I play in an APA pool league and it is generally an enjoyable time that I look forward to once a week... but with some reservations.
I'd say that maybe 50% of the people I've encountered there are truly "into" pool and the league gives them an outlet to enjoy a form of competitive pool with a predictable timeframe and without having to travel far. The remaining players and attendees, especially the lower handicap players, could be divided into spouses/friends who are really just casual players who were talked into the league by better players so their team would have obligatory low handicappers to facilitate the maximum 21 handicap rule per session. (hate that 21 rule)
As I said before, I do enjoy going every Thursday... but it's more about simply being a night out playing competitive pool. I'm not married to the establishment or the league. In fact, I find the "slop counts" APA rules and the handicapping system are quite flawed and aggravating and am contemplating finding a different forum in which to play after this session is over. Before joining the league I was playing in a weekly 8-ball tournament instead. May do that again instead. My league future is still TBD.
To my point...
Reading all of this "what will it take to save US pool" commentary got me thinking back to a different time in my life when I was in the service living in Germany and really just getting into pool hardcore. At that time I was putting in lots of practice hours playing in US military recreation centers and then putting what I learned to use on bar tables in establishments that predominately catered to American service members. Places where you could "own" the table and win free drinks all night... And I got really good at getting drunk for free. (I should also add that I'm half German as well, and speak the language with native fluency.) Anyway, one night at a place called Club Nashville in Nuremberg (long since closed) I was playing 8-ball and winning beer and shots faster than I could drink them, when I was approached by a German guy named Rainer who had been watching from the sidelines and asked if I was interested in joining his Billiard Club.... I'm thinking "WTF is a Billiard Club?" and was immediately interested. He said it was a way to play regular competitive pool in an organized, sanctioned league, against other players in other German cities. I made arrangements to meet up and go check it out the next day.
We met up and went to this very inauspicious looking industrial space that was up on the 2nd floor of a commercial building, above some garages. Rainer had his own key to the place and when he unlocked the door and in we went in I saw a bar, a small stereo system and a sitting area with some comfy couches, chairs and tables on one end of the room, and four beautiful 9-foot Brunswick tables with Simonis cloth in a row on the other side. There were games going on at 3 of the tables and a guy practicing drills at the last table. There was a stereo there, but no loud music going on, no TV, no spectators..... just pool players of varying speeds, playing pool, practicing pool, talking pool. It was a very behaved, comfortable and safe environment. I immediately fell in love with the place. I think the first words out of my mouth were "Where do I sign up?"
We are talking 25 years ago, but to the best of my recollection it worked like this: There were regional and national sanctioning bodies that kept track of the records and rankings and there were similar billiard clubs in cities and towns all around Germany. Larger cities may have several such clubs.. Each club could field as many teams as they wanted, which would be comprised based on the strength of players. A-Team was the four strongest, B-Team the next four, and so on... And each team would then play their schedule based on which league they were in...
The club itself had an internal tournament system to establish which players would be assigned to which team. There were no handicap systems and at that time the games played were straight pool and 8-ball. I believe they may have added 9-ball since then, too. Matches would be held at your home club, or you'd go on the road to play away matches. Some clubs had their own facility (like the one I described) and some were based in pool halls where they organized table time and had reduced rate practice privileges and guaranteed tables for match days. At the highest "National" levels the league was called the Bundesliga 1 (highest level) and Bundesliga 2, which literally translated means "national league." Then there was the "Landesliga," which equates to State-level, and there may have even been a Regional level as well, for the weakest teams. At the end of each year, if your team was good enough and finished in the top of your league, you would advance to the next higher league. And the weaker teams from the top leagues would drop down a level. This is very similar to how German soccer is organized as well. At that time, I remember Oliver Ortman and Ralf Souquet, were names that people were talking about quite a bit as the strongest of German league players. There were also other American and Asian players on teams as well. All in all it was a very positive environment to play and learn pool.
You could only join the club if you were invited, and it was not advertised or hyped up in any way. It was all self-driven, anchored to the sanctioning body. The cost for me to join was around $60 per month, and once I was a member I got my own key to the club and could come and go as I pleased. Buying drinks and food and such from the club was an additional way they raised travel money, and when nobody was around, you could still get drinks and snacks based on an honor system, and you could come and go as you pleased... It was a private club, not open to the public. Members had pride in their club and treated each other and the establishment with respect and 95% of the time followed the house rules (clean/cover tables when you close up, pay for what you drink, etc...)
If we had a system and clubs like that here, I'd join in a heartbeat. And I think we might even see an alternative type of pool playing culture emerge in the USA.
If you got this far... thanks for reading. And what do you think? Would you join a club like that, or is that too hardcore and would it make you miss going to your regular pool hall? (we still went to pool halls, just not as much)
EDIT: Sorry for the extreme length of this post... I knew it ended up pretty long at the time, but I just re-read this and realize it reads more like a magazine article than a forum post.
