CONDUCTING TOURNAMENTS
BILLIARD RECORD
REGULAR THREE-BALL CAROMS
CHAMPIONS GAME
BALKLINE GAME
CUSHION CAROMS
THREE-CUSHION CAROMS
FIFTEEN-BALL POOL
RULES GOVERNING PROFESSIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS
INDEX
INTRODUCTORY.
Apart from its inviting to moderate and wholesome exercise, billiards,
as popularly played, is pre-eminently a mental pastime. Nearly all its
exponents of approved skill, whatever were the drawbacks of their youth,
are intellectually quick and bright. This is due in some measure to the
ready mathematical requirements of the play as a routine, but in a much
greater degree to its taxing the eye, stimulating the fancy, and
disciplining the mind by imposing watchfulness, invention, and analysis.
Slowness is costly, and hence, as an early habit, an eager alertness of
vision, alacrity of step, and promptitude of decision.
Regarding billiards as a spectacle, its physical requisites to
perfection are keen sight, level head and steady hand; but they are by
no means essential to enjoyment of it as a leisure-hour diversion _en
amateur_. In this sense, its charm lies altogether in participation,
which is all the more agreeable and healthful because never needing to
be exhausting.
Caroming methods are still changing. Execution is again growing less
fantastic and more practical. Systemization is becoming more and more
dominant. In consequence, certain gathering shots, depicting instructive
possibilities rather than downright needs, and diagrammed as still
proper to teach when the earlier edition of this book was issued, have
no place in the present volume.
Play has been made harder in theory, but easier in fact. Lowering the
cushion first and the table next has facilitated most strokes, and
particularly those dependent upon elevating the cue. Our fathers knew
_piqué_, but seldom _massé_. Drawing a ball without hopping it has been
made surer. Cloths were once so much heavier in nap that ironing new
ones again and again, until the iron burned them out, was the method
here, as it is in certain other countries yet. Although longer than the
present ones by several inches, yet still choice cues of old rarely went
beyond eighteen ounces. For special needs there are cues now whose butts
alone are heavier than an old-fashioned cue in its entirety. The lighter
ashen sticks of the past were meant for a greater variety of shots than
the experts’ carom game of to-day has use for. Styles of play as a
matter of contest are also different. If the present generation know
better how to count, their elders knew better when not to try and count.
There has been progress in more directions than one. A light-weight cue
never before handled by its wielder played the last 1900 points of a
memorable contest. Our “Record” has no other one-night match so
impressive for headwork, handicraft, and hazard. In the same year, and
in the same State, a mile in harness was trotted in 2:19¾, but under
wholly different conditions from those which to-day govern track,
equipment, transportation, and individual effort. As in the popular eye
some Cresceus or Lou Dillon now completely obscures the bob-tailed,
homely little bay mare at Kalamazoo, so the billiard giants of these
times are apt to overlook that the credit they receive for a marvelous
progress as counters may not be exclusively their own. Some share in it
is possibly due to improvements that first-class mechanicians have made
in billiard implements. Rubber vulcanized in layers of different
densities in the one strip have made cushion-angles trustier, cloths are
of closer shear and more uniformly spread, choice cue-leathers are
choicer, cues have grown magical in their mere heft of hilt, and
vanished is the muslin under-cloth that helped the balls to dig their
graves deep into the one of green. Rarely seen, if ever now, is the
serrated cushion, with a face like a saw whose dulled teeth are set
inches apart, and not often is there complaint that the speed of the bed
is greater than that of the return from the cushion, or else not quite
so great.
HISTORICAL.
Billiards was practically without beginning. As with untold other
excellences, so with that. Until merit is established, curiosity as to
origin rarely begins. When merit is acknowledged, it is too late to
trace origin.
“Let us to billiards, Charmion,” is one of Shakespeare’s many
anachronisms. As introduced into “Antony and Cleopatra,” its
significance is simply that the amusement was growing in favor at the
English court in the time of Elizabeth, Shakespeare, and Mary, Queen of
Scots, the last of whom had brought her table over with her from France.
