A (hopefully) more analytical approach re: Is pool a sport?

Maniac said:
Using this criteria, Jacks and pick-up-sticks might be construed as a sport.

My opinion is that GAMES are played by various degrees of normal people, some better than others at any particular game. Whereas SPORTS are contested between athletes, with physical attributes that give them the ability to rise above most competitors.

When folks like Danny Basavich, the Miz in his later years, Tony Ellin, Buddy Hall, and the list goes on and on can excel at a game where athleticism is not a neccessity, then that endeavor should be considered a game. I've seen footage of some of these larger players of yesteryear slugging down brewskies and puffing on those cancer sticks right in the middle of a match. No real ATHLETE does that. If an overweight slob can run racks and show up everyone in the pool hall, I cannot in my humble opinion consider pool a sport.

Just my opinion. No need to get nasty.
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Fair points. But Golf has John Daly, and he’s an amazing athlete. Sort of 🤣
 
Clusterbuster said:
I don’t play golf but I’d come down pretty firmly on it being a sport what with the power of swings utilizing almost the whole body but I see the argument.

As for, “Sport or game? Do we honestly care?” Nah, not really. Just a fun discussion.
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Yeah, obviously not important- but we need something pool related & fun to chat about, lest we all turn into NPR zombies.

To me billiard’s unique characteristics and difficulty in being classified - is one of its interesting aspects.

The well known archery & shooting analogies are good ones for the obvious parallels, but more broadly those are classified as martial arts, which along with some other ones (but not all) over time have been also officially been become considered sports, vis a vis inclusion in the Olympics, etc.

I think martial art is the best way of describing pool although it obviously doesn’t meet the technical definition.

I like the notions mentioned earlier that classification of pool depends a bit on what level its being played at and how players prefer see it & themselves. A couple engaged in novice date night slop pool - would usually think of themselves as playing a game. Dedicated practitioners who delve into its creative depth, mental zen side and $$ players may gravitate to the martial art concept. I think most of us would consider the current younger crop of top pros as legit athletes, and there have always been some of the greats like Earl, Hoppe etc that considered physical fitness and athleticism as key elements.

Cheers ✌️
 
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Clusterbuster said:
But the argument is twofold: 1) What is a sport; and 2) However a sport is defined, does pool meet enough of those criteria to be considered a sport. These are two separate questions but you can’t get to the second without answering the first.

When you say that “it [pool] is a sport, because it requires physical action to play,” you seem to indicate that physical action alone can make any given action a sport. In that case essentially anything becomes a sport because, in this context, everything requires physical exertion. If a watchmaker has to put together random parts to make a watch it requires physical action. It‘s hard to call that a sport. Does it become a sport if he can put it together faster than the next guy? Not many would say it would. Do you call it a contest? Certainly. A game? Maybe. This is why in my original proposed definition I said that there must be an emphasis on gross motor skills, strength, speed, etc. These are traditionally contemplated in describing sports and remove the possibility of ”sports” including watchmakers or my grandmothers with knitting needles. But pool doesn’t fundamentally rely on most of them. I’ll admit, my examples move toward the trivial and silly but if any kind of physical exertion or, as more typically argued, hand/eye coordination, makes pool a sport then so too can almost anything become a sport. The whole term then loses any practical meaning.

And let me be the first to admit, hell no, it doesn’t really matter. Just kinda fun to knock around the idea.
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I guess I was incomplete on my definition of sport. it must be a game/contest, that requires a physical action to play.

Your watchmaking example is an interesting one though. I don't know a lot about watchmaking, but is it trivial enough that you could tell someone how to do it, and then they could put the watch together as good as you? Or is it finicky enough that the same watch being put together by 2 different people would have certain personal touches.

This got be thinking of another example: Painting. If you had a painting contest that was judged, would that be a sport? Painting certainly requires a hand-eye coordination.

Backtracking a bit, I think that we first must say any sport must also be a game, which then requires the exact definition of a game, but lets assume we already know what a game is. One qualifier might be that doing that game is called "playing" so you must be able to say: "I am going to 'play' that game." In addition to being a game, it must require physical action, such that the work is being done by the player. I think this would then disqualify video games, because the "work" is being done by the computer.

