fred_in_hoboken said:
Except for the BIH, that's apparently standard English eight ball rules.
http://www.epa.org.uk/wrules.php
What happens if you foul on your first "visit"- do you still get your second "visit", and then your opponent gets two?
These are the standard competition rules in England, Australia, Ireland, Scottland and a few other countries. I played most my pool under these rules and they are pretty good rules for the tables we play on (tight pockets). But I do prefer pool on US tables with BIH rules as it is a more aggressive game.
To answer your question, if you foul when you have 2 visits, you lose them both and the opponent gets 2 visits.
The game is more strategical as pocketing the opponent's ball is a foul, even when you hit your own ball first. This combined with tight pockets that make it hard to pot balls down rails, invite a lot of pocket covering and subsequent tactical battles around the control of pockets. Quite often a player will deliberately foul and give away 2 visits to gain control over a pocket.
When playing a deliberate foul, you usually attempt to leave the CB in a position so that the player's first shot is very hard as they must play from where the CB finishes, or from the baulk area if it is a scratch.
If the opponent cannot hit both sides of at least one of his balls after a foul, he is awarded a foul snooker, which means he can nominate the opponent's ball as one of his own. This makes for some real chess like battles and some fine control of clusters of balls around pockets.
At the higher levels of the game it is still basically a run out game with an occassional tactical battle, but at league levels where players aren't confident of running their last few balls, there is a lot of strategy play.
Many of the top level players in this game are very accurate shooters with strong snooker backgrounds. A few of the IPT players have been world champions in this 2-shot form of 8-ball. Mick Hill, Darren Appleton and Quinten Hann come to mind.