Pool, snooker, and carom share one stick and three rule families
Cue sports use a stick to drive cloth-bound balls inside cushioned rails. Three big families split the table: pocketless carom games, six-pocket pool (eight-ball most popular worldwide; nine-ball the pro standard), and large-table snooker or English billiards near twelve by six feet.
Carom classics include three-cushion and balkline on roughly ten-foot boards. Pool lengths run seven to nine feet. Separate histories and cultures keep snooker from being labeled mere pool despite shared cues.
They descend from outdoor stick-and-ball lawn games now called ground billiards, kin to jeu de mail, palle-malle, croquet and golf. The word billiard may come from French billart, a stick, or bille, a ball. A croquet-like billiards was played outdoors in the 1340s, Louis XI of France owned the first known indoor table, and Louis XIV spread the game among the nobility. Mary of Hungary played on a green-covered table in 1535, and Mary, Queen of Scots, protested when her table was taken away during her captivity. From the early seventeenth to the late eighteenth century, tables also carried extra hardware such as an arch like a croquet hoop, a port and a pin called the king.
Early players pushed balls with a mace, but by 1670 they were turning its thin butt end around to strike them, and the straight footless cue arrived around 1800; cushions were then stuffed so balls would rebound. Balls were first wood and clay, with ivory for the wealthy. In the United States the games boomed between 1878 and 1956, partly as a distraction for soldiers. Russian pyramid uses 16 balls as pool does, but 15 are white and numbered, each 68 mm across. Pool, snooker and carom have formed a billiards category at the World Games since 2001.
Source: Cue sports
