>>I used to be a pretty serious pool player ( when you grew up with Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason in your head in The Hustler in a pretty continuous loop that happened. Fortunately, I went to college with a lot of rich kids who had tables in their basement and could beat their coursins so they thought they could play <g> )
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>I hope you didn't get your hands broken as Newman did.
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>>I'd go up to Canada in the summer and get my clock cleaned pretty regularly on snooker tables (which looked to me the size of footbal fields <s>) by the local boys, who had similar experiences when they came south and played our version of pocket billiards.
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>They're daunting in size, aren't they. It's like the difference between launching short- or long-range missiles. Accuracy diminishes with distance. During the finals they showed some ultra low speed film of the cue- and object balls and discovered that they actually bounce minutely, from a hardish shot, and any bounce of the cue ball is imparted to the object ball. Very interesting bit of physics, and like watching a Newton's Cradle.
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>>Very different game - the size of the balls is probably the biggest adjustment.
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>Billiards on a pool table. How so and how many balls in the game?
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>>I've never seen a snooker table in the US though I've been told there's a place in Boston that has a pretty nice setup.
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>>Of course, I can't stand playing 8 ball or on tables you put coins in either. 9 ball and straight pool are the only games I can take seriously. And I really prefer to play in places where my Balabushka isn't the only one in the house. <s>
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>Ah, there's another difference. I've only ever encountered the coin-op 8-ball tables in British pubs and clubs. I get the impression from TV and film that the professional tables (often in blue baize) seem bigger than these, and I don't know what you mean by 9-ball pool.

I think, but please don't tell anyone I said this in case I'm wrong, that a pocket pool table is 8'x4'.

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>"Balabushka" - sounds like something Kate Bush would sing about :-)
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>>>Didn't know whether to put this in sport or not. Over here we've just had, again, another world championship in snooker. Now this "sport" strikes me a little like baseball, in that we have a world championship but, afaik, only one contestant was from outside the British Isles, and that was Honk Kong, an ex-Brit colony. The only other guy I can conjur to mind is Cliff Thorburn, and ex-contestant from Canada.
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>>>Is it that Snooker is only practised in British Commonwealth lands? I've never seen any evidence of it in the USA or Europe. Incidentally, the guy who just lost the final has twice been world champ at 8-ball pool