Game Room Furniture, Billiard Tables, and Supplies
Welcome to allstatepatio.com! Our website is dedicated to the game room: that haven of men world-wide. The game room is an offshoot of the home bar, one that focuses on forms of entertainment as much or more than the bar area itself. There are a host of game types that you can choose for your game room, but the mainstay of almost any game room will be a pool table. That is why much of our site is dedicated to the game of pool, covering some of the history of the game, as well as what you need to know about the most common variants of pool played today. We will also cover other pieces of game room furniture, such as bar stools, a dart board, and other items.
Pool, which is more formally known as billiards, has been around for around 400 years. It was first played in a manner similar to golf. Instead of the cues we use today, it was played with maces, which looked a lot like golf clubs. Instead of striking the balls as we do today, a mace used the bottom or side of the turned end of the mace to push the ball along the lawn. The original game was known as lawn billiards, and it involved attempting to strike the other balls on the lawn, rather than the pocket games we know today. Around the time of Louis XI, king of France, the game moved off the lawn and onto a table.
Since lawn billiards had no pockets in it, neither did the first billiards tables. Instead of the pocket games of today, older billiards games fall into the carom variety. In carom games, points are scored by striking other balls on the table in a particular manner. The most popular early carom game was straight billiards, which involved 2 cue balls and 1 play ball. Each player shot using one of the cue balls. The object of the game was to score a point by striking both of the other balls on the table with your cue ball in a single shot.
At first, maces were still used for the table variety of games, but around the end of the 17th century, a shift occurred towards using a sharp ended cue stick, rather than the bent mace end. It was primarily used as a means to impart more control on the ball, since by pushing with the mace you could only impart forward spin on the ball, but by striking with a cue stick, you could use side or back spin to enhance your shots. The early game room furniture consisted of the table with a large clear space around it, and then a seating area for spectators to watch the game take place. There were some public game rooms, but they started out primarily as a fixture in the houses of the nobility.
The first pockets in billiards tables were actually intended to be used as hazards. It worked much like a sand trap or water hazard was used in golf. You would be penalized for striking a ball into the pockets. Eventually however, the pockets shifted to targets, and an entirely new genre of cue games was invented. The one hold out from the pocket-as-a-hazard that most cue games share is that it is a foul to sink the cue ball into any pocket.