What about tiddlywinks? lol. It seems like there is always something you could come up with that would be in the grey area of any definition. But I think pool is a sport.
 
geoff_182 said:
I guess I was incomplete on my definition of sport. it must be a game/contest, that requires a physical action to play.

Your watchmaking example is an interesting one though. I don't know a lot about watchmaking, but is it trivial enough that you could tell someone how to do it, and then they could put the watch together as good as you? Or is it finicky enough that the same watch being put together by 2 different people would have certain personal touches.

This got be thinking of another example: Painting. If you had a painting contest that was judged, would that be a sport? Painting certainly requires a hand-eye coordination.

Backtracking a bit, I think that we first must say any sport must also be a game, which then requires the exact definition of a game, but lets assume we already know what a game is. One qualifier might be that doing that game is called "playing" so you must be able to say: "I am going to 'play' that game." In addition to being a game, it must require physical action, such that the work is being done by the player. I think this would then disqualify video games, because the "work" is being done by the computer.

What about tiddlywinks? lol. It seems like there is always something you could come up with that would be in the grey area of any definition. But I think pool is a sport.
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Good response. As to your painting example, that is clearly looked on as art, which raises another interesting issue. Ballet and other dance is considered art but if it is done in the context of a contest, such as ballroom dance sometimes is or Dancing With The Stars, does that transform it into a sport? I can see the argument. And it gets awfully close to gymnastics which is clearly looked on as a sport although none of these things involve an objective scoring system, which I think ought to be a break point in the discussion. It’s one of those things where any direction you look, there are exceptions which appear to eat the rule so maybe tradition ends up being dispositive.
 
Good discussion, and a fun one to offer up opinions on. I'll join.
I kind of agree with the sport/game discussions, but when it comes to the olympics, it is about competition. Anything entered into the olympics needs to be competitive in some way or another. We often lament that there isn't a single governing body for pool, and cite that as a justification for many of the problems, but just about every other game/sport has multiple disciplines or governing bodies for their events, so that can't be it.

Pool is kind of a hybrid competition, slightly different from most others. Things like archery, shooting, track & field, skiing, golf, and gymnastics all require participants to perform the same task, and the winner is decided by comparison, either highest score, fastest time, longest distance, or by a judges assessment of you performing that task. Then there are competitions like boxing, wrestling, hockey, maybe even baseball, where you compete directly and dynamically with an opponent, and you must react to your opponent's actions, and eventually defeat multiple opponents to progress in the competition. Things like figure skating fall more into the artistic end of things, and although judged, there isn't a specific structured program for most of it. School Figures, which were structured and judged, and which gave name to the sport, aren't even included anymore. Pool is a hybrid in that you perform autonomously during your turn, but you start from a dynamic location chosen by your opponent. Imagine if while playing golf, another golfer could put a tree in front of your ball, or move your ball to a less desirable location during play. Or if following gymnasts had to vault with the springboard and horse left wherever the prior gymnast left them. Pool falls somewhere in with curling (mentioned previously) in that every individual match, even every turn in the match, depends upon what your competitor left you with.

I don't have any answers or solutions, but just keep circling back to how there must be other reasons why pool/billiards continues to be shunned.
 
Clusterbuster said:
The issue of whether pool is a sport pops up on AZB from time to time and everyone seems to have an opinion but, with some exceptions discussed later, there is seldom any analysis beyond, “Yeah, of course it’s a sport” and “Oh no, it’s not.” I wanted to re-open that discussion with what is hopefully a bit more analysis while acknowledging that at the end of the day, it’s all just opinion anyway. Full disclosure, I’m just a league banger who’s played pool all his life and feels like I have a good night if I break and run a single rack. I know there are many people with much more knowledge of the game than myself who insist that pool is a sport, but, for the reasons below, I respectively disagree.

