A cue sport (sometimes "cuesport") is any game or class of games of the family of cue sports (often generically called "billiards" in American English) — games played indoors with a cue stick which is used to strike balls, moving them around a cloth-covered table bounded by rubber banks (or "cushions").

History

All cue sports are generally regarded to have evolved into indoor games from outdoor stick-and-ball lawn games, and as such to be related to croquet and golf, and more distantly to the stickless bocce and bowling. The word "billiard" may have evolved from the French word billart, meaning "mace", an implement similar to a golf club, which was the forerunner to the modern cue. The term "cue sports" generally encompasses the ancestral, pre-cue mace games, and even the modern cueless variant, finger pool, for historical reasons.

Cue sports can be roughly divided into the now rare obstacle category, which appears to have been the earliest, and which includes the obsolete bagatelle and pin pool among many other variations, some with elaborate structures (likely inspirational of miniature golf), and yet others on a sloped table (the ancestors of pinball), up to the relatively recent bumper pool (popular in the 1970s in home game rooms). The object of such games varies from avoiding obstructions and traps, to hitting them on purpose to score, to using them strategically to score in some other way, such as by rebounding off them to reach a hole in the table or trapping opponents' balls.

The early croquet-like games eventually led to the development of the carom or carambole billiards category — what most non-US and non-UK speakers mean by the word "billiards" — These games, which once completely dominated the cue sports world but have declined markedly in most areas over the last few generations, are games played with three or sometimes four balls, on a table without holes (or obstructions in most cases, five-pins being an exception), in which the object is generally to strike one object (target) ball with cue ball, then have the cue ball rebound off of one or more of the cushions and strike a second object ball. Variations include straight-rail, three-cushion, balkline variants, Italian five-pins, and four-ball among others.

Over time, a type of obstacle returned, originally as a hazard and later as a target, in the form of pockets, or holes partly cut into the table bed and partly into the cushions, leading to the rise of pocket billiards, especially "pool" games, popular around the world in forms such as eight-ball, nine-ball, straight pool and one-pocket amongst numerous others. The terms "pool" and "pocket billiards" are now virtually interchangeable, especially in the US. English billiards (what UK speakers almost invariably mean by the word "billiards") is a hybrid carom/pocket game, and as such is likely fairly close to the ancestral original pocket billiards outgrowth from eighteenth to early nineteenth-century carom games. Snooker, though technically a pocket billiards variant and closely related in its equipment and origin to the game of English billiards, is a professional sport organized at the international level, and its rules bear little resemblance to those of pool games.

Read more at Wikipedia.org





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