Cue sports, equipment and the betting line
Pool, snooker, carom and Russian pyramid: the disciplines, their racks, their scoring, and the history the shop was built on.
Cue sports are not one game with local variations. Pool, snooker, English billiards, carom and Russian pyramid use different tables, different balls and different definitions of a legal shot, and the rulebooks behind them are written by different bodies that do not always agree. This section takes them one at a time and says what actually differs, starting with the rules a player is most likely to break without noticing.
Discipline rack
Every figure in this table is taken from the history of the game reproduced on this site, condensed by Mike Shamos for the Billiard Congress of America. Eight-Ball was invented shortly after 1900, Straight Pool followed in 1910, Nine-Ball around 1920.
| Discipline | Object balls | Table | How it scores |
|---|---|---|---|
| English Billiards | three | large rectangular, six pockets | dominant in Britain from about 1770 until the 1920s |
| Snooker | 22 | the same equipment as English Billiards | offensive and defensive play in one frame |
| American Four-Ball Billiards | four — two white, two red | 11 or 12 ft, four pockets | pocketing, scratches and caroms; up to 13 points on one shot |
| Straight rail | three | pocketless | simple caroms — the forerunner of all carom games |
| Fifteen-Ball Pool | 15, numbered 1 to 15 | pocket table | the value of the ball; 61 of the rack’s 120 points wins |
| Continuous Pool | 15 | pocket table | one point a ball, carried on from rack to rack |
The WPA World Standardized Rules mandate that fifteen object balls be racked "as tightly as possible in a triangle," with the apex ball on the Foot Spot and the 8-ball positioned as the first ball directly below that apex.
Listed in the order the section reads: journal first, then features, answers, equipment notes and catalogue indexes.
The eight-ball break is the clearest example: a shot that looks successful can be illegal, and the reason is in the rack rather than in the stroke. From there the section fans out — nine-ball against ten-ball, where the break stops being a way to win; snooker against pool, where the equipment defeats the transfer of skill; three-cushion carom, scored on a table with no pockets at all; and straight pool, whose famous records depend on a rule that lets a runner never leave the table.
Governance gets its own piece in the Newsroom, because the question “who writes the rules” has more than one answer and the answer matters when two sources disagree. Here the emphasis is on the table: what the discipline demands, what the equipment has to be, and which habit from the last game will cost you the first frame of the next one.