To get beyond the yes it is/no it’s not kind of responses, you have to establish in the first instance the criteria for defining sport generally and, only then determine if pool meets those criteria. These are two different arguments. Without reference to pool, what is “sport”? I’ve not looked it up in Webster’s or Wikipedia but here is my stab at what I believe, from a traditional sense, would constitute a sport. I don’t argue that these are exhaustive or set in stone but they seem a good starting point. A sport is:

1. A contest;
2. Between individuals or teams;
3. With the outcome determined by an objective scoring system (points, times, etc.);
4. With an emphasis on overall physical skills or prowess, to include:
- Strength
- Speed/quickness
- Endurance
- Muscular coordination, with an emphasis on gross motor skills, but including hand/eye coordination and vision
- Reflexes
- Balance

The factors in #4 are the crux of the issue here. The emphasis placed on any of those factors obviously depends on the sport but, to be reasonably defined as a sport, it seems to me the endeavor would have to include at least a large majority, and arguably all, of these factors.

Those that believe pool is a sport almost always fall back on the idea that it involves good hand/eye coordination and it certainly does. If, however, it is conceded that a sport should include some or all of these other criteria, what other boxes does pool check? Certainly it involves a modicum of strength, but not in the sense that we typically think of in sports. A physically very weak person could play a credible game of pool. The same goes with the other criteria.

I’ll concede that a technical argument for pool meeting these other criteria could be made (e.g., walking around a pool table at 3:00 a.m. after eight matches on two hours of sleep can show endurance) but it’s also fair to raise the issue of how society has traditionally and practically assessed things such as strength, endurance , etc. in the context of sport. It seems to me, pool just doesn‘t meet that kind of traditional consideration.

For the hand/eye coordination proponents, they let that argument completely swamp all other considerations. If that is the claim for saying pool is a sport, then you could just as easily give two seventy-five year old grandmothers a roll of yarn, a couple of knitting needles and put them on the clock; best Granny wins. Is that a sport? You’ve got to have more than simple hand/eye coordination and maybe a technical nod to some of the traditional notions of sport to call something a sport.

I’ll also concede that my criteria may imply the disqualification of other endeavors from being called a sport, including some that have been recognized as such for decades and are included in the Olympics. Marksmanship and maybe archery come to mind. Even gymnastics (no objective scoring) would be open to dispute. In these instances, however, I’d allow for giving a nod to tradition.

One final thought. I suspect that for many proponents of pool as a sport, the discussion doesn’t so much center around the nature of the activity as how they wish to perceive themselves. People who play games are merely game players. People who play sports are athletes and that is something admired in our culture. People naturally like to see themselves as athletes. A pool player may well be an athlete, but if he is, it’s not because he plays pool.

Just the opinion of one SL 6 APA banger. Thanks and feel free to weigh in.
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Gameplay can be improved by mental exercise/memorization (Bridge, Pinochle).

Sports can be improved by atheletic activity (feel, power, strength).
 
Rickhem said:
Good discussion, and a fun one to offer up opinions on. I'll join.
I kind of agree with the sport/game discussions, but when it comes to the olympics, it is about competition. Anything entered into the olympics needs to be competitive in some way or another. We often lament that there isn't a single governing body for pool, and cite that as a justification for many of the problems, but just about every other game/sport has multiple disciplines or governing bodies for their events, so that can't be it.

Pool is kind of a hybrid competition, slightly different from most others. Things like archery, shooting, track & field, skiing, golf, and gymnastics all require participants to perform the same task, and the winner is decided by comparison, either highest score, fastest time, longest distance, or by a judges assessment of you performing that task. Then there are competitions like boxing, wrestling, hockey, maybe even baseball, where you compete directly and dynamically with an opponent, and you must react to your opponent's actions, and eventually defeat multiple opponents to progress in the competition. Things like figure skating fall more into the artistic end of things, and although judged, there isn't a specific structured program for most of it. School Figures, which were structured and judged, and which gave name to the sport, aren't even included anymore. Pool is a hybrid in that you perform autonomously during your turn, but you start from a dynamic location chosen by your opponent. Imagine if while playing golf, another golfer could put a tree in front of your ball, or move your ball to a less desirable location during play. Or if following gymnasts had to vault with the springboard and horse left wherever the prior gymnast left them. Pool falls somewhere in with curling (mentioned previously) in that every individual match, even every turn in the match, depends upon what your competitor left you with.

