Cloth color

[ChrisinNC]

I like and respect serious players, really I do, but they make up maybe 10% of my business.

And since I have 16 tables going at $16/ hour this afternoon and will soon have 24 tables going at $20-$24 for 6 or 7 hours…I truly don’t care about being a non-serious travesty of a whorehouse. I run it like a business.
Serious players who have been around say the cloth here is changed more often than anywhere else, ever.

Your poolroom, your choice, but do you really think you would lose all those non-serious playing customers if you had all the tables covered in the same cloth color like tournaments blue Simonis?

A policy that every player on every table uses the correct color of chalk for that particular table (particularly in the case of recreational players who don’t even know better) is a virtually impossible task for your staff to enforce, and a table that has chalk marks on it of another color looks like crap.

 

[Chicagoplayer]

We have black tables and need to pick a cloth color. Should we stick with classic green or do you thing players like reds or blues? Maybe an oddball color? Thanks in advance!

Green for tradition!

 

[Pierre Shakes]

The seriousness of my "travesty of a poolroom" shows up in the cash register. Also in the tables, the cloth, the balls, carpet, seating, and the artwork.

I said, "Serious players who have been around, say the cloth here is changed more often than anywhere else, ever.” Cloth costs only 8-9 cents per hour of use, labour included, to keep it like that. I've been appalled for 40 years by the dirt & dings most halls dare charge their customers to play on. A false economy.

We spent $5,000 on 25 sets of Aramith Duramith balls to replace the 35-year-old Premier balls. We weren’t getting complaints, so why bother? Because better is better. Only the good players noticed, and they were gobsmacked.

Most of you are diehard Diamond devotees, but if you wanted to directly compare them to other tables, say, Rasson or Sam KSteel, where would you go? How many halls would you need to go to to do that? You would forget their characteristics in that time. It is better to have them in one place, mine: Unik, 3 Rasson models, Diamonds, KSteel, Olhausen, Connelly, Peter Vitalie, antique Brunswick, and some I made myself. I should get some more European tables but Gabriels never answers my emails. Other suggestions for Euro tables for my menagerie? I keep the technical tables in one area and only use blue or green cloth on them: 5 different blues and 5 different greens. Blue chalk allowed.

It was no less a player than John Schmidt who said "good payers can adapt quickly" - he was playing on the Rasson Ox at the time. We have had $100 entry tournaments where out-of-town players bitched, and then adapted. The winners were happy and the losers had a built-in excuse.

But what I’m hear to tell you - a voice crying in the wilderness - is that having a variety of tables and cloth colours is good business. Women, much more than men, care about the ambience and aesthetics of a place. That shouldn't surprise you; 10% of men are colour blind. And if women like the place, guys will take them there. On a Saturday night at 11:00 there are 75 people in the bar/restaurant and an equal number in the poolhall. I‘m the only one there who is over 40 or could run four balls. Where do the good players go at such a time? Who cares?

The girls like the marble side tables in the poolhall and the hand-painted ones in the restaurant with text from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (and the food). The leather couches in the poolhall appeal to all. Carpet instead of linoleum is softer to walk on and much quieter - but more expensive to replace. The 945 square feet of painstaking murals on the walls of the poolhall - tens of thousand$ worth - well you may think that extreme, but over four decades it is chump change. People love originality and you can’t fake that with posters. The trick to making it nice is to spend money upgrading things, constantly.

 

[garczar]

I like and respect serious players, really I do, but they make up maybe 10% of my business.
And since I have 16 tables going at $16/ hour this afternoon and will soon have 24 tables going at $20-$24 for 6 or 7 hours…I truly don’t care about being a non-serious travesty of a whorehouse. I run it like a business.
Serious players who have been around say the cloth here is changed more often than anywhere else, ever.

Just jokin there pard. Relax.

 

[The_JV]

The seriousness of my "travesty of a poolroom" shows up in the cash register. Also in the tables, the cloth, the balls, carpet, seating, and the artwork.

