You clearly miss the point.
Just started watching the 10 ball on ultimate pool.
- Thread starter middleofnowhere
- Start date
You won't find a bar table in the Philippines, not one! I've never seen one anywhere I've been. There just not a thing over here (I'm there now for the holidays). I've often thought they might be popular in some places, like in the bars where space is limited. But I might take a beating here for such sacrilege of one of their most important pastimes.Oh, well that’s just makes it okay now…
I don’t recall Britain being a pool powerhouse nation. The USA was… so maybe taking pool lessons from the brits is not that great of an idea
Lets look at the countries that do produce the best players in the last 10 years, do they shoot on bar boxes?
They used to have some coin-operated bar tables, 8 footers I believe, in Angeles City.
I used to play in a place called The Crow's Nest on Perimeter Road which became Field's Avenue once it got closer to the main gate of Clark AB. I think Field's Avenue is now called Walking Street,
Most of the bars with tables had old 9 footers with drop pockets.
The money to be made was on the bases where they had 7 foot bar tables in the clubs. It wasn't too hard to get a ring game going pretty much any night of the week and during the weekends in the day time.
I used to clean house in those games even though we were usually only playing for small amounts. I would go in and have a few beers and play until the last man quit and always came out winner.
People would line the walls to watch us play. Even people who didn't play pool.
I'm here now! In all the years I've been coming here I never played pool on the base at Clark. There used to be some decent small stakes action in the bars along walking street. Like in Margaritaville (now closed and relocated) they had two challenge tables where they played Eight Ball for a drink or 50-100P a game. The challenge board might be six to eight names long, but once I got on that table I would often hold it until the last man (and woman) quit. I would play for free (loser pays the 15-20P charge per game) until the last player quit and there were no more names on the board. Good memories from ten to fifteen years ago. I might make 500-1,000P when it was all said and done, ha ha. It felt good to win anyway. Somehow validating that a 60+ year old man could still beat all comers.
Even back then there were a few spots (in hotels) further up Fields toward Korea Town where the real pool players hung out. I would often find guys (foreigners) who liked to play One Pocket. Here we often played for 500 or 1,000P a game. I did okay but the level of competition was much higher. A couple of times they brought a Filipino in to play me. These guys didn't really know the nuances of One Pocket but they were real players and I had trouble with them, usually losing a few games before giving up. They never missed on those tables and had enough pool sense to not leave me a good shot at a bank or anything else. Roland Garcia was one guy who I played before he became known in the USA. Another short chunky Pinoy guy (name ?) took me down at One Pocket. I told him he was a very good pool hustler.
Nowadays pool is experiencing a revival here with several new poolrooms opening up in the last year or two. The most significant are Capito's which now has two locations, one by Checkpoint and one in Dau. You will see some of the best Pinoy hustlers (many who played in the recent Philippine Open) gambling in there. Old time guys like Lining, Alcano and Gabica may show up to challenge them. Efren plays in here too (he lives in Angeles). The game is always Ten Ball, races from 15 to 30 depending on the size of the bet. A typical game has 50,000P in the middle ($1,000), and the crowd is betting game by game (500-1,000P bets). I've seen bigger games here too, much bigger! It's a lively atmosphere to say the least.
No, I don't play anymore. I still have my trusty Predator cue but no motivation to put in the practice required to find some semblance of my stroke. Maybe one day I will feel like trying to get halfway in stroke again. That's good enough to bang them in playing Bank Pool!
Talking about no bar tables, I lived in Taiwan for three years in the 70s and I never saw an American pool table of any kind on the entire island that wasn't in an American club or recreation center of some type. The Taiwanese all played snooker. I lived in a top floor apartment in Taipei and the bottom floor was a snooker hall.
I used to play almost everyday in the clubs there and I used to kill everybody over there. I won the Island-Wide 14.1 Championship two years in a row and I never played that game in my life except for practicing around as a kid when I worked in the pool hall. I never found anybody over there who beat me playing 9-ball or 8-ball. I won a ton of money over there (in 1970s dollars) and made more money from pool than I did from my salary.
Those were the good-old days of free flowing money overseas during the Vietnam War and right after it ended. Lots of people traveling throughout the Pacific from Vietnam, Japan, Thailand, etc. and they all had money to spend and gamble with.
I had special shirts made just to play pool with. Kind of like those barongs they wear in the Philippines. I would have them put four patch pockets on the shirt. Two chest pockets and two lower pockets. I used to have so much money going on and making change during games that I needed multiple pockets to stash all my cash in. I was a walking cash register.
Last edited:
i wouldn't know enough of the american scene to fully diagnose the lack of pro growth. and i knew very little of league pool before the UP. it's possible barboxes is a factor in pro growth, but leagues cannot possibly be one. by the time you're drinking age and join a league it's too late to become a pro, no matter what tables the leagues are played on.
so then it's just two different things, recreational vs aspirational, and it seems to me both are good things and they don't really collide
They have a UPUSA now as well. Same rule set but on 7fts with Amer. pool balls. Its a very well run outfit.
I'll say this about US big-table pool prospects: its gonna take a MASSIVE cultural sea-change for the US to regularly compete with the world's best. Everyone, including myself, hates the current status-quo but how is it going to change? It has to start at the very bottom with kids getting in the game, getting trained and staying in the game. We have zero programs like the Asians or Euro's. Barboxes rule here and i don't see that changing anytime soon if ever. Really hope i'm wrong but nothing i see makes me believe otherwise.
Last edited: