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50-713: The Women's Professional Billiard Association Tour (known as the WPBA Tour ) is a series of professional women's pool tournaments first held in 1992. Events on the tour are operated by the Women's Professional Billiard Association (WPBA). Events in the Tour feature the women's U.S. Open Nine-ball Championship , the WPBA Masters, and the WPBA Tour Championship. The series runs a world ranking format, based on

100-407: A lag , where both simultaneously hit a cue ball up the table, bouncing it off the top cushion so that it returns to baulk (the first quarter-length of the table). The player who gets their ball closer to the baulk cushion can now choose which cue ball they want to use during the game and to break or let the opponent break. The red ball is placed on the spot at the top of

150-446: A broader classification, including games such as snooker , Russian pyramid , and kaisa , which are not referred to as pool games. There are also hybrid games combining aspects of both pool and carom billiards , such as American four-ball billiards , bottle pool , cowboy pool , and English billiards . The etymology of "pool" is uncertain. The Oxford English Dictionary speculates that "pool" and other games with collective stakes

200-751: A diameter of 2.25 inches (57 mm), plus or minus 0.005 inches (0.13 mm). Modern coin-operated pool tables generally use one of three methods to distinguish and return the cue ball to the front of the table while the numbered balls return to an inaccessible receptacle until paid for again: the cue ball is larger and heavier than the other balls, or denser and heavier, or has a magnetic core. Modern cue sticks are generally 58.5 inches (148.6 cm) long for pool while cues prior to 1980 were designed for straight pool and had an average length of 57.5 inches (146.1 cm). By comparison, carom billiards cues are generally shorter with larger tips, and snooker cues longer with smaller tips. These are games descended from

250-400: A set number of shots of varying difficulty. Cowboy pool and bottle pool are games involving only a few balls which are placed at specific spots on the table. Elements of their games go back to the eighteenth century before balls needed to be racked. Bottle pool shares traits with pin billiards games such as Danish pin billiards . Cowboy pool is a descendant of English billiards . Kaisa

300-423: A slight modification of continuous pool , another offshoot of fifteen-ball pool. The shooter may attempt to shoot at any object ball on the table. The goal is to reach a set number of points determined by agreement before the game. One point is scored for each object ball pocketed where no foul is made. A typical game might require a player to score 100 points to win. In professional competition, straight pool

350-846: Is a similar game played with different equipment. As a competitive sport, pool is governed internationally by the World Pool-Billiard Association (WPA), which has multi-national, regional affiliates comprising the All Africa Pool Association (AAPA), Asian Pocket Billiard Union (APBU, including the Middle East), Billiard Congress of America (BCA, Canada and the US), Confederación Panamericana de Billar (CPB, Latin America and Caribbean), European Pocket Billiard Federation (EPBF, including Russia and

400-542: Is a strategic game for two players in which each player is assigned one of the corner pockets on the table. This is the only pocket into which that player can legally pocket balls. The first player to pocket the majority of the balls (8) into their pocket wins the game. The game requires far more defensive strategy than offensive strategy, much unlike eight-ball, nine-ball, or straight pool. Most times, accomplished players choose to position balls near their pocket instead of trying to actually pocket them. This allows them to control

450-637: Is a surviving member of this group of games. The second and more influential game was pyramid pool . By 1850 a variant called fifteen-ball pool became popular. Both games were supplanted by continuous pool in 1888, the immediate forerunner of straight pool (1910). New games introduced at the turn of the 20th century include Kelly pool and eight-ball . The distinctive appearance of pool balls with their many colors and division between solid and striped balls came about by 1889. Prior to this, object balls were uniformly deep-red and differentiated only by numbers. English pyramid pool and life pool players were

500-530: Is derived from the French poule (literally translated "hen"), in which the poule is the collected prize, originating from jeu de la poule, a game that is thought to have been played during the Middle Ages. Supposedly, participants would put an equal amount of money into a pot and throw stones at a live chicken, and the person who successfully hit the chicken first would win the pooled money. Alternatively

550-409: Is not made with any ball, this is a miss; 2 points are awarded to the opponent, who must play from where the balls have come to rest. If an opponent's cue ball is potted, it remains off the table until it is that opponent's turn to play, when it is returned to that player, who may play it in-hand from the "D". There is one exception to this rule: if the non-striker's ball is off the table as a result of

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600-485: Is played on a pocketless carom billiards table, the term pool later stuck to all new games of pocket billiards as the sport gained in popularity in the United States, and so outside the cue sports industry, which has long favored the more formal term pocket billiards , the common name for the sport has remained pool . The OxfordDictionaries.com definition no longer even provides the obsolete meaning found in