I don't have any answers or solutions, but just keep circling back to how there must be other reasons why pool/billiards continues to be shunned.
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As to your last sentence the biggest reason is that pool still has the backroom/gambling/outlaw reputation and i think to some extent it always will. I don't think other billiard games suffer the same problem. Snooker did at one time til Matchroom,tv, and big $$ took it mainstream.
 
By Websters definition of a Sport, Pool, Chess and other board games are considered a sport. Look it up and see the criteria they use to validate what a sport is. I was surprised what constituted a "Sport" Here are a few things I pulled from the interwebs:

The word "sport" comes from the Old French desport meaning "leisure", with the oldest definition in English from around 1300 being "anything humans find amusing or entertaining"

The precise definition of what differentiates a sport from other leisure activities varies between sources. The closest to an international agreement on a definition is provided by the Global Association of International Sports Federations (GAISF), which is the association for all the largest international sports federations (including association football, athletics, cycling, tennis, equestrian sports, and more), and is therefore the de facto representative of international sport.

GAISF uses the following criteria, determining that a sport should:[1]

  • have an element of competition
  • be in no way harmful to any living creature
  • not rely on equipment provided by a single supplier (excluding proprietary games such as arena football)
  • not rely on any "luck" element specifically designed into the sport.
They also recognise that sport can be primarily physical (such as rugby or athletics), primarily mind (such as chess or Go), predominantly motorised (such as Formula 1 or powerboating), primarily co-ordination (such as billiard sports), or primarily animal-supported (such as equestrian sport).[1]
 
I am going to say the pool/billiards is a game.

By no chance have i ever been an "Athlete". Maybe when i was 30 and running miles a day, you could of considered me an athlete. And that was before i blew out my knee. But i was on a break from pool at the time.

But consider today. I am in the 700+ Fargo rating. mid 40's, overweight and sit at a desk all day. I am far from considered an "athlete" today. I just seriously got back into pool under a year ago. It's not the physical ability that has gotten me back up to where I belong, but my mental ability. In the past year I've had Shoulders, Back and foot issues to deal with.

What is pool the guy that knows more about pool is usually the better player.
 
This whole discussion is positively Shakespearean.


It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
 
Not a sport... A sport is competition between combatants wherein the actions directly effect the ability of the opponent to win.

Figure Skating = not sport
high jump = not sport
Sprinting = not sport***
Diving = not sport
Darts = not sport
Pool = not sport

Soccer = sport
Football = sport
Tennis = sport
Ping Pong = sport
long distance running = sport***

***I categorized two 'running' events in this matter on purpose. In sprinting the racers are not allowed to leave their lane throughout the race. Doing so disqualifies them. However in long distance running. The racers are allowed to position their bodies to impede the path of those behind them.

I find most prefer to merely the categorize sport as a contest of skill. This open the flood gates to judged events like gymnastics and synchronized swimming. I'm not saying those who participate in say any track and field aren't athletes, but they are not taking part in sports.

Feel free to now lose your minds...lol
 
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The_JV said:
Not a sport... A sport is competition between combatants wherein the actions directly effect the ability of the opponent to win.

Figure Skating = not sport
high jump = not sport
Sprinting = not sport***
Diving = not sport
Darts = not sport
Pool = not sport

Soccer = sport
Football = sport
Tennis = sport
Ping Pong = sport
long distance running = sport***

***I categorized two 'running' events in this matter on purpose. In sprinting the racers are not allowed to leave their lane throughout the race. Doing so disqualifies them. However in long distance running. The racers are allowed to position their bodies to impede the path of those behind them.

I find most prefer to use merely the categorize sport as a contest of skill. This open the flood gates to judged events like gymnastics and synchronized swimming. I'm not saying those who participate in say any track and field aren't athletes, but they are not taking part in sports.

Feel free to now lose your minds...lol
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This is a great thread and I have enjoyed reading it. Everyone has made great points to go either way with the debate which has been informative and entertaining.