The diligent student may read that Socrates played billiards, that
Anacharsis saw it played during his travels in Greece, that St.
Augustine saw a billiard-table in journeying to or in Africa, and that
Cathire More, an Irish king of the second century A.D., bequeathed to
his nephew “fifty billiard-balls of brass, with the pools and cues of
the same material.” But the student must not go so far back as the
originals in his search, lest he discover that all are translators’
errors. St. Augustine’s vision has proved to be nothing else.
Billiards is also of quasi-historical record as having been invented by
Henri de Vigne, a Frenchman, for the amusement of Louis XI. As runs a
story more explicit, though probably no trustier, De Vigne was only a
carpenter, or cabinet-maker, who, at the order of Louis, fashioned “a
billiard-table with a bed of stone, covered with cloth, and having a
hole in the centre, into which the balls were driven.”
A more plausible recital is that the game was introduced to both France
and England centuries before, when the Knights-Templars returned from
their first or second crusade in the Holy Land. But why not have been
introduced into Spain and Italy at the same period? Rome should have
been a likely spot for this game of the monasteries of the East to
reach, and yet Rome’s ample archives seem to have shed no light upon it,
although we find the “Lives of the Roman Pontiffs” mentioning one Pope
who was fond of billiards, it being the Italian game of a century or so
ago. Any game of Eastern origin should have reached Spain, through the
Moors, centuries before France or England got it via Palestine.
History is no happier in taking liberties with our own country by
variously assigning the honor of introducing billiards here to the
Spaniards in Florida under De Soto, to the English Cavaliers in
Virginia, to the Huguenots settling in South Carolina in 1690, and to
the primitive Hollanders of Manhattan Island. But why not to the earlier
Spaniards in Florida under Ponce de Leon, to the English Cavaliers who
settled one-half of the province of New Jersey, and to the Huguenots who
founded New Rochelle, N. Y., at the same time that kindred refugees
found lodgment in South Carolina? Other nationalities have both played
the game and kept rooms in once pre-eminently cosmopolitan Holland, but
the Dutch themselves have never-been a billiard-playing people; and the
official proceedings before the schouts, scheppens and burgomasters of
New Amsterdam may safely be challenged to show any allusion whatever to
billiards.
Remote literature, whether official or otherwise, is lacking in evidence
of the game anywhere in America until introduced into New York City by
English officers in garrison in the eighteenth century. On the contrary,
there is proof that, even as late as 1808/9, the only billiards on
Manhattan Island was the English winning-and-losing game on six-pocket
tables, presumptively from England. One was a 7 × 14 with eight legs,
and having cushions stuffed with hair.
It is probably not worth disputing that, howsoever christened at first,
billiards was originally an outdoor game, and that, lifted three or four
feet from the ground, it was eventually taken indoors when it rained.
Remotely, it may have been marbles or the immemorially ancient goff (now
golf), or goff may have been remotely billiards or any one of half a
dozen other outdoor jollities. Suffice that billiards to-day bears no
more resemblance to what was so called a century and a half ago, before
France introduced first the third ball and in 1792 the fourth, than
bagatelle bears to shuffleboard or pingpong.
Obscure as that of the game itself is the origin of the “twist” and the
“draw,” the two most important strokes in modern billiards. England
claims them both for John Carr, the “Bath Marker,” on the ground that,
at some time prior to 1823, he was the first to chalk a cue, which is
not a fact; and France claims them for one Capt. Mingaud, an alleged
professional billiardist, who, while imprisoned for a political offence
in 1823, invented the cue-leather. As the writer recalls this Mingaudism
in its entirety, as published in a book issued in Paris about 1868 and
reprinted in the _Billiard Cue_ here, it was manifestly pure romance.
France may never have had a professional so named, but France did have a
Capt. Roget de Lisle, who, imprisoned for a political offence about the
beginning of the last century, invented the deathless “Marseillaise.”
Moreover, it was about 1868 that the writer, on the authority of Prof.
