eight and straight eight
People play a different set of rules if they say they are playing eight ball or straight eight. If the unlevel table caused a slow rolled ball to hit the rail twice you would have to call it or it be a foul. If it hits both inner rails that would have to be called too. Straight eight does have rules, not always the same. You are pretty safe if you call everything. I didn't remember you couldn't play caroms but it is forty years or more since I have played straight eight and I didn't like it then!
It was the action game for a few hundred miles or so on a road trip so it was play straight eight or don't play. Never found any real action anyway but picking up a few hundred dollars was a lot better than not meeting expenses. One goal on the road was to never go backwards at the end of every day.
About bar rules, I played by them for years! Some good guys too but it was indisputable that a high percentage of jerks around Baton Rouge were from Houston when money was tight in Houston and Baton Rouge was booming. Those guys from Houston were quick to cry, "that's not how we play in Houston!" It always gave me great pleasure to remind them they weren't in Houston. I remember one guy that thought about it a second and acknowledged I was right. No surprise, we became friends or at least friendly. None of the people I gambled with were friends. I made it a rule never to gamble with friends for more than a beer.
I don't get out much anymore. The hall this happened in doesn't open until four and I make it a practice to try to be out of town before the evening traffic jams. I don't know if straight eight has gotten popular in this area or not. All coin tables, even the single nine footer so ten ball doesn't work and nine isn't much better. I hate six ball, never had a consistent break. Too often I won the nine ball game and lost the six ball game everyone wanted to play to use up the balls. Funny thing, I played somebody that played the six ball game first and it seemed much better. Just a mental thing with me obviously!
The coin thing made it even less likely people would play ten ball, so I guess more difficult variations of eight ball are natural. The hall had one nine foot Diamond the last time before this that was on the clock. They got rid of it and put in a coin op nine foot Diamond. First time I encountered a table with two coin mechanisms, one for coins, one for tokens.
Were I the owner, everything would work on tokens. Something I learned when looking into the car wash business, a lot of tokens are never used! Tokens cost eight cents each back then and were worth anything you decided they were worth, up to a dollar or even one-fifty in some areas. Some operators were averaging a thousand a month on the sale of tokens that were never used. Selling little pieces of aluminum for a dollar each is good business!
That coin op Diamond was the softest Diamond I have ever played on so I suspect they do just fine. I'll have to check the seven footers in there some time, they have a dozen of them.
Hu
I think the only take-away we should get from this is "don't play pool with stupid rules". Anything else in this case is too complex and not needed LOL We can't have a ruling on interpretation of a rule that is in a set of rules that by definition does not have a set of rules out there that is not even consistent from one 10 mile radius to another (AKA bar pool, which is what straight 8 is pretty much). If it's not in the WPA or BCA rules to me that is outside the "standard" rules that I think of when I play. If there was a national "Straight 8" league that has been accepted by players and they came out with their rules in a nice format then we could talk about this, as it stands it's just a bunch of us being bards and re-telling stories that we have heard or seen before.
Any set of rules that makes you call how many times you contact a rail or restrict what balls you can contact after a legal shot is just silliness. What if you shoot a shot with a ball touching the rail already, is that one rail hit, no rail hits (since it's already on the rail) or infinite rail hits since it moves along all the points on the rail? What if the ball rolls out due to table not being level and rolls back into the cushion, is that "two" contacts? What if the ball rattles in the pocket, is each bounce in the jaws a "rail hit"? Who counts exactly how many there were?