48 Fun Facts About Pool

In pool, what is it called when the cue ball drops into a pocket?

A scratch. In nine-ball it is a foul that gives the opponent 'ball in hand': the right to place the cue ball anywhere on the table for the next shot.

In eight-ball, what does pocketing the 8 before clearing your group cost you?

The game. That rule is one of the two changes that turned pyramid pool into eight-ball around 1900: the 8 had to go down last.

In eight-ball, which balls are the stripes?

9 through 15. Nobody starts with a group: whichever kind a player first pockets legally becomes theirs, and all seven must be gone before they may shoot at the 8.

Where must the 8 ball sit in a standard eight-ball rack?

In the centre of the third row. Only two other places are fixed, a stripe in one back corner and a solid in the other; every remaining ball must go in at random.

In nine-ball, which object sits at the front of the diamond rack?

The 1. The 9 sits in the middle of the diamond, and because it is the money ball, sinking it on a legal break ends the rack on the spot.

In nine-ball, what must the cue ball contact first on every shot?

The lowest-numbered ball on the table. The balls need not fall in order, though: hit the lowest one first and anything that drops counts, so the 9 can be won early.

Straight pool is also known by what name?

14.1 continuous pool. The name is the rule: once fourteen balls are down they are re-racked around the fifteenth and the shooter carries on, so a run can go on from rack to rack.

Which body governs the game as an international competitive sport?

The WPA specifies balls of 2 1/4 inches weighing 5.5 to 6 ounces.

The playing surface of a regulation pool table has the proportions of what?

Two squares side by side. The two-to-one ratio became standard in the 18th century; before then tables had no fixed dimensions at all.

On a quality pool table, the playing surface under the cloth is made of what?

Slate. The earliest beds were cloth-covered wooden boards; slate took over around 1835, and tournament tables now use three matched slabs at least an inch thick.

Why is billiard cloth traditionally green?

It recalls the grass of lawn games. Billiards began outdoors as a game like croquet; when play moved indoors onto a table in the 15th century, green cloth stood in for the lawn.

Which Shakespeare heroine suggests a game of billiards, centuries before billiards was invented?

Cleopatra. 'Let's to billiards', she tells her attendant in Antony and Cleopatra, a slip that shows how familiar the game was to Shakespeare's audience.

The word 'billiard' may come from the French 'billart', meaning what?

Stick. Dictionaries trace the word to Old French bille, a piece of wood, the name passing from the stick to the game; a rival theory derives it from bille meaning a ball.

Until the early 20th century, high-quality billiard balls were made from what?

Elephant ivory. Demand grew so fast that the industry feared running out of tusks, and its hunt for a replacement produced one of the first plastics.

Which inventor, seeking a new material for billiard balls in the 1860s, patented celluloid?

John Wesley Hyatt. His celluloid was the first plastic to succeed commercially, so a hunt for a better billiard ball ended up giving the world dentures, film stock and much else.

Under what brand does Belgian firm Saluc make the balls used at most professional tournaments?

Aramith. The maker claims more than 85% of the world's players use its balls, so one Belgian factory supplies pool, snooker and carom tables almost everywhere.

Under world rules, what material must tournament pool balls be cast from?

Phenolic resin. The hard plastic is the last in a long line: earlier balls were turned from wood, moulded from clay or carved from ivory.

What is the tip of a pool cue traditionally made from?

Leather. Chalked cues came first; the leather tip, perfected by the 1820s, was what finally let players strike the ball off-centre and make it spin.

Why do players apply chalk to the tip of a cue?

To add friction and avoid miscues. Players were chalking cues for grip before cues even had tips, and that grip is what lets a player strike off-centre to spin the ball.

The shaft of a snooker cue is traditionally made from which wood?

Ash. Pool players go the other way and favour straight-grained hard maple for their shafts, a wood that some snooker players use as well.

Willie Mosconi set the straight-pool record in 1954 by running how many consecutive balls?

526. He did it without a miss at an exhibition, and dozens of people in the room signed a sworn statement to prove it; the mark stood for 65 years.

The Mosconi Cup, founded in 1994, pits the United States against which team?

Europe. It began as a television exhibition meant to interest British viewers in pool, with a team format borrowed from golf's Ryder Cup.

Which 1961 film starred Paul Newman as pool shark 'Fast Eddie' Felson?

The Hustler. The film rescued a game that seemed to be dying out: new pool rooms opened all over America and the boom lasted through the 1960s.

Paul Newman won his only competitive Academy Award for reprising Fast Eddie in which 1986 sequel?

The Color of Money. With Tom Cruise as the young hotshot, it set off a second pool boom a quarter-century after the first film, this time in smart new upscale rooms.

Real-life player Rudolf Wanderone took the name Minnesota Fats from where?