I am replying to your post because my daughter was a diver at WVU for four years. If I told her about this thread and then your post, the first thing she would say to me would be, I hope you said that diving is a sport! lol

While my focus is on diving, the only two sports/games that are up for discussion in your 'not sport' list are darts and pool. The other four are most certainly sports in my opinion. Just because one participant can't tackle another during a high jump does not mean it isn't a sport. I watched my daughter (and her teammates) train and practice thousands of times over the years and there isn't anything anyone can say to convince me otherwise. Figure skating, track and field, swimming and diving are all competition sports.

Bottom line is, we will agree to respectively disagree. Cheers!
 
The_JV said:
Not a sport... A sport is competition between combatants wherein the actions directly effect the ability of the opponent to win.

Figure Skating = not sport
high jump = not sport
Sprinting = not sport***
Diving = not sport
Darts = not sport
Pool = not sport

Soccer = sport
Football = sport
Tennis = sport
Ping Pong = sport
long distance running = sport***

***I categorized two 'running' events in this matter on purpose. In sprinting the racers are not allowed to leave their lane throughout the race. Doing so disqualifies them. However in long distance running. The racers are allowed to position their bodies to impede the path of those behind them.

I find most prefer to merely the categorize sport as a contest of skill. This open the flood gates to judged events like gymnastics and synchronized swimming. I'm not saying those who participate in say any track and field aren't athletes, but they are not taking part in sports.

Feel free to now lose your minds...lol
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Hm, but if you play a safe on the opponent or leave them in a bad spot, you are directly affecting their ability to win.
More so than say darts since both players at a pool table are competing with the same set of balls. For example soccer, both sides go after the same ball, darts, each player is independent of the score of the other. Chess, how you move your pieces affects how the other player can move theirs. If we use this definition of "sport".

I view sports as any activity one trains for, and some of those happen to involve physical ability.
 
I'm going Skiing in a few weeks for my annual winter trip to CO. I don't play anything while I doing it. It's actually just an activity like Hiking, which I do on my annual summer trips to the CO mountains. But an organized ski race is certainly Sport.
 
Rickhem said:
Pool is kind of a hybrid competition, slightly different from most others. Things like archery, shooting, track & field, skiing, golf, and gymnastics all require participants to perform the same task, and the winner is decided by comparison, either highest score, fastest time, longest distance, or by a judges assessment of you performing that task. Then there are competitions like boxing, wrestling, hockey, maybe even baseball, where you compete directly and dynamically with an opponent, and you must react to your opponent's actions, and eventually defeat multiple opponents to progress in the competition. Things like figure skating fall more into the artistic end of things, and although judged, there isn't a specific structured program for most of it. School Figures, which were structured and judged, and which gave name to the sport, aren't even included anymore. Pool is a hybrid in that you perform autonomously during your turn, but you start from a dynamic location chosen by your opponent. Imagine if while playing golf, another golfer could put a tree in front of your ball, or move your ball to a less desirable location during play. Or if following gymnasts had to vault with the springboard and horse left wherever the prior gymnast left them. Pool falls somewhere in with curling (mentioned previously) in that every individual match, even every turn in the match, depends upon what your competitor left you with.

I don't have any answers or solutions, but just keep circling back to how there must be other reasons why pool/billiards continues to be shunned.
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My wife was once an extremely talented ballet dancer, and I used to love to bait her by asking her how she'd perform if she had maneuver around Shaquille O'Neal during one of her leaps. Are ballet dancers athletes?

As for whether pool is a game or a sport, I'm in the Who Cares camp. To me it's a sport on the pro level and a game on lower levels. YMMV.

And other than basketball, football, hockey and boxing / MMA, you can nitpick many sports if you want to put them in a lesser category. Take soccer, for instance----what kind of a "sport" is it if only two players on the field are even allowed to use their hands? I'd never consider soccer not to be a sport, but to me this restriction places it on a level distinctly below the likes of basketball or hockey. To me no sport surpasses hockey in its required combination of speed, strength, hand/eye coordination, reflexes, endurance and skating ability.
 
atlas333 said:
I'm going Skiing in a few weeks for my annual winter trip to CO. I don't play anything while I doing it. It's actually just an activity like Hiking, which I do on my annual summer trips to the CO mountains. But an organized ski race is certainly Sport.
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Agreed. Something can be seen as a sport in some contexts and a leisure activity in others.
 
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