9 ms·

Billiards Is a Good Game (1975)

198 points by thomasjudge 7y ago

jstarks 7y ago
A wonderful read on a Friday morning. Thanks for sharing.
tln 7y ago
"I saw him run over forty several times, and it was not unusual for him to put a string together of twenty or thirty" I wonder if thats 40 caroms in cowboy? or 5 racks of 8 ball? The caption mentions (and shows) cowboy pool: you play with 1, 3, 5 and can score with carom, bouncing the cue off 2 other balls, pocketing also scores the number on the ball till 90; till 100 only caroms score. to get 101 and win, you must scratch off the 1. Fun game, my favorite when not paying for each rack.
- nsfyn55 7y ago
  >I saw him run over forty several times, and it was not unusual for him to put a string together of twenty or thirty They are almost certainly talking about 14:1 continuous which was far and away the most popular pocket billiards game in the 1930s,40s, and 50s. 40 is pretty good but great players regularly run over 100 and John Schmidt just ran 600+
- dnate 7y ago
  can you explain what "scoring with carom" means? I googled for 10 minutes and didn't fully understand it.
  - ucarion 7y ago
    To "carom" a ball, in America, is to hit the cue ball into ball X, and then after that collision, the cue ball goes on to hit ball Y. In Britain this is known as a "cannon", as in you cannon the cue ball off of X into Y. In the game of cowboy, which is sort of a novelty game that is intentionally quirky, you can score points merely by making a carom. Here's an example I got by Google image searching: https://i.makeagif.com/media/10-30-2015/ODVWHH.gif https://i.makeagif.com/media/10-30-2015/ODVWHH.gif
- jnewkirk 7y ago
  The description of play in the article corresponds most closely to (straight) carom billiards rather than a variety of pool (or even three-cushion billiards). A run of forty is creditable; runs of 100 or more aren't uncommon among good players. There's a billiard table just behind the foreground pool table in the photo of the Quadrangle Club.
  - mrbrandonking 7y ago
    “... Michelson would run ten or twelve billiards with a touch so delicate that the three balls could always be covered by a hat.” Michelson was playing billiards on a table without pockets. I agree that Michelson wasn’t playing 3-cushion because not even Willie Hoppe (best player of that era) had runs 10 or 12 on a daily basis. Balkline was still popular as an amateur game in the 1920s, so Michelson could have been playing one of the balkline variants rather than straight rail. Level of difficulty in billiards ... Straight Rail < Balkline < Cushion Caroms < 3-Cushion
rubinelli 7y ago
Tangentially, billiards is a great game to play after a few hours in front of a screen, as your eyes focus on the balls and holes at different distances.
- spyspy 7y ago
  If I ever start my own company I will outright ban ping pong, but a pool table would be a must in my office. It's an amazing game to take a break with, I find the noise relaxing, and people can have a full conversation while playing.
  - eru 7y ago
    Ping pong is fun. Just make sure to put it into a room that's sound-isolated from people trying to concentrate.
aidenn0 7y ago
> After watching Michelson play bridge for a while, you could predict more or less the kind of mistake he would make, and it was not unrelated to the American champion’s description of his chess game. He would make a bid short of game, but, after getting the bid, would see that, if he took and made two long finesses, he could come in with a little slam. Of course, a little slam would make only a few points difference since he hadn’t bid it, but he would take the two finesses and not only lose both but lose his bid on an absolutely “lay-down hand.” He was a rather small man, as you know, and he would look with almost childlike incredulity at the ruined remains of his daring invention of two long finesses where none was a sure thing. If anybody needs translation: In bridge you bid how many tricks you will take; there are 13 tricks and the minimum bid is 7 (i.e. you will take over half). If you make at least as many as you bid, your score is positive, if you make fewer than you bid your score is negative. You get bonus points for bidding at a certain level; "game" is 9-11 tricks depending on the situation (10 tricks is the most common for reasons I won't get into here). "small slam" (or little slam in this article) is 12 tricks and "grand slam" is 13 tricks. You have two opponents in bridge and a finesse is a play that depends on cards being in the correct opponents hand. Most common is which opponent holds a king when you have an ace and a queen. If you can force them to decide to play the king or not before you play, then you beat the king with an ace, or beat the lower card they play with the queen. A "long finesse" (called a "deep finesse" today) requires more than one card to be in the correct position, so attempting one is a move of last resort. Now the translation. He bid to make 9 or 10 tricks, but saw that he could make 12 tricks if all of the cards were in the position maximally lucky for him. Since he did not bid high enough to get the bonus for winning those, the reward is tiny, and he should just make the obvious plays to cover his bid. Instead he took the risky play and ended up not even making the 9 or 10 that he bid. This is the sort of mistake that even an intermediate bridge player learns not to make very quickly, but a beginner couldn't make this mistake at all because they wouldn't see the opportunity. So Michelson is smart but a terrible bridge player. I'm struggling to think of an equivalently bad play in poker; maybe staying in the pot when your hand is the low-pair after the flop and several others have already called?
- moate 7y ago
