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9-ball
Nine-ball (sometimes written 9-ball) is a discipline of the cue sport pool. The game's origins are traceable to the 1920s in the United States. It is played on a rectangular billiard table with at each of the four corners and in the middle of each long side. Using a cue stick, players must strike the white cue ball to nine colored billiard balls, hitting them in ascending numerical order. An individual game (or ) is won by the player pocketing the . Matches are usually played as a to a set number of racks, with the player who reaches the set number winning the match. The game is currently governed by the World Pool-Billiard Association (WPA), with multiple regional tours. The most prestigious nine-ball tournaments are the WPA World Nine-ball Championship and the U.S. Open Nine-ball Championships. Notable 9-Ball players in the game include Luther Lassiter, Buddy Hall, Efren Reyes, Earl Strickland and Shane Van Boening. The game is often associated with hustling and gambling, ...
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Efren Reyes
Efren Manalang Reyes (born August 26, 1954) is a Filipino professional pool player. A winner of over 100 international titles, Reyes was the first player to win world championships in two different pool disciplines. Among his numerous titles, Reyes is a four-time World Eight-ball champion, the 1999 WPA World Nine-ball Championship winner, a three-time U.S. Open winner, a two-time World Pool League champion, a four-time All Japan Championship winner, a seven-time Asian Nine-ball Tour champion, and a thirteen-time Derby City Classic winner. Reyes also represented the Philippines at the World Cup of Pool, winning the event with partner Francisco Bustamante in 2006 and 2009. By defeating American player Earl Strickland in the inaugural The Color of Money event in 1997, Reyes took home the largest single match purse in pool history of $100,000. Many analysts, fans and players consider Reyes to be the greatest pool player of all time. Reyes is nicknamed "The Magician"—f ...
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WPA World Nine-ball Championship
The WPA World Nine-ball Championship is an annual professional nine-ball pool tournament contested since 1990. The championship is sanctioned by the World Pool Association (WPA) and principally sponsored and organized by Matchroom Sport, who promote he event as the World Pool Championship. The championship is divided into men's, women's and wheelchair divisions. History In the summer of 1989, the World Pool-Billiard Association (WPA) began plans for a world championship tournament. The group sent invitations, rules, sports regulations and by-laws. Reception was positive, and a provisional Board was created. In March 1990, the inaugural WPA World Nine-ball Championship was held in Bergheim, Germany. The playing field included 32 men and 16 women in separate divisions, and has since become an annual event. The event was organised solely by the WPA from this inauguration through 1999.
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Glossary Of Cue Sports Terms
The following is a glossary of traditional English-language terms used in the three overarching cue sports disciplines: ''carom billiards'' referring to the various games played on a billiard table without ; ''Pool (cue sports), pool'', which denotes a host of games played on a table with six pockets; and ''snooker'', played on a large pocket table, and which has a sport culture unto itself distinct from pool. There are also games such as English billiards that include aspects of multiple disciplines. Definitions and language The term ' is sometimes used to refer to all of the cue sports, to a specific class of them, or to specific ones such as English billiards; this article uses the term in its most generic sense unless otherwise noted. The labels "British English, British" and "United Kingdom, UK" as applied to entries in this glossary refer to terms originating in the UK and also used in countries that were fairly recently part of the British Empire and/or are part of the ...
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Mosconi Cup
The Mosconi Cup is an annual nine-ball pool tournament contested since 1994 between teams representing Europe and the United States. Named after American pool player Willie Mosconi, the event is comparable to the Ryder Cup in golf and the Weber Cup in bowling. Team composition and formats have varied over the years. , each team has five playing members. Each team also has a captain and vice captain, who may be among the players, or may be non-playing additional members of the team. The teams compete over one team match, several doubles matches and singles matches, with the first team to win 11 matches claiming victory. On 3 December 2024, Team Europe beat Team USA 11–6, kept the title and took an overall series lead of 17–13, with one tie. History and player selection First staged in 1994 by Sky Sports and Matchroom Sport as an exhibition event to increase public awareness of pool in the United Kingdom, the Mosconi Cup was named to commemorate the legacy of American ...
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Earl Strickland
Earl Strickland (born June 8, 1961) is an American professional pool player who is considered one of the best nine-ball players of all time. He has won over 100 championship titles and three world titles. In 2006 he was inducted into the Billiard Congress of America's Hall of Fame. In 1996, Strickland won the largest cash prize to date winning the PCA $1,000,000 Challenge by being the first player to run 10 consecutive racks in a tournament. Career Strickland started playing pool at the age of 8. After intensive practice, he entered his first professional tournament aged 16. Strickland rose to national prominence in 1983 with a victory in Caesars Tahoe Billiard Classic defeating Steve Mizerak in the finals and winning $35,000. This was followed in 1984 by winning the McDermott Masters 9-Ball Championship. According to sources, Strickland played "like a polished gem." He was beginning to be a dominant force on the tournament trail and recognized as a future world champion. He had ...
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Buddy Hall
Cecil P. "Buddy" Hall (May 29, 1945 – May 22, 2025) was an American professional pool player and was considered one of the best nine-ball players of all time. The International Pool Tour heralds Hall as a "living pool legend." He was nicknamed "The Rifleman" for his accuracy and had been a consistent top player for over two decades and virtually unbeaten when playing "money matches". Many players and pundits consider him to be one of the most fundamentally solid 9-Ball players of all time, heralding him with the best cue ball control of any player. Hall has been credited with creating the "clock system" which is a technique for where to hit the cue-ball, using the face of a clock as a gauge for where to aim. Hall began playing at 14 years of age in a soda shop in his home town. When local pool rooms would not let him enter because of his age, he used subterfuge to obtain a new birth certificate from a local judge which stated he was of legal age. He cut his teeth at Herbi ...