I said, "Serious players who have been around, say the cloth here is changed more often than anywhere else, ever.” Cloth costs only 8-9 cents per hour of use, labour included, to keep it like that. I've been appalled for 40 years by the dirt & dings most halls dare charge their customers to play on. A false economy.

We spent $5,000 on 25 sets of Aramith Duramith balls to replace the 35-year-old Premier balls. We weren’t getting complaints, so why bother? Because better is better. Only the good players noticed, and they were gobsmacked.

Most of you are diehard Diamond devotees, but if you wanted to directly compare them to other tables, say, Rasson or Sam KSteel, where would you go? How many halls would you need to go to to do that? You would forget their characteristics in that time. It is better to have them in one place, mine: Unik, 3 Rasson models, Diamonds, KSteel, Olhausen, Connelly, Peter Vitalie, antique Brunswick, and some I made myself. I should get some more European tables but Gabriels never answers my emails. Other suggestions for Euro tables for my menagerie? I keep the technical tables in one area and only use blue or green cloth on them: 5 different blues and 5 different greens. Blue chalk allowed.

It was no less a player than John Schmidt who said "good payers can adapt quickly" - he was playing on the Rasson Ox at the time. We have had $100 entry tournaments where out-of-town players bitched, and then adapted. The winners were happy and the losers had a built-in excuse.

But what I’m hear to tell you - a voice crying in the wilderness - is that having a variety of tables and cloth colours is good business. Women, much more than men, care about the ambience and aesthetics of a place. That shouldn't surprise you; 10% of men are colour blind. And if women like the place, guys will take them there. On a Saturday night at 11:00 there are 75 people in the bar/restaurant and an equal number in the poolhall. I‘m the only one there who is over 40 or could run four balls. Where do the good players go at such a time? Who cares?

The girls like the marble side tables in the poolhall and the hand-painted ones in the restaurant with text from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (and the food). The leather couches in the poolhall appeal to all. Carpet instead of linoleum is softer to walk on and much quieter - but more expensive to replace. The 945 square feet of painstaking murals on the walls of the poolhall - tens of thousand$ worth - well you may think that extreme, but over four decades it is chump change. People love originality and you can’t fake that with posters. The trick to making it nice is to spend money upgrading things, constantly.

Right on... good on you and an excellent business model.

If there is only one constant in business it's this: A pool player will never be happy.

Modeling yourself as a social destination that also has pool tables, is far better than being a "pool room".

I wish you continued success.

 

[Pierre Shakes]

Just jokin there pard. Relax.

"Red cloth would probably look good in an old west whorehouse."

Very apt. Part of what the lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows, in one-night cheap hotels pay for is time spent before and after in luxury surroundings. In Ulysses - Dublin 1904 - in Bella Cohen’s place (You might go farther and fare worse): the walls are tapestried with a paper of yewfronds and clear glades; In the grate is spread a screen of peacock feathers; gilt mirror over the mantelpiece; a shade of mauve tissuepaper dims the light of the chandelier. There is a gramophone and a pianola. If they had a pool table with red cloth, it would probably be the Lord Nelson, not the Unik.

Just because men are lesser aesthetic beings, it doesn’t mean that they don’t perceive quality subconsciously. A 14-year-old boy asked why my prices were higher than Goose, a very declined snooker hall that had been there for decades. I gave him a clipboard and said, “You can play for an hour free, if you can list 8 ways that this place is better.” He came back with a dozen reasons. Phil is still playing here 30+ years later.

 

[Chili Palmer]

I like and respect serious players, really I do, but they make up maybe 10% of my business.
And since I have 16 tables going at $16/ hour this afternoon and will soon have 24 tables going at $20-$24 for 6 or 7 hours…I truly don’t care about being a non-serious travesty of a whorehouse. I run it like a business.
Serious players who have been around say the cloth here is changed more often than anywhere else, ever.

