 Engraving of an early billiards game with obstacles, targets, and pockets, from Charles Cotton's 1674 book The Compleat Gamester | |
| Highest governing body | World Confederation of Billiards Sports |
|---|---|
| First played | 15th-century Europe, with roots in ground billiards |
| Characteristics | |
| Contact | No |
| Team members | Single opponents, doubles or teams |
| Mixed-sex | Yes, sometimes in separate leagues/divisions |
| Type | Indoor, table |
| Equipment | Billiard balls, billiard table, cue sticks |
| Venue | Billiard hall or home billiard room |
| Presence | |
| Olympic | No |
| World Games | 2001 – present |
Cue sports are a wide variety of games of skill played with a cue, which is used to strike billiard balls and thereby cause them to move around a cloth-covered table bounded by elastic bumpers known as cushions. Cue sports are also collectively referred to as billiards, though this term has more specific connotations in some varieties of English.
There are three major subdivisions of games within cue sports:
- Carom billiards, played on tables without pockets, typically ten feet in length, including straight rail, balkline, one-cushion carom, three-cushion billiards, artistic billiards, and four-ball
- Pocket billiards (or pool), played on six-pocket tables of seven, eight, nine, or ten-foot length, including among others eight-ball (the world's most widely played cue sport[citation needed]), nine-ball (the dominant professional game), ten-ball, straight pool (the formerly dominant pro game), one-pocket, and bank pool
- Snooker, English billiards, and Russian pyramid, played on a large, six-pocket table (dimensions just under 12 ft by 6 ft), all of which are classified separately from pool based on distinct development histories, player culture, rules, and terminology.
Billiards has a long history from its inception in the 15th century, with many mentions in the works of Shakespeare, including the line "let's to billiards" in Antony and Cleopatra (1606–07). Enthusiasts of the sport have included Mozart, Louis XIV of France, Marie Antoinette, Immanuel Kant, Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, George Washington, Jules Grévy, Charles Dickens, George Armstrong Custer, Theodore Roosevelt, Lewis Carroll, W. C. Fields, Babe Ruth, Bob Hope, and Jackie Gleason.