650-440: Is the most popular and the predominant professional game with ten-ball as the second-most prominent. There are many local and regional tours and tournaments that are contested with nine-ball. The World Pool-Billiard Association (WPA) publishes the world standardized rules. The European professional circuit has instituted rules changes to make it more difficult to achieve a legal break shot. The largest nine-ball tournaments are

700-454: Is usually played to 125 points. Straight pool is a call-pocket game, meaning the player must indicate the intended object ball and pocket on every shot. The most commonly played pool game is eight-ball, which appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is often thought of as synonymous with "pool". The game has numerous variations, mostly regional. It is the second most played professional pool game, after nine-ball , and for

750-452: The billiard mace in favour of the cue stick . There are a number of pocket billiard games directly descended from English billiards, including bull dog, scratch pool, thirty-one pool and thirty-eight. The last of these gave rise to the more well-known game cowboy pool . English Billiards was virtually unknown in the United States until 1913, when Melbourn Inman visited the US and played

800-611: The Billiards Association and the Billiards Control Club (founded in 1908). In the 19th century and up through the mid-1950s, a common way for championship titles to change hands was by a challenge match . A challenge was issued to a championship title holder accompanied by stake money held by a third party. Up until the first organised professional tournament in 1870, all English billiards champions were decided by challenge. The first champion

850-625: The US Open Nine-ball Championship and the WPA World Nine-ball Championship for men and women. A hotly contested event is the annual Mosconi Cup , which pits invitational European and U.S. teams against each other in one-on-one and scotch doubles nine-ball matches over a period of several days. The Mosconi Cup games are played under the more stringent European rules, as of 2007. Also known as 14.1 continuous , this game originated as

900-596: The World Pool-Billiard Association International Standardized Rules. But tavern eight-ball (also known as " bar pool "), typically played on smaller, coin-operated tables and in a "winner keeps the table" manner, can differ significantly even between two venues in the same city. The growth of local, regional and national amateur leagues may alleviate this confusion eventually. One-pocket owes its origins to 18th century cramp (handicapped) games. It

950-445: The winning and losing carambole game , folding in the names of three predecessor games, the winning game , the losing game , and an early form of carom billiards that combined to form it. The winning game was played with two white balls, and was a 12- point contest. To start, the player who could strike a ball at one end of the table and get the ball to come to rest nearest the opposite cushion without lying against it earned

1000-537: The 1700s, the carom game added a red object ball to the two white cue balls, and dispensed with the pockets. This ball was adopted into the English game, which retained the pockets, and the goal was to cannon off both the red and the opponent's ball on a single shot, earning 2 points. This influence on the English game appears to have come about through the popularity of French tables in English coffee houses; London alone had over two thousand such establishments in

1050-679: The Near East), and Oceania Pocket Billiard Association (OPBA, Australia, New Zealand, Pacific islands). The WPA represents pool in the World Confederation of Billiards Sports , which in turn represents all forms of cue sports (including carom billiards and snooker ) in the International Olympic Committee . English billiards English billiards originated in England, and was originally called

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1100-598: The UK, although it has been eclipsed by snooker . The first governing body of the game, the Billiards Association , was formed in the UK in 1885, a period that saw a number of sporting bodies founded across the British sporting world. By the mid-20th century, the principal sanctioning body was the Billiards Association and Control Council (later the Billiards and Snooker Control Council), formed in 1919 by an amalgamation of

1150-811: The United Kingdom the game is commonly played in pubs, and it is competitively played in leagues on both sides of the Atlantic. The most prestigious tournaments including the World Open are sponsored and sanctioned by the International Pool Tour. Rules vary widely from place to place (and between continents to such an extent that British-style eight-ball pool/blackball is properly regarded as a separate game in its own right). Pool halls in North America are increasingly settling upon

1200-417: The balls must be respotted: red on its spot and opponent's ball in the centre spot, with the striker to play from in-hand. Matches held under professional regulations include a rule forcing the player to execute a shot in a way to have his cue ball cross the baulk line, heading towards the baulk cushion, once between 80 and 99 points in every 100 in a running break. If a foul occurs, two points are awarded to

1250-462: The balls of the other player(s) in a certain order, the winner taking all the stakes submitted at the start of the contest" is now obsolete, and its other specific definitions are all for games that originate in the United States. In the British Empire for most of the nineteenth through early twentieth century, pool referred specifically to the game of life pool . Although skittle pool

