The congestion factor

A couple posts ago I mentioned a very, very small table I had played on in Williamsburg, at the Brooklyn Ale House. Looking at a triangle of balls racked for a game of 8-ball (above at left), you can see how downright dinky the table looks. (Note: It seemed appropriate to post the picture alongside a shot of a 6x12 snooker table, above at right. Bar table pool and snooker are about as opposite as can be. It's like comparing croquet and golf. More on snooker at a later post.) On such a tiny table, I wonder if all 15 balls would even fit if they were lined up side by side in a straight line parallel to the short head/foot rails. After the break it's all just a clustered mess you gotta mop up. I would describe the table on the left as a "sub" bar table.

I have read a lot by Phil Capelle, author of "Play Your Best Pool," who writes about the differences between big and small tables. He writes, "Eight Ball on the bar table favors strategy and defense because the smaller size leads to congested layouts...On a big table, the balls are spread over a larger area, which helps open routes for pockets, making Eight Ball much more a game of offense in which shotmaking plays a bigger role." He talks about the ratio of the size of the balls compared to the area of the playing surface. On a bar table, the balls occupy 1.864 percent of the playing surface. On a bigger table, the balls take up 1.193 percent. "When you couple the decreased relative surface coverage of the balls with the tendency of balls to cluster, you can begin to see how strategy plays such a major role in playing Eight Ball on a bar table."

Now, most of my pool is played on bar tables and lately I've been trying to get to the bottom of the issue of why some seem smaller than others, when all bar tables are almost always referred to as being 3.5x7. (As most APA players reading this already know, the league sheets invite captains to mark which table size is in use: 3.5x7 and 4x8 coin ops or 4.5x9 regulation size.) At times I've found myself thinking "Does this table only appear to look small because it's close to the wall? Does overhead lighting affect the appearance of the table size?"

I think I've found the answer: there are three sizes of bar tables. I took the following graphic from the website of Valley-Dynamo, which appears to be the coin-operated table division of Brunswick Billiards. It shows the dimensions of the tables they produce. I was surprised to learn that the table length dimensions all fall within 13 inches of one another. So now I know, there are three bar table sizes to be encountered. Still, I wonder if, say, 88 inches (7.33 feet) refers to the rail-to-rail playing surface or to the size of the table box itself. That's enough rambling for now, I'll just have bring along my tape measure next time I play.