History of tight pockets?

JarnoV

JarnoV

JarnoV
Silver Member
The trend seems to favor tight pockets nowadays, but I was left wondering whether this has always been the case or is this just a recent trend. The difference isn't that huge between sloppy and tight tables inch-wise, but I've noticed that the pocket size does make a big difference in overall pocketing percentages.

Is the current standard of tight pockets (say, the normal Diamond table pocket size) a new invention or has it always been like it is today?
 
My poolroom in NY in the 1960's had 8 9' tables and one billiard table. One of the 9' tables had a 4 1/8" pockets. Most rooms had a tight table or two, on the east coast anyhow. Probably like that all over the US. Johnnyt
 
Johnnyt said:
My poolroom in NY in the 1960's had 8 9' tables and one billiard table. One of the 9' tables had a 4 1/8" pockets. Most rooms had a tight table or two, on the east coast anyhow. Probably like that all over the US. Johnnyt
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Yeah, but I bet the pockets on that billiard table were impossible!!:D
 
I may be wrong on this, but I read somewhere that the low point in pool's popularity was in the 50's. When The Hustler came out, it revitalized pool and Brunswick started opening these combo Bowling and Billiard centers. To shorten the learning curve, and make the game easier for the masses, they made the pockets bigger (current standards).
 
There are some good informations about the evolution of the game and the tables in that article written by Ralf Eckert in Marco Tschudi's Blog.

Link HERE :thumbup:
 
That's good question. Wish Mike Shamos was a member here.
When I wanted to tune my game up, I used to practice with regular balls on a ten-foot snooker table. Bet I wasn't the only one....
 
Bob Callahan said:
That's good question. Wish Mike Shamos was a member here.
When I wanted to tune my game up, I used to practice with regular balls on a ten-foot snooker table. Bet I wasn't the only one....
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I used to do that myself until the room owner told me that I was damaging the cloth. He said the weight of normal balls is more than that of snooker balls therefore it damages the cloth. :(

For a while though it was great practice. I never was able to run a whole rack of 9-ball though. Tough, very tough.:angry:
 
Henry...I think it began long before that. Back in the 30's, 40's, and 50's, when you paid by the rack (and there was a 'rackman'), a room owner would want ALL the balls to go in on the break, thus speeding up the game, and making them more money, so they would opt for larger pockets. I agree with the poster who said tight pockets, as a norm, came along about the same time as faster cloth...which is only the last 20 yrs or so. No doubt there was almost always one tight table, even back in the day, for gambling.

Scott Lee
www.poolknowledge.com

ctyhntr said:
I may be wrong on this, but I read somewhere that the low point in pool's popularity was in the 50's. When The Hustler came out, it revitalized pool and Brunswick started opening these combo Bowling and Billiard centers. To shorten the learning curve, and make the game easier for the masses, they made the pockets bigger (current standards).
Click to expand...
 
Scott,

Thanks, I don't want to spout misinformation. From my understanding pool started to decline right after WWII. Brunswick started to focus more on bowling and family orientated games. To make it easier, pockets were made bigger and a shift to 9 foot tables.

As for faster cloth and tighter pockets, that started with the switch to 9-ball from straight pool (move towards Simonis 860, and appearance of Diamond tables), right?
 
Ten footers, bigger balls, 4.5" pockets.....

In the early 1900s, championships were played on 5x10' tables with 2 5/16" ivory balls, and the pockets were 4.5" .... but another poster is correct that room owners wanted bigger pockets for more per-game revenue. Both things were going on at the same time. However, the "shelf" in the pockets was smaller then and that shelf depth also accounts for a pocket being tough, along with the angle of the facings.
One by one the old standards went away, the ivory balls probably being the first casualty due to an ivory pool ball set costing as much as an entire table. I think a more relevant discussion of pocket toughness these days is the deeper shelf. Roomkeepers used to shave/round the edges of the dropoffs so that games would go faster, too. But even if they had left them alone the tables still had narrower shelves than Diamonds. This is a general discussion, so feel free to correct me on small details about this. I am not an old-timer, just an interested party who has read the history.
 
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