pool

any poolroom operators out there? If so what are your pet peeves? How about pool players pet peeves avout poolroom operators?


Dino.

I don't get to play any pool where I live since I won't go to the one pool hall for various reasons (and I've never seen a billiard table in my current home state) but here are some good complaints and peeves from my fading memory of the cue sports:


As to operators-


-Giving me a blank stare when I ask if you have a billiard table the first time I walk into your pool hall that has the misleading sign saying "Billiards." If you own a pool hall you should know the difference and so should your help.


-Gandy chalk.


-Gandy tables.


-Teeny bopper music and attitude tolerated. I want a bunch of old alcoholics, deadbeats, con men and losers to play cheap nine ball or straight pool with. I want there to be one croak over 80 with entertaining stories. I like it when there's a liquor store next door to sneak booze in. I occasionally like to shoot craps on a billiard table with bad felt. I occasionally want to play gin with the counter help so you have to have a deck of cards with all 52. I want guys with stupid nicknames and cheap cigars around.


-If you can't give me the above I want imported heated-slate billiard tables with outstanding cloth and good balls and a few good billiard players to beat my brains out.


Players:


-Don't drill the chalk.


-Don't get baby powder all over. You don't need it. Wash more than once a week instead.


-No purple cues.


-Learn a game other than one foul nine ball where everything stays down. Try playing push out one time in your existence. Try one-pocket once. Play straight pool once in a while.

rubber backed cloth

the demise of the 5 by 10

big pockets

balls without the black circle around the number


fast 3 cusion tables

no ivory balls around anymore


by the way i still have my old pool cues and i dont play ever. i will guess that i will die with them but i dont know why. i suppose you want to know what they are--


a balabuska that george made for me in new york city around 1968.


an old frank paradise cheapie that he made for me in elizabeth new jersey in 1967 or so before he died.


a nice josh west that billy stroud made around 1978 thats looks like the old rambo i had once in another lifetime.


an old house cue butt with a brass joint that takes good shafts.

Oooh, I'm jealous. I've only seen one Balabushka. A guy named Carlton from NY who moved to Denver played with an old one. Didn't look like much, but that wasn't what it was about. Nicest cue I ever saw was a Joss West Stroud made for a mid-level Denver player. You are a rich man.


Lodged in the back of my closet I have only a tulipwood and ebony Heubler and an old Willie Hoppe. I got the Willie Hoppe from a guy who had it in his basement. I paid him $50. The shaft was no good so I had a pretty good cue maker in Colorado Springs match a shaft to it. I had him do a special taper and it is pretty solid. I had a Helmstetter billiard cue once that was so solid it was a dream. It had the wood-to-wood joint with the screw turned from wood in the shaft. Zero deflection. I can't play anyway but still regret selling it.


When HDPW buys me a nice house I will have a table in the basement. Billiards if it will fit, pool if it won't. At least a Brunswick and Brunswick Centennial balls. I can't make a ball but what the hell?

HDPM,


Ever visit the 211 Club in Seattle before it closed this year (RIP)? A classic pool hall. 2 billiard tables, 4 snooker, and straight pool counters on every table. Money on the lights, no music, barely any noise except for the balls, the chatter and the old pinball machine. They even had a sign that they made the loud talkers and whistlers wear if they didn't heed the owner's warning. I'd go down and grab a pint of Pabst and just watch the old timers play brilliant pool. Learned one pocket there as well as the golf game played on a snooker table. What an excellent joint. Too bad the gentrification of downtown Seattle caused it to close up shop. Very little soul left in that neighborhood.


KJS

No, I was never there. But I would have liked it. I never played a lot of golf (snooker table kind). I was horrible at it. There was a place in Denver where they had a $2/.25 golf game every day. If you had played there less than 5 years every day I think they'd collude against you and make it impossible to win. I did play a little golf against a pretty nice guy with no teeth and a custom cue about twenty feet long who smoked Camel straights and the cheapest human I ever met who had an awful hairpiece and smoked rancid cheap cigars. I think he worried about using too much lighter fluid when he lit one. He would go to an all-you-can eat buffet and eat for as long as he could and then not eat for a day or so. Another guy was a complete loser. I would try to get him to play 9-ball or straight pool because he was an ATM machine. He settled an injury case and had the only money he ever had, like maybe 15K. He dumped like 4-5K trying to get a 1973 station wagon to run. It never did. Wouldn't get a different car. He would lose $20 every day. No more, no less. His wife weighed maybe 700 pounds and would sit in the station wagon outside while he lost. He'd bring her a burrito and a pop periodically. The first one in line got his $20 unless we had a ring game or played golf. Golf made his money last longer. The pool hall where I played these guys became a church. What a horrible fate. The neighborhood was lousy and dying (no chance of gentrification either) but still - a church?