  It's hard to have smartdumb plays like that in poker in quite the same way. I guess it would be closer to AK suited in hand with a Q 10 suited and off suit Q and 3 people raising on each round. Then on the turn and river you get an off suit K and a meaningless card. Your hand is good, with the former possibility of being the nuts, but there's also a chance that someone out there is holding Q (or possibly QQ) of a straight and you're dead already.
every 7y ago
Good read. And in the future I shall write off my deficiencies as merely a gap in my genetic tape...
tbjohnston 7y ago
Thank you for sharing this. Great reading!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mrbrandonking 7y ago
Whenever the author refers to “billiards,” he’s talking about a game played on a pocketless table with three balls. He says “Pool” whenever he’s referring to pocket billiards, the game that most people are familiar with.
- PeterStuer 7y ago
  The preferred version her is 3-cushion. 3 balls, no pockets, the cue ball has to hit the other 2, but has to hit 3 cushions before touching the 3rd ball.
- yumraj 7y ago
  > Whenever the author refers to “billiards,” he’s talking about a game played on a pocketless table with three balls. You're right about 3 balls, but there are pockets in a billiards table and you do get points for pocketing the correct ball.[0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_billiards https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_billiards
  - frobozz 7y ago
    The no-pockets version is French Billiards
    - yumraj 7y ago
      Ah, didn't know that. For me while growing up in India, Billiards was synonymous with the English version.
      - GrumpyNl 7y ago
        Thats called snooker.
        dhruvkar 7y ago
        nope, that's different: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snooker#/media/File%3ASnooker_table_drawing_2.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snooker#/media/File%3ASnooke...
newsreview1 7y ago
What a great article! So well written, and thoroughly enjoyable. Thanks for the share.
- sjburt 7y ago
  The author is Norman Maclean, who wrote _A River Runs Through It_.
tkfu 7y ago
There's a line in there that I find a bit jarring and difficult to parse. I understand that this was written in 1975 (Not long before I was born, but nonetheless an era that I can't really say I understand), but when the author mentions this: > The waitress told us he drew sketches of the faculty he did not care to eat with. She said they all had long noses. ...it sets off strange alarm bells, but I don't quite have the cultural context to figure out how I should interpret it. Of course, everyone knows that long noses are a Jewish stereotype, and that in the 70s when this article was written, anti-semitism was far enough out of fashion that it would have been impolite to express it in more than an oblique way. Can someone explain to me what MacLean was trying to say here? I know Michelson himself was of Jewish descent, which makes the comment all the more confusing.
- jhbadger 7y ago
  At the time he was writing about (pre-WWII), many people of Jewish descent who by looks and/or surname could "pass" as non-Jewish, did so to avoid anti-semitism. Many of them even practiced a degree of anti-semitism themselves. MacLean is suggesting that Michelson (who didn't identify as Jewish despite his heritage) was such a person.
- oneida 7y ago
  Liars?
- pfarrell 7y ago
  I read it as a specific aside on the way the drawings were caricatures of the other faculty. Without an example, it’s hard to discern intent.
andreygrehov 7y ago
I wonder why there are so few billiard (Russian billiard) [0] places in US? When I lived in Ukraine, where I'm originally from, we usually got together with friends/co-workers to play billiard after work and it was a hell lot of fun. There were usually 10-15 billiard tables for adults and 1-2 pool tables for children. For comparison, this is the size of a pocket in Russian billiard [1]. When I moved to US, we had a few team outing events at a pool hall and the game was pretty boring (at least to me). I could easily pocket all the balls without giving a chance for the other players to even start playing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_pyramid [1] https://i.redd.it/tbph52kvpngy.jpg https://i.redd.it/tbph52kvpngy.jpg
- Nursie 7y ago
  There seem to be quite a lot of games going by the name "Billiards" I play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_billiards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_billiards semi regularly here in the UK, which is apparently of Russian origin as well!
  - mannykannot 7y ago
    I am glad to hear that game is still played -- I had the impression that it had been replaced by pool in most venues. May I ask where one can find it?
    - cannam 7y ago
      If you should happen to be in Bath, I think they still have a table at the Bell on Walcot St. (A very fine pub no matter what)
    - Nursie 7y ago
      I play at a pub called "The Titanic" in Southampton. I have seen tables in two other pubs around the city, but never seen them in use there.
- Symbiote 7y ago
  Does anyone play snooker in the USA? That has tighter pockets than American (or English) pool, although not as tight as these Russian ones. It adds significant difficulty with the structure of play with the coloured balls.
clairity 7y ago
"Cue your ball in the center as often as you can. Don’t use something hard to control unless you have to." [edit: referring to too much english on the ball] this was a nice life lesson for me, learned while playing 3-cushion in college. the KISS principle was something i'd heard of before, but sometimes only experience can knock sense into you.
anotherevan 7y ago
I remember I once saw a single panel cartoon of two people playing billiards and the caption read, "Actually, it is rocket science!" but I've never been able to find it again.