Wm. Lake, who was a professional billiard-player here before and after
1823, published that Camille Avout, a shoemaker, was the pioneer in
turning out cue-leathers in New York City prior to 1823, in which year a
few were imported from France.
Further to complicate matters, Carr is called the “father of the
side-stroke” by the renowned Pierce Egan, a contemporary of Carr, in his
“Annals of Sporting,” a London periodical; while later English billiard
writers recount that Roomkeeper Bartley, Carr’s employer, was the
inventor of the side-stroke and the draw, that in due course he showed
them to his marker, and that Carr merely profited by vending, as the
magical cause of both, some powdered chalk in pillboxes at
two-and-sixpence a box, Italian, French and Spanish players being his
easy customers.
No matter when or in what shape billiards had its beginning, it has been
a favorite recreation of the good and the great for ages, and never more
noticeably so than in the present one. Philosophers seek it, divines
commend it, and physicians prescribe it.
Whatever its old form, its new is essentially American. Other lands have
gradually yielded to the force of American ideas. Public matches were a
dozen years old in this country before there was one in any other, and
the American billiard tournament, never seen in England until 1874/5,
and not in France until 1879, is now the accepted mode in both.
Balklining, another American idea, was unknown to the professionals and
amateurs of France until 1880. It is now their standard caroming
restriction, while for seven or eight years past the English have been
urging a line around the table as a hindrance to the “nursery cannons”
that are the most recent powerful development in their national game.
Cushion-caroms were first publicly exhibited in this country in 1867,
but never in France until 1881. Three-cushion caroms, of which the Paris
professionals have made a specialty during the past dozen years,
constitute another game of American development, dating from 1878 in a
non-public way among professionals, and going many years further back
among our non-professionals.
Until the way was shown by Andrew Buist, an American, caroms were barely
an incidental feature of the English game. Attention was called anew to
them by the separate visits the Dions made to London more than twenty
years ago. Even the prolific spot-ball play, which has likewise been
surprisingly progressive, owes at least a little to this side of the
Atlantic, for in advance of Buist another American—Linley Higham, the
“Albany Pony”—settled in England. Spot-balling, at which he was mighty
for that era on an American 6 × 12 table, called then for but four
different strokes in England. Now it engages more than twice as many.
Modifications have likewise affected the representative players of
France and America. For fifteen years after they first came together,
the French were weak as compound cushioners, but strong as ball-to-ball
drivers. It was the other way with the Americans, who had been brought
up on 6 × 12 and 5½ × 11 pocket tables, while the French professors had
been accustoming themselves to what was nearly a 4½ × 9 carom, whereon
other cushioning than a single one, in which they were strong and the
Americans weak, was an infrequent necessity. Now that the two
nationalities are using the one table, there is little to choose between
them in respect of cushioning and ball-to-balling. If proof were needed,
there is the international championship match of January 29, 1904, with
its score of 500 to 496, which is both trusty history and the latest up
to date.
THE BILLIARD-ROOM.
An apartment to accommodate one table should be of the dimensions
following, graduated by the size of the table, and affording space for
the free exercise of the cue. Where two or more tables are placed, five
feet will be sufficient to allow between them.
For table 6 x 12, room should be 16 × 22.
For table 5½ × 11, room should be 15½ × 21.
For table 5 × 10, room should be 15 × 20.
For table 4½ × 9, room should be 14½ × 18½.
For table 4 × 8, room should be 14 × 17½.
For table 3½ × 7, room should be 12 × 15.
Architects, in their plans for modern mansions, should make suitable
provision for this amusement, without which no gentleman’s establishment
(more especially if a country one) can now be considered perfect. Even
if the builder of a house has no taste for the game himself, he should
look beforehand, and consider that such an accommodation might form an
important item in the price which a succeeding tenant would be willing
to pay for it. The light, if possible, should come from above, through
ample skylights, so as to bring the table within a general focus, and
thus prevent any shadow being thrown from the balls or cushions. The
gas-light should be raised about three feet two inches from the bed of
the table and supplied with horizontal burners, as by such an
arrangement no shadow is cast from the pipe. The distance of the light
from the floor should be about 6 feet 1 inch. For a 5 × 10 table the
cross-arms of the pendant should measure from light to light 28 inches,
and the long arms 56 inches. For a 4½ × 9 table, cross-arms 25 inches,
and long arms 50 inches. For a 4 × 8 table, cross-arms 22 inches, and
long arms 44 inches. For a 5½ × 11 table, cross-arms 31 inches, and long
arms 62 inches. A useful shade has been devised which throws a soft,
even light on the table, and keeps the glare from the player’s eyes. The
floor, if carpeted at all, should be covered with some thick, soft
material.