The character in the 1961 film. Known until then as New York Fats, he claimed the screen character was based on him, which the novel's author always denied, and became a celebrity anyway.

Which Filipino pool player is nicknamed 'The Magician' and 'Bata'?

Efren Reyes. 'Bata', meaning kid, told him apart from an older player of the same name; 'The Magician' came later, for the escape shots he seemed to conjure off the cushions.

Jeanette Lee, world No. 1 in the 1990s, is known by which nickname?

The Black Widow. A club owner coined it because the mild-mannered Lee would 'eat people alive' once she reached the table, and she played up to it by always dressing in black.

British Army officers stationed in which country are credited with inventing snooker in the 1870s?

India. By tradition the name comes from army slang for a raw cadet, turned on a fellow player by a young officer called Neville Chamberlain, not the later prime minister.

What is the maximum break in snooker?

147. It takes all fifteen reds, each followed by the black for eight points a pair, and then the six colours in order for 27 more, with no miss anywhere.

Since 1977 the World Snooker Championship has been staged at which Sheffield venue?

The Crucible Theatre. It is a working playhouse whose stage is wrapped by seats on three sides, so nobody in the audience is more than about 20 metres from the table.

Which of the three main cue-sport families is played on a table with no pockets?

Carom billiards. With no pockets to aim for, a point is scored by sending the cue ball into both of the other balls; in three-cushion play it must touch three cushions on the way.

Which imprisoned royal had her billiard table taken away by her jailer?

Mary, Queen of Scots. The story goes that her jailer removed the table once she was condemned, and that its cloth was used to cover her body after the execution.

In 19th-century America, a 'poolroom' was a parlour for betting on what?

Horse racing. Billiard tables were put in so gamblers could pass the time between races, and the game ended up with the name of the betting pool.

The word 'cue' comes from the French 'queue', which means what?

Tail. Early players pushed the ball with a club-headed implement; near a cushion they turned it round and struck with the thin handle, its tail, which became the cue.

The Great Bath, thought to be the world's first swimming pool, was dug in the 3rd millennium BC where?

Mohenjo-daro. Its builders in the Indus Valley, in what is now Pakistan, made the brick tank watertight by sealing it with a thick layer of natural tar.

'Piscina', the Italian and Spanish word for a swimming pool, originally meant what in Latin?

A fish pond. Wealthy Romans kept fish in their private pools, so the word for one became the word for the other; French 'piscine' has the same root.

How long is an Olympic-size swimming pool?

50 metres. The pool is laid out with ten lanes, but only eight are raced in: the two outer ones are left empty as a buffer between the swimmers and the walls.

Which country's San Alfonso del Mar resort opened in 2006 with what was then the world's largest swimming pool?

Chile. The pool at Algarrobo is more than a kilometre long and is filled with seawater pumped in from the Pacific, which lies a few steps away.

Which chemical is most commonly used to kill pathogens in swimming pool water?

Chlorine. The same chemistry made city tap water safe: before chlorination, cholera and typhoid carried in drinking water killed thousands of people every year.

The 'diamonds' inlaid along a pool table's rails are also called what?

Sights. They are credited to Michael Phelan, the 19th-century promoter remembered as the father of American billiards, who added them to help players aim shots off the cushions.

Which piece of equipment came before the cue and resembled a small golf club for shoving the ball?

The mace. It lingered long after the cue arrived, because for years women were made to keep using it: they were thought likelier to rip the cloth with the sharper cue.

The OED speculates the word 'pool' comes from French poule, literally meaning what?

Hen. In the old game the theory points to, players are said to have put in equal stakes and thrown stones at a live bird, the first hit taking the pot; dictionaries call the link possible, not proven.

What do American pool players call side-spin on the cue ball, after the visitors who taught it to them?

English. Visitors from England showed Americans how to spin the ball in the early 1800s; the British themselves simply call it 'side'.

Which American author made the billiard room at the top of his house his writing room?

Mark Twain. As his family grew he gave up his study to the children and wrote instead in the billiard room on the top floor of his Hartford house.

Why was fifteen-ball pool nicknamed '61'?

Scoring 61 won a rack. Each ball scored its own number and fifteen balls add up to 120, so the first player to 61 held more than half and could not be caught.

The novelist behind Fast Eddie Felson also wrote which chess novel?

The Queen's Gambit. Walter Tevis knew the world he wrote about: he worked in a pool hall as a student and published a pool story before the novels.

Which company's early version of eight-ball used seven red and seven yellow balls with one black?

Brunswick-Balke-Collender. The firm named it after itself: its handbook printed the rules under a heading made of the company's own initials.

Seven-ball, credited to William D. Clayton, racks its object balls in what shape?

A hexagon. Seven balls pack naturally into one, six around a centre ball, with the 1 at the front and the 7, the ball that wins the game, in the middle.