1300-406: The early 18th century. One period advertisement read: "A very good French Billiard Table, little the worse for wearing, full size, with all the materials fit for French or English play". The three ancestral games had their British heyday in the 1770s, but had combined into English billiards, with a 16-point score total, by approximately 1800. The skill required in playing these games helped retire

1350-419: The early 19th century games of pyramid pool and fifteen-ball pool which required balls to be racked due to the large number of them on the table. Of the other pyramid traditions of Continental Europe, only Russian pyramid survives. Snooker , originally known as snooker's pool, can be considered a member of this family. Rotation games require players to make legal contact with the lowest numbered ball on

1400-513: The final stroke of the non-striker’s last turn. If the striker then makes 15 consecutive hazards, the non-striker's ball is spotted, after the fifteenth hazard, in the Middle of the Baulk-line or, if that spot is occupied, on the right-hand corner of the “D”, as viewed from baulk. It becomes a "line ball" and may not be played directly from baulk. If the cue ball is touching an object ball, then

1450-405: The first to adopt balls with different colors. The stripes were the last addition. Pool is played on a six pocket table . Modern pool tables generally range in size from 3.5 by 7 feet (1.07 by 2.13 m), to 4.5 by 9 feet (1.37 by 2.74 m). Under World Pool-Billiard Association (WPA) official equipment specifications, pool balls weigh from 5.5 to 6 oz (160 to 170 g) and have

1500-605: The game against Willie Hoppe . By 1915 the game had become rather popular, prompting American billiard hall proprietors of the period to increase the number of English-style tables in their establishments. It also became favored in British colonies ; the game's longest-running champion was an Australian, Walter Lindrum , who held the World Professional Billiards Championship from 1933 until his retirement in 1950. The game remains popular in

1550-441: The game by forcing their opponent to be on defense instead of taking a low percentage shot that could result in a loss of game. These low percentage shots are known as "flyers" by one-pocket aficionados. Bank pool can be played with a full rack (can be a long game), but is more typically played with nine balls (frequently called "nine-ball bank"). The balls are racked in nine-ball formation, but in no particular order. The object of

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1600-443: The game is simple: to be the first player to bank five balls in any order (eight balls when played with a full rack). Penalties and fouls are similar to one pocket in that the player committing the foul must spot a ball for each foul. This must be done before the incoming player shoots. Artistic pool is the competitive discipline of trick shots inspired by its carom equivalent . Played on pool or snooker tables, players must complete

1650-463: The last several decades ahead of straight pool . The goal of eight-ball, which is played with a full rack of fifteen balls and the cue ball, is to claim a suit (commonly stripes or solids in the US, and reds or yellows in the UK), pocket all of them, then legally pocket the 8 ball, while denying one's opponent opportunities to do the same with their suit, and without sinking the 8 ball early by accident. In

1700-409: The many different pool games, the most popular include: eight-ball , 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 generic term pocket billiards is sometimes also used, and favored by some pool-industry bodies, but is technically

1750-409: The middle and pyramid spots are occupied, it goes back on the spot. When potted from the middle or pyramid spot, it returns to the spot at the top of the table. After a losing hazard, play continues in-hand from the "D". When playing from in-hand, a striker must touch a ball or cushion out of baulk before striking a ball in baulk. If playing in-hand and all balls on the table are in baulk, and contact

1800-465: The official rules for these two fundamental shot types, although " pot " and " in-off " have become the usual terms for them in British English . The final element was the cannon (or carom ) shot, which came from carom billiards , a game popular in various countries of western Continental Europe , especially France, and in many parts of Asia and South America. In

1850-481: The opponent's ball; and the player conceded three points if the cue ball was pocketed without even hitting the opponent's ball. These rules continued to exist in English billiards until 1983, when a standard of two points for all fouls was introduced. By contrast, in the losing game a player could only score two points by pocketing the cue ball through a carom off the opponent's ball. " Winning hazard " and " losing hazard " are terms still mentioned in

1900-443: The print edition, and refers only to the typical game "using two sets [each] of seven coloured and numbered balls ... with one black ball and a white cue ball" on a table with pockets. With the exception of one-pocket , games typically called "pool" today are descended from two English games imported to the United States during the 19th century. The first was English billiards which became American four-ball billiards , essentially

1950-567: The results of the prior 6 events. The Tour followed the WPBA receding from the Professional Billiard Tour Association (PBTA) the year prior. This article related to cue sports is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Pool (cue sports) Pool is a series of cue sports played on a billiard table . The table has six pockets along the rails , into which balls are shot. Of

