Billiards 🎱
General Information
Cue sports (sometimes written cuesports), also known as billiard sports,
are a wide variety of games of skill generally played with a cue stick,
which is used to strike billiard balls and thereby cause them to move
around a cloth-covered billiards table bounded by elastic bumpers known as
cushions.
Historically, the umbrella term was billiards. While that familiar name is
still employed by some as a generic label for all such games, the word's
usage has splintered into more exclusive competing meanings in various
parts of the world. For example, in British and Australian English,
billiards usually refers exclusively to the game of English billiards,
while in American and Canadian English it is sometimes used to refer to a
particular game or class of games, or to all cue games in general,
depending upon dialect and context. In colloquial usage, the term
billiards may be used to refer to pocket billiards games, such as pool,
snooker, or Russian pyramid.
There are 3 major subdivisions of games within cue sports:
- Carom billiards, referring to games played on tables without pockets, typically 10 feet in length, including straight rail, balkline, one-cushion carom, three-cushion billiards, artistic billiards and four-ball
- Pool, covering numerous pocket billiards games generally played on six-pocket tables of 7-, 8-, or 9-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 pyramid, games played on a billiards table with six pockets called a snooker table (which has dimensions just under 12 ft by 6 ft), all of which are classified entirely separately from pool based on a separate historical development, as well as a separate culture and terminology that characterize their play.
Learn more about Cue Sports on Wikipedia
My favorite game: 9-ball!
Nine-ball (sometimes written 9-ball) is a discipline of the cue sport pool. The game is traceable to origins in the 1920s in the United States. It is played on a rectangular billiard table with pockets 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 pocket nine colored billiard balls in ascending numerical order. An individual game (or rack) is won by the player pocketing the 9-ball. Matches are usually played as a race to a set number of racks, with the player who reaches the set number winning the match.
Rules
The game of nine-ball is played on a billiard table with six pockets and with ten balls. The cue ball, which is usually
a solid shade of white (but may be spotted in some tournaments), is struck to hit the other balls on the table. The
remaining balls are numbered 1 through 9, each a distinct color, with the 9-ball being striped yellow and white. The aim
of the game is to hit the lowest numbered ball on the table (often referred to as the object ball) and pocket balls in
succession to eventually pocket the nine-ball. As long as the lowest numbered ball on the table is hit first, the
player may continue to shoot as long as any ball is pocketed in any of the 6 pockets. A shot where the player hits the
object ball and pockets any other ball is sometimes called a combination shot. The winner is the player who pockets the
nine-ball, even if doing so by a combination shot.
Learn more about 9-ball on Wikipedia