198 points by thomasjudge 7y ago

A wonderful read on a Friday morning. Thanks for sharing.

tln 7y ago

"I saw him run over forty several times, and it was not unusual for him to put a string together of twenty or thirty" I wonder if thats 40 caroms in cowboy? or 5 racks of 8 ball? The caption mentions (and shows) cowboy pool: you play with 1, 3, 5 and can score with carom, bouncing the cue off 2 other balls, pocketing also scores the number on the ball till 90; till 100 only caroms score. to get 101 and win, you must scratch off the 1. Fun game, my favorite when not paying for each rack.

nsfyn55 7y ago
>I saw him run over forty several times, and it was not unusual for him to put a string together of twenty or thirty They are almost certainly talking about 14:1 continuous which was far and away the most popular pocket billiards game in the 1930s,40s, and 50s. 40 is pretty good but great players regularly run over 100 and John Schmidt just ran 600+
dnate 7y ago
can you explain what "scoring with carom" means? I googled for 10 minutes and didn't fully understand it.
- ucarion 7y ago
  To "carom" a ball, in America, is to hit the cue ball into ball X, and then after that collision, the cue ball goes on to hit ball Y. In Britain this is known as a "cannon", as in you cannon the cue ball off of X into Y. In the game of cowboy, which is sort of a novelty game that is intentionally quirky, you can score points merely by making a carom. Here's an example I got by Google image searching: https://i.makeagif.com/media/10-30-2015/ODVWHH.gif https://i.makeagif.com/media/10-30-2015/ODVWHH.gif
jnewkirk 7y ago
The description of play in the article corresponds most closely to (straight) carom billiards rather than a variety of pool (or even three-cushion billiards). A run of forty is creditable; runs of 100 or more aren't uncommon among good players. There's a billiard table just behind the foreground pool table in the photo of the Quadrangle Club.
- mrbrandonking 7y ago
  “... Michelson would run ten or twelve billiards with a touch so delicate that the three balls could always be covered by a hat.” Michelson was playing billiards on a table without pockets. I agree that Michelson wasn’t playing 3-cushion because not even Willie Hoppe (best player of that era) had runs 10 or 12 on a daily basis. Balkline was still popular as an amateur game in the 1920s, so Michelson could have been playing one of the balkline variants rather than straight rail. Level of difficulty in billiards ... Straight Rail < Balkline < Cushion Caroms < 3-Cushion