BILLIARD APPLIANCES—THEIR CHOICE AND CARE.
HOW TO SELECT A TABLE.
Never attempt it. Rather consult with and rely upon reputable
manufacturers.
SIZE, SHAPE, AND STYLE.
In this country there are the standard size, which is 5 × 10 feet, and
the popular size, which is 4½ × 9. Experts use the former, and the
latter is preferred in many public rooms and clubs, as well as in most
private houses, in the last of which the 4 × 8 also often finds a place.
Tables are of various styles and shapes, but mostly now without pockets,
and with the broad rails at sides and ends beveled, ogee, or square.
Those designed for ball-pool have six pockets usually, but sometimes
only four. In addition there is the combination billiard-table, meant
for both caroms and ball-pool at will.
Beds are of slate, and their tendency is toward greater thickness than
was required up to a few years ago. This adds to the general stability
of the table. Even for the 6 × 12, slabs now are often in three pieces,
instead of four, thus insuring a smoother playing surface. Heavier slabs
should have six legs instead of four, whether the table is 5 × 10 or
larger. Many 4½ × 9’s have six.
Apart from its cloth and cushions, a table requires no special care
beyond treating it similarly to any other piece of furniture, by keeping
its framework clean and occasionally applying polish, which can be had
of almost any furniture-dealer. When not in use, the table should be
well covered up.
THE CLOTH.
There are various kinds and several grades. Buying the best will save
money.
Almost invariably, it is the indifferent player or worse who, in or out
of public rooms, finds most fault with cushions, balls, cues, leathers,
or chalk. The experienced one has learned that usually, when all is not
well with him at billiards, the fault is with himself or in his stroke.
A less skillful performer will blame the balls when a sagging floor has
thrown the table out of level, the table when a ball needs either truing
or a holiday, the chalk or the leather when he is wildly throwing his
whole body at the ball, and the cushion when diminished speed is really
due to the influence of a protracted spell of damp weather upon cloth or
ivory. One is sure to absorb moisture, and the other may.
As soon as play is over, and especially in damp weather, the cloth
should first be hair-brushed and then whisk-broomed, both processes
being with the nap. This, on all tables properly set up, runs in the one
direction, although what in America and elsewhere are called “head” and
“foot” become “bottom” and “top” in England, an inversion whose effect
is to make the grain run the same way in both, the English starting from
the bottom. Whether table be pocket or carom, the dust is to be swept
out through the two corners farthest from the “string-line,” or “balk,”
as it is termed in Canada, India, England and Australia.
Beating with the hair-brush is not advisable. Cloth should not be so
long neglected as to need it. The brush spreads in the pounding, and its
action is as much against the nap as with it.
THE CUES.
As to both their selection and their care, players should trust to the
roomkeeper and his staff. An owner of a private table ought to see that,
after play, they are not only kept away from a heater, but are also
stood exactly upright in their rack, to prevent warping or crooking.
Under-leathers sometimes need sandpapering to overcome expansion.
Neglected, they will wear away the nap of the cloth in low-ball
“draw-shots,” if not make it picturesque with L-shaped rents, although
the usual start of these rents is that the cloth has been minutely
punctured either by a hammered cue-ball (massé) or by one made acrobatic
by an unskillful, thoughtless stroke as it leaves either the cue or the
cushion. For slightly roughening the surface of the upper leather,
solidifying it, smoothing its edges, and generally “rounding it off” as
a finishing touch, a fine rasp is of service; but it should not be used
without that instruction which any competent roomkeeper will be glad to
give.
