed worsted wool preferred. The cloth must not pill or fluff, backed cloth is not allowed, and for competition only three colors are acceptable: yellow-green, blue-green and electric blue.
Every ball in World Pool-Billiard Association play must be cast phenolic resin, 2 1/4 inches across within five thousandths of an inch, weighing between 5 1/2 and 6 ounces. The specification also says what not to do to them. Balls should be unpolished and unwaxed, cleaned with a towel or with soap and water. Any ball treated with a slippery compound has to be wiped down with diluted alcohol before play. Shine is not a finishing touch here.
The balls are not interchangeable. Snooker's rule book sets a diameter of 52.5 millimeters, and asks that the heaviest and lightest ball in a set be no more than three grams apart. Pool's specification gives 2 1/4 inches, about 57.15 millimeters. Carom billiards, played without pockets, uses the largest of the three: the world rules require 61 to 61.5 millimeters. Crossing between the games changes the size of the target and the weight of the hit at once.
Pool's equipment specification is oddly one-sided about cues. The length must be at least 40 inches, with no maximum given. The weight has no minimum but may not exceed 25 ounces. The tip may be no wider than 14 millimeters. Snooker's rule book asks only that a cue be at least three feet long and show no change from the traditional tapered shape and form. Between the two codes, there is room for a cue as long as a player can carry.
A cushion's height is not given in inches. The pool specification puts the nose of the rail between 62.5 and 64.5 percent of the ball's diameter above the bed, a little above the middle of the ball. The rubber is triangular, and with its cloth on it measures one and seven-eighths to two inches from the featherstrip to the nose. Then the specification tests the result rather than the theory: struck firmly from the head spot through the foot spot, a ball must travel four to four and a half lengths of the table without jumping.
A three-cushion table is an appliance. The world rules of carom billiard require that a table used in an official tournament carry an electrical heater to eliminate humidity from the slate and from the cloth, and that the heater and its thermostat be switched on from the moment the table is set up and stay on for the whole competition. The stated reason is to ensure the best possible rolling, from the first day of a tournament to the last.
For most of the nineteenth century, players rubbed real chalk, carbonate of lime, on a cue tip to keep it from slipping off the ball. In March 1897, William A. Spinks and William Hoskins were granted a United States patent for a substitute built around commercially pure silica, with a little glue to bind it and powdered corundum to roughen it. Their patent argues that silica clings to the leather more tenaciously and leaves less residue behind. The cube is still called chalk.
In 1864 the billiard supplier Phelan & Collender published a $10,000 reward for an artificial ivory that matched the real thing for elasticity, density and hardness at half the cost. John Wesley Hyatt, a young printer from Albany, New York, took up the challenge. The Smithsonian keeps his 1868 ball on its own pedestal, under a plaque calling it the first plastics resin. When researchers analyzed it, they found not pure celluloid but a composite: cellulose nitrate, camphor and ground bone, the bone identified as cattle. By 1885 a set of four sold for $10.50 against $22 for ivory.
The snooker and billiards governing body's history of the cue describes early French versions of the game that would baffle a modern player. One was fortification billiards, played on a pocketless table with little lead huts, bells, hoops and kingpins, and it was far closer to an indoor version of croquet than to anything in a poolroom. The same account explains the color of the surface in passing: the cloth was made green to emulate grass.
John Carr kept score at Bartley's billiard rooms in Bath, and his employer taught him a rare trick: striking the cue ball off center to put spin on it. Carr grew better at it than his teacher, hid the method by appearing to aim dead center, and told astonished customers that the secret was his special Twisting Chalk, sold in small boxes at half a crown. Twist was the old word for what players now call side. The chalk was ordinary chalk.
Army slang gave the game its name. At the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, older cadets called a first-term junior a snooker, being apt to despise them. The story goes that in 1875, in an officers' mess at Jubbulpore in India, Lieutenant Neville Chamberlain, not the prime minister of the same name, added colored balls to a pool game, remarked that everyone present was a snooker at it, and watched the name stick. Chamberlain made that claim in 1938, sixty-three years later, and researchers still argue about where and when.
4The first world snooker title paid six pounds ten
On the tile: Camkin's Hall1927
Snooker's first professional World Championship drew ten entrants and wandered from hall to hall, the players arranging their own venues, before the semifinals and final reached Camkin's Hall in Birmingham in May 1927. Joe Davis beat Tom Dennis 20-11 and collected what the governing body's history calls a princely six pounds ten shillings. Davis had been raised on billiards and, like many players then, looked down on the newer game at first. He backed it anyway, being a financial pragmatist who could see where the earnings were going.
Leicester Square Hall in London, formerly Thurston's and named for a table maker, was an iconic venue for half a century, and the BBC's first outside broadcast of snooker came from there in 1950. Its last act was about as good as the game gets. On January 22, 1955, in an exhibition against Willie Smith, Joe Davis made the first officially recognized 147. The governing body's history says that break effectively brought the curtain down on the hall.
In July 1969 the BBC needed programs that would show off BBC2's new color service. The channel's controller was David Attenborough, years before his natural history films made him a broadcasting legend, and he wanted content that emphasized color. A game with fifteen red balls and six colored ones fit perfectly, and it was easy to cover. Ted Lowe, a former manager of Leicester Square Hall known for whispered commentary, devised the format. Eight professionals were invited, and Pot Black was a hit.
By the mid-1970s snooker's World Championship had no fixed home; it had been staged in various outposts, including Australia. The promoter Mike Watterson wanted something small and intimate for 1977. According to the governing body's history, his wife, Carol, came back one night from seeing a play at a theater in Sheffield and thought it might fit the bill. The Crucible stages dramatic works for fifty weeks a year and snooker for seventeen days, and has done ever since.
In Antony and Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt calls for music, thinks better of it and says, "Let it alone. Let's to billiards. Come, Charmian." Her attendant answers that her arm is sore. Shakespeare was writing about a game of his own century: billiards entered English in the 1590s, from a French word for the wooden stick, and the earliest known reference to the indoor game is a 1470 inventory of the accounts of Louis XI of France. Ancient Alexandria had no billiard tables.
Rudolf Wanderone was known in New York poolrooms as New York Fats. After the 1961 film The Hustler, he announced that its character Minnesota Fats was based on him, and said it until it stuck. Walter Tevis, who wrote the novel, called that ridiculous in a foreword to the 1976 edition, saying he had made up the name "as surely as Disney made up Donald Duck." Then a Kentucky university police officer reexamined Tevis's manuscript in a library basement and found the typed nickname New York Fats crossed out by hand and changed to Minnesota.