rubinelli 7y ago

Tangentially, billiards is a great game to play after a few hours in front of a screen, as your eyes focus on the balls and holes at different distances.

spyspy 7y ago
If I ever start my own company I will outright ban ping pong, but a pool table would be a must in my office. It's an amazing game to take a break with, I find the noise relaxing, and people can have a full conversation while playing.
- eru 7y ago
  Ping pong is fun. Just make sure to put it into a room that's sound-isolated from people trying to concentrate.

aidenn0 7y ago

> After watching Michelson play bridge for a while, you could predict more or less the kind of mistake he would make, and it was not unrelated to the American champion’s description of his chess game. He would make a bid short of game, but, after getting the bid, would see that, if he took and made two long finesses, he could come in with a little slam. Of course, a little slam would make only a few points difference since he hadn’t bid it, but he would take the two finesses and not only lose both but lose his bid on an absolutely “lay-down hand.” He was a rather small man, as you know, and he would look with almost childlike incredulity at the ruined remains of his daring invention of two long finesses where none was a sure thing. If anybody needs translation: In bridge you bid how many tricks you will take; there are 13 tricks and the minimum bid is 7 (i.e. you will take over half). If you make at least as many as you bid, your score is positive, if you make fewer than you bid your score is negative. You get bonus points for bidding at a certain level; "game" is 9-11 tricks depending on the situation (10 tricks is the most common for reasons I won't get into here). "small slam" (or little slam in this article) is 12 tricks and "grand slam" is 13 tricks. You have two opponents in bridge and a finesse is a play that depends on cards being in the correct opponents hand. Most common is which opponent holds a king when you have an ace and a queen. If you can force them to decide to play the king or not before you play, then you beat the king with an ace, or beat the lower card they play with the queen. A "long finesse" (called a "deep finesse" today) requires more than one card to be in the correct position, so attempting one is a move of last resort. Now the translation. He bid to make 9 or 10 tricks, but saw that he could make 12 tricks if all of the cards were in the position maximally lucky for him. Since he did not bid high enough to get the bonus for winning those, the reward is tiny, and he should just make the obvious plays to cover his bid. Instead he took the risky play and ended up not even making the 9 or 10 that he bid. This is the sort of mistake that even an intermediate bridge player learns not to make very quickly, but a beginner couldn't make this mistake at all because they wouldn't see the opportunity. So Michelson is smart but a terrible bridge player. I'm struggling to think of an equivalently bad play in poker; maybe staying in the pot when your hand is the low-pair after the flop and several others have already called?

moate 7y ago
It's hard to have smartdumb plays like that in poker in quite the same way. I guess it would be closer to AK suited in hand with a Q 10 suited and off suit Q and 3 people raising on each round. Then on the turn and river you get an off suit K and a meaningless card. Your hand is good, with the former possibility of being the nuts, but there's also a chance that someone out there is holding Q (or possibly QQ) of a straight and you're dead already.

every 7y ago

Good read. And in the future I shall write off my deficiencies as merely a gap in my genetic tape...

tbjohnston 7y ago

Thank you for sharing this. Great reading!

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mrbrandonking 7y ago

Whenever the author refers to “billiards,” he’s talking about a game played on a pocketless table with three balls. He says “Pool” whenever he’s referring to pocket billiards, the game that most people are familiar with.