It is a habit with a few to chalk both their bridge-hand and the upper
half of their cues in muggy weather, thereby befouling their own cloth
and that of the table. A wet rag, followed by a dry one, will remove the
stickiness.
Cues are made as light as 12 ounces, but those most in demand are from
17 to 22.
Ball-pool, in calling for a somewhat different stroke from that of
ordinary caroms, needs a little longer cue.
CUE-LEATHERS.
Self-adhesives, with directions accompanying every box, have made the
act of leathering an easy art; but selection is still a science, and
here again, until experience has taught the amateur not so much,
perhaps, what he needs as what he ought to expect to get, manufacturer
or roomkeeper will be the safer guide.
The same counsel will apply to
CHALK.
Most on the market is good. Much is often unspeakably bad. All should be
dry, and as free from grease as from grit. It now comes in various
shapes—octagon, cylindrical and square. As the colored is labor-saving,
few roomkeepers have use for the white. Just as few took to the colored
when first brought to notice, nearly forty years ago, although it was
made green in order not to show itself upon the cloth.
THE CUSHIONS.
Elasticity, accuracy and durability are their requisites. By elasticity
is not meant excessive speed, for a cushion can be made so fast as
utterly to baffle the good player without ultimately aiding the bad one
who craves it. All other things equal, that cushion is best which is
neither radical nor unexpected in its angles, and is least susceptible
to ordinary atmospheric changes.
Until their covering begins to wear out in spots, cushions need no other
attention than to be lightly brushed when the bed-cloth is cleansed, and
every few weeks to have their bolts tightened by the merest turn or
fraction. Should the bolts be overlooked too long, the cushion itself,
by emitting a jingling sound, will give notice that a shrinkage in wood
or metal calls for carpenter’s bit-and-brace.
The height of the top of the modern cushion-rail from the floor, if
level, may be roundly expressed as thirty-four inches, and that of the
cushion’s knife-like edge from the bed is one and seven-sixteenths
inches. This is for the regulation American and French ball, which, at
one-quarter of an inch above its centre, comes into contact with the
cushion’s edge. Struck with force, a much larger ball would jump over
the cushion, while a much smaller, jamming itself between table’s bed
and cushion’s edge, would jump inwardly.
Cushions must be tuned to balls. Unless the former have a given height
and pitch, there cannot be accurate reflection, and there may be
inaccurate stroke. Height has already been discussed. Pitch is the
inward slant of the cushion’s top surface as a guide to the cue in
certain situations.
THE MAGIC BALLS.
With balkline the vogue, as much depends upon balls, cloth and cushions
as upon the player himself.
Balls should be of well-seasoned ivory, and the only available guarantee
as to that is the ability of manufacturers to carry a heavy stock.
There are players who talk of perfect balls, but a well-turned ball is
the limit, and neither its truing-up nor its recoloring should ever be
intrusted to other than an artisan of conceded skill and experience.
Earth has never known an absolutely round sphere or a perfectly smooth
plane. Under the glare of a chemical light, lens and screen will show
hills and valleys in both.
Requiring much patience and much ivory, matching balls is an art in
itself. The lower end of a tusk is too small for carom balls, and the
upper and larger too hollow. Perhaps six balls, on an average, can be
shaped out of the central section. The ball toward the smaller end is
closer-grained than any of its companions, all of which, while of the
one size, may differ in other respects from one another. Possibly out of
twenty tusks not fifty balls will be found approximately equal, in sets
of three, with respect to weight and centralized gravity. As sets, they
may all differ from one another, notwithstanding that any one set is fit
for ordinary use; and for an important match the whole twenty tusks are
liable not to turn out three balls alike in size, weight and central
gravity.
The best and dearest ivory is the rarest—the worst, of course, is
cheapest. Some tusks, as they grow, acquire more moisture than others.
