there's pool billiards, with 15 balls and a white ball.
there's 9ball, a variation on pool billiards.
there's snooker, with 15 red balls and some colored balls.
there's regular billiards, with 2 white balls and a red (or a white, yellow and a red ball).
i play the last version, and i've just had my first match in the district's competition. i play in a team of 4 players, we're all friends and go way back so it's always fun to play with em.
the reason i'm posting this is we won this first match. i won my own match, and my team won the match against the other team. i'm very, very happy because me and my friends have only been playing this for less than a year, and our opponents today were "veterans". i will be playing in this competition with my team until somewhere february, so i hope we can keep the scores up.
some side info about the game in the spoiler.
Spoiler!
the fun thing about billiards is that being bad at the "sport" is never a real handicap. let me explain this a bit.
like i said in the list, there's either two white balls (one of em has got 2 spots on them so its recognizable as a different ball than the other white), and a red one. two players each have their own white ball; one has the spotted one, the other has the clean white.
to score a point in this sport, you have to shoot a "carambole". this means that with your white ball, you will have to hit both the other white and the red. after you scored a carambole, you can take another shot, until you miss; then it's the opponent's turn to take a shot.
now here is why being bad at the game is not a real handicap. every player is actually not playing against his opponent, but against himself. it's all about your own avarage.
say, i have an avarage of 1,5. that means that, in 10 turns i can hit 15 caramboles when i play like i normally play. this means that, in a match or competition, i will have to shoot a certain amount of caramboles, say 25. now my opponent has an avarage of 2. in a competition he will have to shoot, say, 31 caramboles. if i were to play against this player, who has a higher avarage than me, then i have to shoot 25 caramboles in the same time that he has to shoot 31. so basically, i have no handicap because he simply has to shoot more caramboles than i.
ok, enough with the info. if anyone has any big questions, you can ask them :] all i know is i love this "sport", because it includes drinking a couple of beers with my best mates. it's both fun and competition.
Isn't it 8ball? Last number is 8 on the black ball right?
Grats on the winning =] I love billiards (your's), we had one for a long time but it took too much space so we got rid of it...Wish we still had it tho
well me and my friends used to play pool almost every day, in our spare time. in highschool, we used to go to the pub whenever we had an hour of free time, at our uni we have a pool table in the uni's pub. but thing was, we cleared the whole table within 5 minutes, so we got bored of it. we tried snooker, but the balls are smaller and the table is bigger, so our know-how of pool would mean nothing. then we tried billiards, and the balls and table are the same size as with pool, so we knew where to place the balls and what effects to use. :]
me and my team won the competition, were like 35 points ahead of the second team. now in i think 2 weeks, we will be playing the regional finals, then if we get through that we play the finals of north/east/south/west, and then we might play in the national finals.
everyone we played against told us we have a good chance of becoming dutch champions in our devision.
don't get me wrong btw, we are not pro billiard players who play in the highest league lol. we play in the 5th devision right now, next year we will play in the 4th. still, i'm very happy to have won the competition since it's the first time we participated :]
Thats pretty sweet. I wish I was good enough to play at a high competitive level. Its a shame, I am looking at our pool table right now that we use only when people are over haha.
me and my team won the regional finals. we're now going to compete with the best team from north south and west of the netherlands. go us <3
what programm can we watch you at? euro-sport? my dad always watches snooker on bbc...
I doubt even first devision gets broadcasted in the Netherlands, so Cin being in the 5th, I think the chances are very slim we'll see him on some kind of national television. There may be a chance he goes on regional television.
, see i always knew you were good with balls 
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