Problem with non-players in the pool room

[ChopStick]

it was a serious players pool hall. no leagues except for a traveling league once a week. wonder why it closed.

Well, back in the day, there was a decent crowd every night of the week and weekends pool rooms all over town were packed and had waiting lists for a table. No leagues, just players. It wasn't just in Memphis. Atlanta was the same way. I guess everyone quit. I quit for 12 years when I moved down to Florida. When I came back, it was leagues everywhere.

 

[Floppage]

I feel like too many bars set themselves up for this kind of mess.

Last week at a cross-bar league match (meaning: not an in-house league...not sure if that's the right term) we were playing a bar across town and they just had a small pool area with two tables. Each team had about 8 or 9 players and one table was being used for the match and the other for practice. This league is definitely a little more serious than the in-house leagues I have played on. There was a shuffleboard table at the back but it was almost covered in cases, cues and guys leaning against or sitting on stools against it. You could barely even see a table back there.

In the middle of the match a guy comes up to start playing shuffleboard with his buddies. There was absolutely no way they were going to fit in around the table at the same time the league match was going on and yet the bar had no problem giving them the suffleboard set.

We were pretty polite in trying to explain the situation to them and they agreed to come back later but the bar never should have created that situation. Don't give out the ping pong paddles or the shuffleboard set during tournaments. Unplug the damn punching bag game that's 2 feet from the table during league finals. These don't seem like unrealistic expectations.