TWO GAMES OF BILLIARDS – FRENCH AND ENGLISH STYLES
Pall Mall Gazette, Wednesday 17 January 1894
The contempt of the Englishman for the sports and games of the Latin races is strongly pronounced when he speaks of French billiards. A billiard-table without pockets is to him something like a cricket-ground without a wicket. The balls, he says, are as big as footballs, the cue like the bowsprit of a yacht. With a table so small, and balls so big, it is his conviction that a man must be a Frenchman to be able to avoid cannoning. That there is any skill in it at all is almost beyond comprehension, or, at least, he credits it with the sort of skill which may be demanded by a spoilt kind of English billiards. That there is any different quality of skill in the game has not entered into his philosophy—that it demands even greater skill, more judgment, finer delicacy of touch, is at first quite beyond his comprehension. It is instructive to watch the smile of kindly superiority with which the Englishman, “lately escaped from his island,” looks on at his few first games of French billiards. Should there be two Britons—for they have a habit of travelling in couples, in order that they should not be reduced to the necessity of speaking to strangers— one will occasionally observe to the other:—
“By Jove, wonderful screw-back, wasn’t it?” And his friend will reply: “Oh, my dear fellow, it’s those great big balls—you can get any amount of screw on balls like those.’’ And so it seems, when one begins to play the game. It is more easy for the unskilful to produce great effects with the large balls. But—curiously enough, and contrary to the notions held by those who know nothing of the French game—when a French professional is giving an exhibition of fancy strokes, of remarkable effects of screw, and of tours de force of all descriptions, he brings out a set of small English balls wherewith to perform them. He makes them do wonderful things which he would be utterly unable to achieve with the big balls of his national game of billiards, and so disposes, once and for all, of the notion, if it has really existed, that it is by virtue of the big balls that the great screw strokes are possible.
ON A FRENCH TABLE.
A little practice on a French table, with a tolerable instructor, will help a fair player at English billiards to much improve his game. In the first place it teaches him very soon a most serviceable fact about these screw shots, namely, that it is not necessary to hit the ball very very low, to the peril of the cloth. It is quite enough to hit the ball below the centre, and a big step is made when this is realized. Secondly, because the game is made entirely by cannons, it teaches the player to give more thought to nursing and arranging the balls, with this object, than he is likely to bestow where a pocket offers itself as a recourse when the arrangements for the cannon break fail. A very little experience will show the Englishman the fallacy of his theory that with such big balls and such a small table it is impossible to fail to make a cannon.
When one comes to the higher rank of French billiards—such as the games exhibited in that cate where M. Vigneau is the star—marvels of nursing and delicate play are exhibited such as the Englishman will look for in vain, even from’ the magical fingers of Mr. John Roberts. The problems of the billiard-table are rendered so much more difficult, especially where cannons are the sole means of scoring, by the prohibition of that “push” stroke of which Roberts is such a master. In its absence the masse stroke becomes no longer a tour de force, but an absolute necessity— that stroke for which the cue is held perpendicularly and descends on the ball, giving screw, or side, or screw combined with side, at pleasure. When the one object ball partially eclipses the line of the other —“stimies’’ it in the language of golf, masque it in the language of French billiards—then this masse stroke is the only possible means of effecting the cannon, unless it be done by a stroke off the cushion, which is a fess artistic method.
THE “MASSE” STROKE.
The masse stroke sends the ball a lew inches out, away from the two object balls; then the screw begins to tell, and it comes running back as if its master had whistled tor it, and strikes one ball and then the other, leaving all three nicely together for the next cannon.
The uninitiated player will now begin to learn that though it is not so impossible as it had seemed to fail to cannon, yet simple cannons—in indefinite succession—have become so easy to the practised skill of French professionals that they no longer find in them a game worth playing. They can pursue the balls round and round the table, cannoning until they break down of nothing less-than physical exhaustion. It is as wearying as Peall on the spot stroke. So they have invented all sorts of devices for making the game more difficult.
There are games in which the cannons are only to be made off a cushion —a similar restriction to that in vogue at “snooker’’ pool. There are games in which the striker’s ball has to hit the cushion before making the cannon. They increase the difficulty at pleasure by making the rule that two, three, or tour cushion camions alone shall count, or that the striker’s ball shall hit two, three, or lour cushions before the camion is made. And in all these games they have acquired such accuracy as to make considerable breaks, though, of course, in diminishing number as the number of cushions is increased which they are required to strike.
A favourite device is to have an inner rectangle chalked out on the table in lines parallel with those of the cushions, and to require that at each cannon the striker’s ball shall pass from inside the line to the outside, or vice versa. But the almost magical skill of the performers has succeeded in enabling them now and again to make very large breaks, in spite of this restriction, by manoeuvring one object ball just outside the line, and the other ball just inside it. The striker’s ball then delicately grazes first one and then the other, crossing the line each time in accordance with the rule, yet moving the object balls so very slightly that a great number of cannons are made before they are brought to a corner of the rectangle. Hie manoeuvring of the balls round that corner, while still continuing to cannon, with the striker s ball each time crossing the line, affords an opportunity for the exhibition of yet more finished skill.
But when it comes to the matter oi “monkey tricks” on the billiard- table, to cannoning on to the top of a hat, to cannoning from one table to another, to cannoning round a hat, and many others—strokes which are not billiards, but yet are entertaining feats of conjuring—then the French professor brings out his English balls and deals with them in a manner calculated to dazzle. Ives, the American, did much to open the eyes of Englishmen to the wonderful things to be learned on a French table; he even made Roberts look as if he were really awake. It may be objected that it was not really billiards—neither French nor English, but a nameless hybrid of the two—at which Ives and Roberts competed, but alter all are our own methods of billiards in the championship matches quite beyond question?
WHO IS CHAMPION?
Who is our champion billiard player? John Roberts. He has won the Championship; there is no one whom we care to see play the game in comparison with him. Undoubtedly he is the finest player of English billiards in the world. But put him down to play a match with Peall on “a billiard table”-with no restriction about championship, pockets, or alteration of the position of the spot, or spot-stroke barred-who would win? Undoubtedly Peall. Then ought Peall to be champion? In our own ordinary games, where breaks of fifty are as oases in the desert, we play on the ordinary table which we know as a “billiard table.” To play the championship, and to allow John Roberts to hold the championship, the play has to be on something quite different—on a “championship table.” And yet Roberts is unquestionably the finest player of the game of English billiards in the world, and he, and none other, ought to be champion. And yet, again, has not Peall something to grumble at?
Probably the real answer is that there is something not quite ideally right about the arrangements of the ordinary billiard table. It ought not to be possible for one stroke, no matter how perfectly mastered, to give its master a superiority over another player who is his master at perhaps every other stroke on the board. The ordinary table ought to be made more after the fashion of the championship table. We would not suggest that the pockets should be contracted to championship size, or some club tables would be occupied all day while two players were making fifty. But if the spot were moved a little nearer the cushion, very few, an unconsidered minority, would be a penny the worse, for the great majority of amateurs who attempt the spot-stroke lose far more than they gain by it, and the alteration would be no bar to the pretty breaks of combined hazard and cannon al the upper end of the table. In no department of his life’s interests is man more conservative than in his games. The proposer of any change is looked on as an. Anarchist, without discussion. But the present condition of championship billiards present an impasse which is almost an absurdity, on consideration. And we might hail with gratitude the effective bomb which should remove it.