BAR BILLIARDS: Old King John hosts the Stag
BY HUGH SULLIVAN
It’s a winter Wednesday evening, and at the Old King John (OKJ) pub in Middle Street, Ore (round the back of the Co-op), there’s a match taking place in the Hastings & Bexhill Bar Billiards League. Mainly male and generally not so young, competitive but at the same time convivial, the players gather around the small table in the left hand corner, as one of the home team’s five champions of the night contests a 20-minute shoot-out against a visiting cue-slinger from the Stag Inn down the hill.
Actually there’s nothing less akin to a gunfighter’s trigger reflex than the smooth rhythm of the bar billiards master as he accumulates a winning break. Each cue ball rolls over the baize surface at a speed never greater than the minimum required to tumble one or both balls into the nearest hole with absolute precision. Players need the patience and attention to detail of a clock-restorer, the accuracy and self-discipline of an airline pilot.
OKJ are top of the league, with a previous winning record of seven wins out of nine in the current winter season. And playing on home territory offers crucial advantages. Each table, though conforming to standard measurements, has subtle variations of speed and of bounce off the cushions. The baize will be regularly ironed but may retain rough patches or minor deviations in incline levels. Home players know and take account of each miniscule idiosyncrasy.
Surprisingly, OKJ go two frames down in the best-of-five encounter, with a narrow win for the Stag’s first-up player Peter Payne followed by a commanding performance by Bob Osborne, who accumulates 5,280 points including one 2,000+ break in the next tie. Mark Bailey pulls one frame back for the OKJ, then Roger Andrews demolishes his Stag opponent with a best-of-the-evening score of 5,490. Finally, in a low-scoring contest of the captains, the home team’s Chris Lamb defeats Tom Pope despite twice toppling a white peg. Perhaps I’ve distracted the latter in my ignorant questionings, but he bears no grudge. “A good result for the team, really”, he concludes. “OKJ are very strong at home”.
A couple of decades ago, according to Tom, most pubs in Hastings had a bar billiards table and one or more representative teams: there were three divisions of 12 teams each across Hastings and Bexhill. Nowadays the league consists of just five teams spanning the Old Town and Ore – the OKJ, the Stag, the Ashburnham Arms and two from the Jenny Lind. Other towns in Sussex such as Worthing, Lewes and Horsham still run similar leagues but Eastbourne, which used to house equivalent numbers of tables, now has none at all.
Although a table takes up less space than a dart board, and far less than a pool table, which needs to accommodate players taking shots from 360 degrees around it, there’s less revenue, Tom explains, from a landlord’s point of view. Pool – an American import beloved of Hollywood movies – attracts a younger crowd; more importantly its contests are quicker resolved, hence more coins in the slot. But most pubs are trying to diversify anyway into food provision, and increasingly inclined to turn all games areas into meal tables.
Bar billiards tables are expensive to make and need careful maintenance: they’re a threatened species. So get to play while you can. All the Hastings teams welcome new recruits. If you express an interest at the Stag Inn bar, they’ll put you in touch with Tom.
Nine Holes, Three Pegs and a Bar
Bar billiards is a miniature version of other games in which a small hard ball is poked with a cue to roll across a cloth-topped cushion-edged table, impacting on other balls already on its surface.
In classic billiards, snooker and pool, the main aim is to dispatch one or both balls into side or corner pockets, though tactical advantage may be sought from aligning balls to frustrate an opponent’s ability to do so (snookering). But a bar billiards table has no such pockets: rather there are nine holes in the playing surface itself, three of them protected by wooden pegs (one black, two white). You score by ‘potting’ balls into these holes, assigned various point values ranging from 10 to 200, but receive heavy score penalties for knocking over a peg (see below). Once potted, the balls run in lanes below the surface of the table back to the starting point for reuse (as with the white ball in snooker or pool).
It might be assumed that the ‘bar’ in the game’s name signifies the almost universal location of bar billiards tables within pubs or other drinking areas – like ‘beach’ in beach volleyball. Not so: the bar is a mechanical device built into the table which drops after a set time in each game – 18 minutes – so as to prevent potted balls from returning for reuse. The game continues thereafter only for a minute or two while there remain balls unpotted.
You start with a white and a red (which scores double) in fixed position, and must pot one or both in one of the nine holes; if both, you repeat the start (up to a maximum of three goes, after which you must leave one on the table); if just one, you introduce a new ball from the same starting position, and strike it onto the other, wherever it has come to rest. Again the aim is to pot one or both balls. Your ‘break’ (turn with the cue) continues until you play a shot that fails to pot either ball. Then you tot up your score, and your opponent takes over.
At that point there will necessarily be two balls on the table, but the new player introduces a third from the starting point and carries on within the same parameters, again aiming to pot one or more balls from each shot. In a match between competent players, there will rarely be more than three or four balls lying unpotted on the table. But there are potentially eight (seven whites, one red) to be used, and if they are all left in play, the nearest to the starting point is lifted and reused.
A good break at local league level would be 1,000 or more – in a 20-minute game, a total of 5,000. But beware of knocking over a peg: if it’s one of the two white pegs it will not only end your break but cancel your break score; if it’s the sole black peg, you lose your entire game score accumulated up to that point.
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