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Cue Sports Equipment
Cue sports are a wide variety of Game of skill, games of skill played with a cue stick, which is used to strike billiard balls and thereby cause them to move around a Baize, cloth-covered billiards table, table bounded by elastic bumpers known as . Cue sports, a category of List of stick sports, stick sports, may collectively be referred to as billiards, though this term has more specific connotations in some List of dialects of English, English dialects. There are three major subdivisions of games within cue sports: *Carom billiards, played on tables without , typically ten feet in length, including straight rail, balkline, one-cushion carom, three-cushion billiards, artistic billiards, and Four-ball billiards, four-ball *Pool (cue sports), Pocket billiards (or pool), played on six-pocket tables of seven, eight, nine, or ten-foot length, including among others eight-ball (the world's most widely played cue sport), nine-ball (the dominant professional game), ten-ball, straight ...
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Pool (cue Sports)
Pool is a series of cue sports played on a billiard table. The table has six Pocket (billiards), pockets along the , into which Billiard ball, balls are shot. "Pool billiards" is sometimes hyphenated and/or spelled with a singular "billiard". The WPA itself uses "pool-billiard" in its logo but "pool-billiards" in its legal notices. The organization compounds the words to result in an acronym of "WPA", "WPBA" having already been taken by the Women's Professional Billiards Association. Normal English grammar would not hyphenate here, and w:de:Poolbillard, the term is actually a Germanism. A general rules booklet on pool games in general, including eight-ball, nine-ball and several others. Of the many different pool games, the most popular include: eight-ball, Blackball (pool), blackball, nine-ball, ten-ball, seven-ball, straight pool, one-pocket, and bank pool. Eight-ball is the most frequently played discipline of pool, and it is often thought of as synonymous with "pool". The ge ...
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Shane Van Boening
Shane Van Boening (; born July 14, 1983) is an American professional pool player from Rapid City, South Dakota. Van Boening is considered one of the best players of all time. Van Boening has won the WPA World Nine-ball Championship and has won the US Open Nine-ball Championship on 5 occasions, along with over 100 other professional titles. Van Boening has a hearing impairment and uses a hearing aid, but it does not affect his pool ability. He has received praise for his attitude towards the sport, particularly for his behavior during matches, and for avoiding alcohol. Professional career Van Boening has a family background in pool. His grandfather, Gary Bloomberg, was a trick-shot artist; his grandmother, Jeanne Bloomberg, a VNEA national champion; his mother, Timi Bloomberg, a BCA national champion; and his aunt, Gari Jo Bloomberg, a three-time VNEA national champion. Van Boening defeated Hungarian Vilmos Foldes at the International Pool Tour qualifier in 2006, and was o ...
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Seven-ball
Seven-ball is a pool game with rules similar to nine-ball, though it differs in two key ways: the game uses only seven as implied by its name, and play is restricted to particular pockets of the table. William D. Clayton is credited with the game's invention in the early 1980s. Rules At the start of the game, balls one through seven are in a hexagonal configuration, with the 1-ball placed at the rack's , centered over the table's , the 7-ball placed at the rack's center, and all other balls placed clockwise ''(see photo top right)''. Immediately following the , the opponent must elect three pockets along one of the table's , and the player who broke is automatically assigned the three pockets situated along the opposite long rail. Once that selection is made, balls 1–6 may be in any pocket in rotation, starting with the one, as the object ball. Balls pocketed via combinations off of the object ball are legal. The 7-ball must be pocketed in player's assigned side to be a leg ...
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World Cup Of Pool
The World Cup of Pool is an annual international single-elimination tournament for doubles teams in nine-ball pool competition. The Philippines holds the record for World Cup wins, winning the title on four occasions. In 2023, they also became the first unseeded country to win the tournament. History The tournament is held annually, at various locations, and was first held in 2006 in Newport, Wales Wales ( ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by the Irish Sea to the north and west, England to the England–Wales border, east, the Bristol Channel to the south, and the Celtic .... The tournament is hosted by Matchroom Pool. Format There are usually 32 participating teams, representing 31 nations (the host nation is represented by two teams, A and B) composed of two players each. The participating nations do not have to go through a qualifying tournament in order to join, as they are selected by the organizers ...
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World Pool-Billiard Association
The World Pool Association (WPA) is the international Sport governing body, governing body for Pool (cue sports), pool (pocket billiards). It was formed in 1987, and was initially headed by a provisional board of directors consisting of representatives from Australia, the Americas, Africa, and Europe. As of 2023, the WPA president is Ishaun Singh of South Africa. It is an associate of the World Confederation of Billiards Sports (WCBS), the international umbrella organization that encompasses the major cue sports. WPA is headquartered in Gauteng, South Africa. History In the late 1970s, Kazuo Fujima of Japan invited various European players to compete in the All Japan Championship (pool), All Japan Championship. This led to cooperation with Europe, being the first time contacts between Europe and Asian associations had been made. However, most of the efforts were initiated by individuals, and progressed slowly. By the mid-80s, many European players, who had the European Pool Champi ...
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