Tournament Tables in the 50's and 60's?
- Thread starter mnorwood
- Start date
I believe during the 60s the tables were Gold Crowns,i dont believe they were 8 ft tables for tournaments but i wasnt there. 
Tournament Tables 50's & 60's
Nine foot Gandys at Johnston City.
Nine foot Gandys at Johnston City.
mnorwood said:
Standard size tournament table was 9' but the South was known to have a lot of 8 footers.
I've always heard that it would be a lot harder to run 500 in 14 .1 on a eight footer than the same on a nine footer because of traffic jams. It makes sense in my humble opinion, what do you'all think ?
Leonard
Leonard
mnorwood said:
I went to quite a few tournaments in the 60's. All were played on 9' tables. Gandy's, Gold Crowns and Sport Kings were ones I remember. I think Nationals were used at a tourney in Cincinnati.
In the pool halls back then, particularly in the Midwest and South, many used the "oversize" 8' tables. These had the 46" x 92" playing surface as opposed to the 9' table with 50" x 100". That's about as specific as I can get. The difference in size was 4" across by 8" long. They were noticeably smaller.
In New York and a few places in the East, you would occasionally still see a 10' pool table. 7-11 had one. The playing surface was 56" x 112". It was also noticeably larger. The bed height (playing surface) of most tables in the U.S was about 30". When I first went to Japan, something felt funny, until I realized I was playing on tables about 1-1.5" lower. That's a big difference!
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mnorwood said:
What matches, and where?
As said by others, anything even vaugely resembling
'official' competition was played on 9 ft.
The first 14.1 Championship played on a 9ft was aprox 1950,
prior to then, it was on 5 x 10.
How do you know the tables are 8 ft?
Dale
There stilll are a lot of 8 footers in the rural south in pool rooms.
A lot of the older tables had HUGE extremely forgiving pockets.
A lot of the older tables had HUGE extremely forgiving pockets.
Willie Mosconi had the highest run ever recorded of 526 balls in straight pool. He did it on an 8 foot table.
av84fun said:
There was no standard size back then. I suspect the Gandys at Johnston City were close to 4.75" pockets. Maybe 4.50" at the smallest. 4.5" was a typical pocket opening back then, two balls wide. Rarely was anything tighter than that. Sometimes even a bit looser, like 4 and five eighths or 4.75", were not uncommon. The pockets were almost always straight cut back then, no angled openings. That made them play a little smaller. And the shelves may have been a half inch deeper too, also making them play tougher.
The tightest (and toughest) pockets I ever saw were the Vitalie tables used at the Peter Vitalie Open in 1987. They were 4" pockets with deep shelves. A ball could hide behind those corners, where you couldn't make it shooting down the rail. TRUE! Sigel loved those tables, and so did Buddy. Earl hated them, he couldn't run out.
By the way, NO ONE ever set up tournament tables any better than Al Conte did the Gold Crowns from the 70's to the 90's. He was the best ever in my book! They didn't play good, they played perfect!