I'd say that maybe 50% of the people I've encountered there are truly "into" pool and the league gives them an outlet to enjoy a form of competitive pool with a predictable timeframe and without having to travel far. The remaining players and attendees, especially the lower handicap players, could be divided into spouses/friends who are really just casual players who were talked into the league by better players so their team would have obligatory low handicappers to facilitate the maximum 21 handicap rule per session. (hate that 21 rule)
As I said before, I do enjoy going every Thursday... but it's more about simply being a night out playing competitive pool. I'm not married to the establishment or the league. In fact, I find the "slop counts" APA rules and the handicapping system are quite flawed and aggravating and am contemplating finding a different forum in which to play after this session is over. Before joining the league I was playing in a weekly 8-ball tournament instead. May do that again instead. My league future is still TBD.
To my point...
Reading all of this "what will it take to save US pool" commentary got me thinking back to a different time in my life when I was in the service living in Germany and really just getting into pool hardcore. At that time I was putting in lots of practice hours playing in US military recreation centers and then putting what I learned to use on bar tables in establishments that predominately catered to American service members. Places where you could "own" the table and win free drinks all night... And I got really good at getting drunk for free. (I should also add that I'm half German as well, and speak the language with native fluency.) Anyway, one night at a place called Club Nashville in Nuremberg (long since closed) I was playing 8-ball and winning beer and shots faster than I could drink them, when I was approached by a German guy named Rainer who had been watching from the sidelines and asked if I was interested in joining his Billiard Club.... I'm thinking "WTF is a Billiard Club?" and was immediately interested. He said it was a way to play regular competitive pool in an organized, sanctioned league, against other players in other German cities. I made arrangements to meet up and go check it out the next day.
We met up and went to this very inauspicious looking industrial space that was up on the 2nd floor of a commercial building, above some garages. Rainer had his own key to the place and when he unlocked the door and in we went in I saw a bar, a small stereo system and a sitting area with some comfy couches, chairs and tables on one end of the room, and four beautiful 9-foot Brunswick tables with Simonis cloth in a row on the other side. There were games going on at 3 of the tables and a guy practicing drills at the last table. There was a stereo there, but no loud music going on, no TV, no spectators..... just pool players of varying speeds, playing pool, practicing pool, talking pool. It was a very behaved, comfortable and safe environment. I immediately fell in love with the place. I think the first words out of my mouth were "Where do I sign up?"
We are talking 25 years ago, but to the best of my recollection it worked like this: There were regional and national sanctioning bodies that kept track of the records and rankings and there were similar billiard clubs in cities and towns all around Germany. Larger cities may have several such clubs.. Each club could field as many teams as they wanted, which would be comprised based on the strength of players. A-Team was the four strongest, B-Team the next four, and so on... And each team would then play their schedule based on which league they were in...
The club itself had an internal tournament system to establish which players would be assigned to which team. There were no handicap systems and at that time the games played were straight pool and 8-ball. I believe they may have added 9-ball since then, too. Matches would be held at your home club, or you'd go on the road to play away matches. Some clubs had their own facility (like the one I described) and some were based in pool halls where they organized table time and had reduced rate practice privileges and guaranteed tables for match days. At the highest "National" levels the league was called the Bundesliga 1 (highest level) and Bundesliga 2, which literally translated means "national league." Then there was the "Landesliga," which equates to State-level, and there may have even been a Regional level as well, for the weakest teams. At the end of each year, if your team was good enough and finished in the top of your league, you would advance to the next higher league. And the weaker teams from the top leagues would drop down a level. This is very similar to how German soccer is organized as well. At that time, I remember Oliver Ortman and Ralf Souquet, were names that people were talking about quite a bit as the strongest of German league players. There were also other American and Asian players on teams as well. All in all it was a very positive environment to play and learn pool.
You could only join the club if you were invited, and it was not advertised or hyped up in any way. It was all self-driven, anchored to the sanctioning body. The cost for me to join was around $60 per month, and once I was a member I got my own key to the club and could come and go as I pleased. Buying drinks and food and such from the club was an additional way they raised travel money, and when nobody was around, you could still get drinks and snacks based on an honor system, and you could come and go as you pleased... It was a private club, not open to the public. Members had pride in their club and treated each other and the establishment with respect and 95% of the time followed the house rules (clean/cover tables when you close up, pay for what you drink, etc...)
If we had a system and clubs like that here, I'd join in a heartbeat. And I think we might even see an alternative type of pool playing culture emerge in the USA.
If you got this far... thanks for reading. And what do you think? Would you join a club like that, or is that too hardcore and would it make you miss going to your regular pool hall? (we still went to pool halls, just not as much)
EDIT: Sorry for the extreme length of this post... I knew it ended up pretty long at the time, but I just re-read this and realize it reads more like a magazine article than a forum post.
Last edited:
)