PeterStuer 7y ago
The preferred version her is 3-cushion. 3 balls, no pockets, the cue ball has to hit the other 2, but has to hit 3 cushions before touching the 3rd ball.
yumraj 7y ago
> Whenever the author refers to “billiards,” he’s talking about a game played on a pocketless table with three balls. You're right about 3 balls, but there are pockets in a billiards table and you do get points for pocketing the correct ball.[0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_billiards https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_billiards
- frobozz 7y ago
  The no-pockets version is French Billiards
  - yumraj 7y ago
    Ah, didn't know that. For me while growing up in India, Billiards was synonymous with the English version.
    - GrumpyNl 7y ago
      Thats called snooker.
      - dhruvkar 7y ago
        nope, that's different: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snooker#/media/File%3ASnooker_table_drawing_2.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snooker#/media/File%3ASnooke...

newsreview1 7y ago

What a great article! So well written, and thoroughly enjoyable. Thanks for the share.

sjburt 7y ago
The author is Norman Maclean, who wrote _A River Runs Through It_.

tkfu 7y ago

There's a line in there that I find a bit jarring and difficult to parse. I understand that this was written in 1975 (Not long before I was born, but nonetheless an era that I can't really say I understand), but when the author mentions this: > The waitress told us he drew sketches of the faculty he did not care to eat with. She said they all had long noses. ...it sets off strange alarm bells, but I don't quite have the cultural context to figure out how I should interpret it. Of course, everyone knows that long noses are a Jewish stereotype, and that in the 70s when this article was written, anti-semitism was far enough out of fashion that it would have been impolite to express it in more than an oblique way. Can someone explain to me what MacLean was trying to say here? I know Michelson himself was of Jewish descent, which makes the comment all the more confusing.

jhbadger 7y ago
At the time he was writing about (pre-WWII), many people of Jewish descent who by looks and/or surname could "pass" as non-Jewish, did so to avoid anti-semitism. Many of them even practiced a degree of anti-semitism themselves. MacLean is suggesting that Michelson (who didn't identify as Jewish despite his heritage) was such a person.
oneida 7y ago
Liars?
pfarrell 7y ago
I read it as a specific aside on the way the drawings were caricatures of the other faculty. Without an example, it’s hard to discern intent.

andreygrehov 7y ago

I wonder why there are so few billiard (Russian billiard) [0] places in US? When I lived in Ukraine, where I'm originally from, we usually got together with friends/co-workers to play billiard after work and it was a hell lot of fun. There were usually 10-15 billiard tables for adults and 1-2 pool tables for children. For comparison, this is the size of a pocket in Russian billiard [1]. When I moved to US, we had a few team outing events at a pool hall and the game was pretty boring (at least to me). I could easily pocket all the balls without giving a chance for the other players to even start playing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_pyramid [1] https://i.redd.it/tbph52kvpngy.jpg https://i.redd.it/tbph52kvpngy.jpg

Nursie 7y ago
There seem to be quite a lot of games going by the name "Billiards" I play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_billiards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_billiards semi regularly here in the UK, which is apparently of Russian origin as well!
- mannykannot 7y ago
  I am glad to hear that game is still played -- I had the impression that it had been replaced by pool in most venues. May I ask where one can find it?
  - cannam 7y ago
    If you should happen to be in Bath, I think they still have a table at the Bell on Walcot St. (A very fine pub no matter what)
  - Nursie 7y ago
    I play at a pub called "The Titanic" in Southampton. I have seen tables in two other pubs around the city, but never seen them in use there.
Symbiote 7y ago
Does anyone play snooker in the USA? That has tighter pockets than American (or English) pool, although not as tight as these Russian ones. It adds significant difficulty with the structure of play with the coloured balls.

clairity 7y ago

"Cue your ball in the center as often as you can. Don’t use something hard to control unless you have to." [edit: referring to too much english on the ball] this was a nice life lesson for me, learned while playing 3-cushion in college. the KISS principle was something i'd heard of before, but sometimes only experience can knock sense into you.

anotherevan 7y ago

I remember I once saw a single panel cartoon of two people playing billiards and the caption read, "Actually, it is rocket science!" but I've never been able to find it again.