Billiards Terminology

Series Summary

8-Ball pool is a great game. It is the standard game of todays billiards and the one most amateurs tend to play when socializing. This game consists of striped and solid color balls with one solid black 8-Ball. The type of ball you will play is determined after the initial break. The object of the game is to hit all your balls in before your opponent and then successfully make the 8-Ball as well. It is a game of precision, geometry and skill but it is a lot of fun and anyone can play.

In this free video series, our expert Richard Buccola will tell you how to play billiards, specifically 8 ball. Richard will tell you about the object of the game, the rules, the terminology, and how to rack the balls. He'll tell you how to call obvious shots, call complex shots, the lag, and how to break the rack. He'll also tell you about scratching, stripes and solids, jumping, the open table, safety shots and the concept of ball in hand. He'll even tell you about scoring and the rules for shooting the 8-Ball and how you can lose the game automatically if you mess up on the 8-Ball.

Video Transcript

"All right, before I even teach you the rules of 8-ball, I just wanted to go over some quick terminology so you know the game in case it's your first time. One of the first things you're going to need is the table--this is the pool table. The table is a slate--that's what it rolls on. There's actually a marble under the table, so they call that the slate sometimes, or the body. You're going to have cushions, or rails. These are what the ball will actually bounce off of. You're going to have a que ball, and you're going to have balls--fifteen balls. Some games you won't need all fifteen balls. You're going to need a rack to rack them. There's different types of racks. This is a regular rack, triangle rack, but they also have a 9-ball rack. We're going to also talk today about chalk. Going to need chalk. Chalk prevents friction from the ball and the tip, which is made of leather--it eliminates friction so you don't miscue. Miscue is when you miss the ball, or you jump the ball and don't hit it properly. That's a miscue. Your que stick--this is your stick that you're going to use. Different types of ques--you've got from cheap, being in the pool hall, you can just find your que, up to thousands of dollars for custom-made sticks that they make, or ques, or que sticks. So, we're going to go over everything from--we're going to talk about shots. There's regular shots, there's shots. A lot of these I'll talk about later and get into more detail. There's combination shots, there's bank shots, there's straight shots, there's jump shots, there's marsay shots--marsay shot is where you actually make the que ball spin around another ball to hit a ball. There's a lot of different terminology. So, we're going to slowly just tell you these things now, and as we go through the video, you'll learn more about them when I actually do something. Some other terms you might here, of course, are the pockets, and the object ball. The object ball will be the ball you're going to shoot. The que ball will be the ball that is the universal ball for shooting in your object balls and into pockets. You also have the points at the table. These are diamonds located all through the table. They usually break the table up into quarters, or thirds depending how you look at it. They're used for angle shots and determining where a specific angle or bank shot will go off of hitting off of one of these diamonds. So, some of the other things we'll be learning today are definitely in this video, so come back we're having fun with 8-ball."