2000-420: The right to shoot for points first. This is the origin of the modern custom of " stringing " (or " lagging "). A player who pocketed the opponent's ball scored two points, as is still the case in modern billiards. A player missing the opponent's ball, considered a foul , added one point to the opponent's total; the shooter conceded two points if their own ball went into a pocket after striking

2050-444: The same equipment for both games and play the game to practise ball control. There are three balls. They are the same size as snooker balls (52.5 mm or 2 + 1 ⁄ 16  in with a tolerance of 0.05 mm) and they must weigh the same to a tolerance of 0.5  g within a set. The balls are designated as: The billiard table used has the same dimensions as in snooker, and in many venues, both games are played on

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2100-433: The same equipment. The playing area of a standard tournament table measures 11 feet 8 inches by 5 ft 10 in (3.569 m by 1.778 m) with a tolerance of 1 ⁄ 2 inch (1.26 cm) in both directions, though smaller ones, down to half size, are often found in snooker halls , pubs and home billiard rooms . To see who will be the starting player, players perform

2150-403: The same game but with an extra red object ball to increase scoring opportunities. It was the most popular billiards game in the mid-19th century until dethroned by the carom game straight rail . American four-ball tournaments tried switching to carom tables in the 1870s but this did not save it from being doomed to obscurity; the last professional tournament was held in 1876. Cowboy pool

2200-429: The start of the game, or by which player is leading at the end of a timed game. If the red is potted it is respotted on the spot at the top of the table (the black spot). After the red has been potted twice off the spot in a row (i.e. without a cannon or losing hazard), it is respotted on the middle spot . If the middle spot is occupied, it goes on the pyramid spot (the pink spot in snooker). If both

2250-437: The table (same as the black spot in snooker) and the first player begins by playing in-hand from the "D" behind the baulk line. The other cue ball remains off the table until the opponent's first turn, when they play in hand from the "D". The idea is to leave the balls safe by creating either a double baulk (both object balls in baulk), or the red in baulk with the cue-ball tight ( frozen ) to

2300-410: The table or a foul is called. The earliest rotation game, originally known as 61 , started off as a variant of fifteen-ball pool during the mid-nineteenth century. The name "rotation" came from how the balls were placed around the table in its unracked offshoot Chicago . 61 has spawned many variations of its own such as American rotation , nine-ball , ten-ball , and Kelly pool . Of these, nine-ball

2350-427: The term could derive from the verb to pool in the sense of combining objects or stakes. The oldest use of the word "pool" to describe a billiards-like game was made in 1797 in a Virginia newspaper. The OED defines it as generally "any of various types of billiards for two or more players" but goes on to note that the first specific meaning of "a game in which each player uses a cue ball of a distinctive colour to pocket

2400-429: The top-side cushion. Points are awarded as follows: Combinations of the above may all be scored on the same shot. The most that can be scored in a single shot is therefore 10 – the red and the other cue ball are both potted via a cannon (the red must be struck first), and the cue ball is also potted, making a losing hazard off the red. The winner is determined by a player reaching a fixed number of points set at

2450-829: Was Jonathan Kentfield, who held the title from 1820 to 1849, losing it to John Roberts Sr. after Kentfield refused his challenge. Roberts's 21-year reign lasted until he lost to William Cook in 1870. That year was also the first in which an English billiards challenge match was held in the United States. From 1870 to 1983 the champions were: William Cook , (1870, 1871–74); John Roberts Jr. , (1870, 1871, 1875–77, 1885); Joseph Bennett , (1870, 1880–81); Charles Dawson , (1899–1900, 1901, 1903); H. W. Stevenson , (1901, 1909–11); Melbourne Inman , (1908–09, 1912–19); Willie Smith , (1920, 1923); Tom Newman , (1921–22, 1924–27); Joe Davis , (1928–32); Walter Lindrum , (1933–50); Clark McConachy , (1951-68); Rex Williams , (1968–76, 1982–83); and Fred Davis , (1980). A "Women's Billiard Association"

2500-489: Was formed in Britain in 1931. One of the founders was Teresa Billington-Greig who had been a leading suffragette and was then married to a billiard ball manufacturer. Over the course of the 20th century, English billiards was largely superseded as the favoured cue sport in the United Kingdom by snooker and the rise of English-style eight-ball pool . The game does retain some popularity amongst snooker players, who can use

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