The seriousness of my "travesty of a poolroom" shows up in the cash register. Also in the tables, the cloth, the balls, carpet, seating, and the artwork.

I said, "Serious players who have been around, say the cloth here is changed more often than anywhere else, ever.” Cloth costs only 8-9 cents per hour of use, labour included, to keep it like that. I've been appalled for 40 years by the dirt & dings most halls dare charge their customers to play on. A false economy.

We spent $5,000 on 25 sets of Aramith Duramith balls to replace the 35-year-old Premier balls. We weren’t getting complaints, so why bother? Because better is better. Only the good players noticed, and they were gobsmacked.

Most of you are diehard Diamond devotees, but if you wanted to directly compare them to other tables, say, Rasson or Sam KSteel, where would you go? How many halls would you need to go to to do that? You would forget their characteristics in that time. It is better to have them in one place, mine: Unik, 3 Rasson models, Diamonds, KSteel, Olhausen, Connelly, Peter Vitalie, antique Brunswick, and some I made myself. I should get some more European tables but Gabriels never answers my emails. Other suggestions for Euro tables for my menagerie? I keep the technical tables in one area and only use blue or green cloth on them: 5 different blues and 5 different greens. Blue chalk allowed.

It was no less a player than John Schmidt who said "good payers can adapt quickly" - he was playing on the Rasson Ox at the time. We have had $100 entry tournaments where out-of-town players bitched, and then adapted. The winners were happy and the losers had a built-in excuse.

But what I’m hear to tell you - a voice crying in the wilderness - is that having a variety of tables and cloth colours is good business. Women, much more than men, care about the ambience and aesthetics of a place. That shouldn't surprise you; 10% of men are colour blind. And if women like the place, guys will take them there. On a Saturday night at 11:00 there are 75 people in the bar/restaurant and an equal number in the poolhall. I‘m the only one there who is over 40 or could run four balls. Where do the good players go at such a time? Who cares?

The girls like the marble side tables in the poolhall and the hand-painted ones in the restaurant with text from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (and the food). The leather couches in the poolhall appeal to all. Carpet instead of linoleum is softer to walk on and much quieter - but more expensive to replace. The 945 square feet of painstaking murals on the walls of the poolhall - tens of thousand$ worth - well you may think that extreme, but over four decades it is chump change. People love originality and you can’t fake that with posters. The trick to making it nice is to spend money upgrading things, constantly.

I only read the first couple of paragraphs but it brings up a KEY point on why I refused to give money to a local hall, not only did they have crappy (that is my opinion) tan felt but they also did ZERO maintenance on 40 year old tables! I lost a 1P tournament match when my opponent missed his ball by a mile but it decided to go ahead and bounce down the end rail 3 times to finally drop in the pocket, the ball should've hit the side rail 1/2 diamond up but the table roll was that bad. On at least 6 other tables the rails were LITERALLY falling off. You could grab them and wiggle them and the rubber was NOT connected to the wood in MANY places.

I probably could've dealt with the tan felt but throw in the crap tables and yeah, wasn't spending my hard earned money there. I did always question some of the local gambler about why they continue to go there and the reply was "It's the only place", well, if you don't show up and tell them why then maybe things change. It took 10 years but they did move to all Diamonds but I still won't step foot in there at this point. Crap service may have something to do with that

Your place isn't that type of place. If you only had red tables I probably wouldn't bother but if I had to play on red tables while waiting for a green/blue to open I would probably willing to do that if the price was right, the food was good, and the service was good. Sounds like you're doing pretty good in most of those departments, well done

 

[Bob Farr]

For a Pool Hall, green or tournament blue. For a home table, whatever matches your decor. I have an oak table and I picked out an olive green. Looks good.
I love the look of red cloth but, you better use grey or tan chalk because red chalk will infect your whole house!!!
At the Union Bldg at the University of Utah, all the tables are covered with red cloth and it looks really cool when you walk in but, all the equipment is filthy with red chalk residue. Red chalk should be against the law.