Smaller Than Regulation Pool Balls

That’s the price you pay for playing in bars. The tables, balls, cloth, cues, etc, are never maintained. Furthermore, they are often the bottom quality brands to begin with.

If you go to a “players” room, things will usually be much different. This is one of the big reasons so many players hate leagues. The equipment, as a rule, sucks.
 
The newfound chips in the object balls, I’d guess, are more likely from a pocket defect than a customer shooting directly into the object balls with the wrong end of a stick.
 
iusedtoberich said:
The newfound chips in the object balls, I’d guess, are more likely from a pocket defect than a customer shooting directly into the object balls with the wrong end of a stick.
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You might be on to something, but the chips appearred overnight and they haven't gotten any worse since the biker party.




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Bob Jewett said:
How big are they? Maybe someone you know has a set of calipers.
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I don't know, and to be honest, I really don't care exactly how big they are. To me it is obvious that they were manufactured smaller than 2 1/4" from the factory. It's not just a millimeter or two smaller.

They might of came with the table from the vendor. The president of our league is going to try to pressure the bar to get some regulation sized balls for that table.

Now that I'm thinking about it. On the table with smaller balls, the larger 7 ball and 11 bar occasionally would end up in the hole where the cue ball ends up. Because it wasn't just one numbered ball, it didn't occur to me that there was something different about only those two balls.

Once someone pointed out that the 11 ball was smaller, I immediately found the smaller 7 ball. It was a good lesson on not being able to see something obvious, when in the back of your mind, you never in a million years think there could be a size ball different from the standard floating around in the bar that you play for.
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megatron69 said:
You can get a cheap set of good-enough digital calipers from Harbor Freight for like $15-20.
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Or if you want to compare an off-size ball with the others in the set, try to make a ring of six "normal" balls around the odd one. Arrange the ring so there is only one gap.

If the middle ball -- the one you are measuring -- is larger, the ring won't quite fit around the big ball and there will be a gap between (only) two balls in the ring.

If the middle ball is small, when you try to form the ring, the last ball into the ring will not touch the middle ball -- remember to keep all the other ring balls touching. There will be one gap between that last ring ball and the middle ball.

In either case, the gap is three times the error in the diameter of the ball in the middle. (This is true for small differences and stops being true for ping pong balls and watermelons.)
 
The table with the full sized balls everyone always acknowledged was faster, since the cloth is less worn, because that table gets less play.

But now I'm wondering how nobody noticed the difference in the action of the balls all this time.

I'm assuming that the cue balls are regulation size on both tables, so it's even more odd that nobody noticed that the cue ball was bigger than all of the object balls on that one table.


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Get_A_Grip said:
... I'm assuming that the cue balls are regulation size on both tables, so it's even more odd that nobody noticed that the cue ball was bigger than all of the object balls on that one table. ...
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No. Cue balls that have been in use for as long as the object balls on the table are nearly always smaller than the object balls. If a new cue ball is substituted it will be larger than the object balls. If the table is a bar table and the cue ball is the old-style big ball (to allow the return mechanism to work) the cue ball is not supposed to be regulation size.

The regulation size is stated above. If you go to the trouble of actually measuring the balls, I think you will be surprised.
 
Bob Jewett said:
No. Cue balls that have been in use for as long as the object balls on the table are nearly always smaller than the object balls. If a new cue ball is substituted it will be larger than the object balls. If the table is a bar table and the cue ball is the old-style big ball (to allow the return mechanism to work) the cue ball is not supposed to be regulation size.



The regulation size is stated above. If you go to the trouble of actually measuring the balls, I think you will be surprised.
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These are Valley tables and the cue balls are not the extra large ones. My assumption was always that they were magnetic. They have a green logo on them.



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And now it just occurred to me that on the table with the smaller balls, there are two pockets where the balls get stuck in the back of the pocket and don't come down. I bet that using regulation sized balls will fix that too.


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Bob Jewett said:
No. Cue balls that have been in use for as long as the object balls on the table are nearly always smaller than the object balls. If a new cue ball is substituted it will be larger than the object balls. If the table is a bar table and the cue ball is the old-style big ball (to allow the return mechanism to work) the cue ball is not supposed to be regulation size.



The regulation size is stated above. If you go to the trouble of actually measuring the balls, I think you will be surprised.
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Okay, I got the guy who runs the league that I play with at that bar to agree to check the size of the balls with a caliper. I'll report back with whatever he finds.

I told him to check the size of both cue balls too.


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A lot of the balls that are cheap at Walmart and the like have something in small print on the back that says to the effect "may vary in size, weight, and color." They're really not joking.
 
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Bob Jewett said:
No. Cue balls that have been in use for as long as the object balls on the table are nearly always smaller than the object balls. If a new cue ball is substituted it will be larger than the object balls. If the table is a bar table and the cue ball is the old-style big ball (to allow the return mechanism to work) the cue ball is not supposed to be regulation size.

The regulation size is stated above. If you go to the trouble of actually measuring the balls, I think you will be surprised.
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There hasn't been a coin operated pool table built in the last 25 years that still requires the use of an oversized or undersized cue ball. Even then, most all of the tables that don't use a magnetic cue ball or red circle have been replaced with newer equipment, except in the most remote areas.
 
Get_A_Grip said:
Playing all day today at the bar that I play leagues at, we made an amazing discovery.

For the longest time we've all had the damnest time making a tight rack. I'm talking for around a full years time. We all assumed that there was a problem with the rack itself not being shaped properly. So we were constantly flipping the rack over and rotating it around and around when racking.

Then one guy when looking at the layout of the balls says, "Hey, the 11 ball is smaller than the 15 ball next to it! " Sure enough, upon closer inspection, both the 11 ball and the 7 ball were definitely smaller than the rest of the balls.

I literally couldn't believe it. You mean to tell me that there are actually pool ball manufacturers that produce balls smaller than the standard size?!!! That is so unbelievably stupid, that nobody noticed the different sized balls for over a year.

Finally we opened up the other table, and sure enough, the full sized 11 and 7 balls were mixed in with the rest of the smaller balls on the other table. Somehow these two balls got exchanged with the balls from the other table.

The rest of the night we were all amazed at how well everyone was all of a sudden racking and breaking now that all of the balls could be racked tight!

Just when you think you've seen it all, something happens that you just can't believe would be possible. And nobody noticed this for over a year. Crazy!


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Makes me wonder if anyone sober ever plays on those bar tables - if it took nearly a year for someone to notice the difference between 2-1/4" balls and 2-1/8" balls!
 
ChrisinNC said:
Makes me wonder if anyone sober ever plays on those bar tables - if it took nearly a year for someone to notice the difference between 2-1/4" balls and 2-1/8" balls!
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Maybe. But it was only very easy to see once someone else pointed it out. It brings a new meaning to pool players being in the zone. The twilight zone.




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One of the places our league plays in has side pockets on one table that don't line up, so one is 2 inches off center. No-one there noticed till my team started playing there. No idea how they managed to get rails done like that.
 
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