HDPM


Sounds just like the poolroom I used to hang around in my younger{and not quite so younger} days. Joe's Poolroom, Jackson TN Sounds like you've been in the place before!


You're dead right about gandy tables and 9-ball too. I much prefer one-pocket, but since the game requires a little thought, you don't see many of the local poolroom crowd playing playing it.


I own a poolroom right across the street from where Joe's used to be. A bank resides there now and if you ask someone to play some bank they say "it's right across the street" Ah for the days gone by.


Dino.

You Southerners and your bank pool. :-)


If I ever make it to your part of TN (sorry, long odds) I'll play you some cheap bank pool even though I can't win.

I don't like it when some idiot get ready to rack the balls & sets his beer on the felt, or has a cigarette with a long ash hanging from his mouth and it drops on the felt then he rubs it in. Then u got the guy who wants power to rub on his dirty hands.

I didn't know the 211 club went under. As far as I know, it was the last real pool hall in America. I can't remember the sign on the door, but it went something like"


No Music

No Booze

No Bullshit


Somebody like the Smithsonian ought to buy up an old rust-belt action room and keep it running. Spitoons and all.

<BLOCKQUOTE>no ivory balls around anymore </BLOCKQUOTE>


Ivories sure held the english, but were never round. What they were really good for, was providing an excuse. The old timers would miss a popcorn natural, shake their heads and mutter, "That would have gone with ivories."


I remember a place in NYC up on 9th Ave. with acres of 5 x 10's. They also had fifty junkies on the rail who could give me 14 to 2 and the breaks and rob me. The even had billiard tables with balklines on them. I don't think I've seen a 5 x 10 since the 60's.


How did you like your Rambow? I've never understood why people like them.

1. Clean equipment. If the tables are clean, the players won't go to the talc so much. It's impossible to know where dirty balls are throwing. I was in a place near East St. Louis that I had been afraid to walk into. The tables were so clean they could have been in a surgery. They had a couple of sinks along the wall for the players to wash their hands. If a room doesn't have clean eqipment, I know they just don't get it.


2. Music. Don't play anymore, but when I did, I knew when nobody would be there who played the juke box. I am sure there is music that is condusive to playing, but its not performed by AC/DC.


3. Light. I'm old; can't see as well as I used to. I know there is an end rail down there somewhere. It would be nice to be able to see it.

How about the guys who play for $20 a rack, but if the counterman is in the bathroom when they bring the balls back, they CLIMB OVER THE COUNTER TO STOP THE METER BEFORE IT CLICKS OFF ANOTHER FIVE CENTS.


I shouldn't need to roll 87 house cues before I find one that didn't descend from William Tell's bow and arrow set.


And I'm glad I'm not the only 3-rail player here.


Bobby


("Billiards? Is that like bumper pool?")

rambow were good but not as good as the balabuska that came out later.

i agree. the pool hall i frequent most often here in chicago (Chris' billiards on Milwaukee ave.) has decent tables, decent cues, billiards tables, and a lot of tournaments (it was also where The Color of Money shot a couple scenes.) but the jukebox was atrocious. it was in one room of the hall (they have several rooms in a big upper-warehouse type setting) i used to hear the same 5 crappy songs out of the same horrible options the thing had (maybe 3 songs even marginally worth listening to) they recently got one of them new digital ones with a whole lot more options. before they changed i was there one time, was the only one in the jukebox room with my friend. the quiet was great. then a turbodude and his turboslut came in, and the guy goes to the jukebox. i heard the same Metallica song 2x in a row!!! he's the only one putting stuff on thte jukebox and playing the same song 2x in a row. i almost puked.


i do like to see guys who have a clue. i do enjoy seeing people treat the house cues well, and not drilling the chalk and waving cues around, and trying to dig the cueball from the bottom and scratching the felt.


one pocket is a beautiful game. straight pool is fun if you are playing with one person, and are playing byt the hour, not the game.