The dentine in the millions of little cells is greater in one tusk than
in another. When it comes to billiard-balls, what the animal fed upon up
to from ten to twenty years of age, and also where it fed, are no
inconsiderable factors, could we find them out. Some tusks partly season
by sun-drying as they grow, their owners having to trot long distances
for water. Other elephants rear themselves where water is abundant, but
sunshine scarce. There would also seem to be more durability in the
detached tusk than in balls made from it. The writer has a match-set he
knows to be at least twenty-three years old, that have never been
returned, and that have not had their cardboard box opened in nearly
twenty years. What will happen to them if put on table? Within four
hundred feet of where they rest, the set used in the Phelan-Seereiter
match fell to pieces, in 1867, as soon as played with. As souvenirs they
had lain idle eight years. In Paris, some years later, professors
engaged in a series of games with a set from a tusk (that of a mammoth)
presumably thousands of years old. Until told the players had no idea
but that those balls were from a modern elephant, born and despoiled
within their own lifetime.
In view of all this, is it any wonder either that manufacturers decline
to guarantee ivory or that man to-day knows no more about it and its
care than was known two hundred years ago?
Heat is a greater foe to balls than cold. The latter is not an abstract,
positive quality or condition, being merely the absence of heat. Could
excessive warmth be guarded against as to billiard-balls, there would be
little reason to dread the chilly draught. At the outset, balls need to
be much larger in hot climates than in cold. We in America murmur, and
yet billiards, both social and spectacular, is played in countries where
heat and moisture will change every new set from sphere to spheroid
within a month.
Balls usually do their prettiest freaks across the grain, but sometimes
do them with the grain. Those that swell under the influence of moisture
will occasionally, if allowed to remain idle for months, resume their
proper form automatically; but in a large majority of cases truing-up is
the only cure. Balls that crack will be helped to heal, like human lips
that chap, by touching them somewhat sparingly with tallow. Neither
rubbing balls with oil nor storing them in sawdust saturated with it is
recommended. There are countries having peculiarly evaporative traits in
which oil has been proved a blessing, but in this climate tallow for
cracks and sawdust without oil are about the limit of cure and
prevention.
Balls should never be placed on or near a heater. Modern artificial
warmth is ivory’s direst enemy. Roomkeepers meet with fewer mishaps as
to balls when their places are heated by stoves. Those fresh from play,
especially in hot rooms, should not be placed on metal or stone, nor
even on wood near door or window. Metal and stone are no colder than the
room itself, although feeling colder to the touch; but they have a
wonderful capacity for stealing heat from other things and giving it
away in space, to suck in more. Nor should balls be put at once into an
iron safe. Their play has been work, and there can be no work without
generating inside heat. The old way was to put them up on a shelf in the
open room. The box might have a lid, but there would be holes in it the
year round. The fire would go out slowly and early, and zero might come
after midnight, but the balls would be there at 8 A.M. sharp. Nails in
the floor worried the old-timers, with their self-ventilating balls,
more than heat or cold.
It was their fashion, too, never to put new balls in play at once. No
matter how well-seasoned ivory is in point of age, it is practically
nowhere riper than in its greenest part. Consequently a ball pared in
spots in returning is virtually a new ball throughout in proffering the
atmosphere new access to its interior. Were new balls put upon the table
every day for two or three weeks, after the chill is off the room, and
merely toyed with, without ever being struck with anything like force,
they would probably give better and longer service.
A private table should have two sets of balls, and public rooms not
fewer than three sets to every two carom tables.
As soon as play is done, the balls should be wiped off with a moist
cloth, and then dried and polished with one of wool or chamois, so fine
as not to scratch.
Composition balls have advantages besides their cheapness, but the
demand for them continues to be almost confined in this country to
ball-pool. The prejudice against them for caroms is still, as it was
thirty-six years ago, that they are not ivory. The interval has greatly
improved them, however, and this year’s promise of “absolute perfection”
may at least result in coming closer to it than ever before.
The match-standard American carom-ball, always of ivory, is of 2⅜
diameter, with the red no larger than the whites. Standard ones for
ordinary use are, when new, either 2⅜ full or 2–7/16 scant.