As the popularity of my blog has exploded (I now have 1 follower, myself) I need to learn to cope with my newfound fame ;)

Anyway, wanted to mention that I also use Google Latitude, contact me to share locations.

Tonight, I'm gonna check out a private snooker club with a friend I didn't know I had in Basel! I will let you know all about it.

Yesterday, I did visit the Basel Billiard Center.

Manu playing snooker with me.

It was quite busy when I got there, but emptied out around 10pm.

A quick conversation with the bartender uncovered that they host an internal pool club (8-ball and 9-ball) that plays on Wednesdays.

They have about 12 8-foot american pool tables, 2 9-footers, and two full size snooker tables. All are well-maintained. I don't usually sample the house sticks because I carry my trusty Joss everywhere I go, but US Airways biffed and my stick is gawd knows where at the moment. So I did sample the sticks here and they were horrendous.

The tables on the other hand were very well maintained. Some spots did seem a little bit cramped (had to wait till someone finished their shot before taking mine more than a few times over the course of 2 hours) but overall lots of room and the high ceilings definitely help.

they have a full bar.

Price is CHF 18 per hour, which is quite pricey - bartender said the average for the area is about 15 and the cheapest is 12. CHF 1 is about equal to $1. Which means that by American standards the price is RIDICULOUS.

I didn't know how high the price was when I started shooting, and by the time I checked out I had racked up a CHF49 tab because I had a 'couple of beers'. well, I only had CHF40 and change, but the bartender let it slide, which would have been completely unheard of in Germany for ex.

I didn't find anyone there shooting very seriously, all were in groups and no one was looking for a game with a stranger (I didn't even see anyone with their own cue!), so I just practiced some trick shots and some 1-pocket long rail banks.

I did spot some carom balls behind the bar, but they said they got rid of their carom table a while ago.

People were overall nice but not talkative at all, except for a group of drunk-but-not-unpleasantly-obnoxious spaniards.

Here is a short video tour.

Please bear with me on the filming and commentary skills as I get used to videodocumenting...

More to come soon!

Gabe

Written here on December 23rd, 2009 at 5:45pm local time.

About this blog

Hello everyone, and welcome to my blag.

The goal of this blog is to document any form of cue sport or cue sport related material from my travels. I am fortunate to have a job which sees me traveling quite a bit, and as an amateur billiard/pool/snooker enthusiast I enjoy exploring anything related to cue sports and feel like I have some cool stories to share.

I may occasionally go off-topic into some geography, economy, photography, science or even awesomer things I don't even know about yet, but will try to stick to topics related to cue sports in some way.

Some things you will see on this blog as it goes forward:

• History of cue sports
• Geography of cue sports
• Some techniques, tips and systems
• Awesome stories
• Coincidence
• Billiard culture
• Billiard travel gangster technology
• Reviews of pool halls and bars

Here are a couple of cool tools that I use to keep temporal and geographical track of where I am and what I am doing:

• You can see my planned location with this calendar (will try to figure out how to imbed this at some point - I would appreciate some tech tips as this is my first blog)!
• You can see my exact location here or here if you are on a mobile
• I keep a shared and open map of places to shoot. Feel free to comment and CONTRIBUTE!!! Let me know if there are problems, still figuring out the quirks of shared google maps.
• I have a new youtube channel, still learning.
• I share things I find interesting here. Not too much about billiards, just things I find fascinating.
• I am active on a couple social media platforms - Facebook, Twitter

About me:

My name is Gabriel Josset. I was born in France in a totally awesome bilingual/bicultural family, spent my childhood in France, moved to the US to study when I was 18. I studied biology and chemistry at Penn State at the Behrend Campus in Erie, then moved to the Philadelphia area where I worked for 7 years. I recently took a job which sees me traveling all the time, mostly between Raleigh North Carolina, Liverpool UK, Marburg Germany, Siena Italy, Emeryville California, Basel Switzerland and eventually other sweet locations.

I love meeting new people of all sorts, so if you are in the same area as me, hit me up. Do it. Nothing is worse than showing up in a strange place to shoot and not finding a game. I can read English, French, German, Spanish and can deal with bridled Italian.

I will strive to keep this blog nice and current, targeting an average of 1.5 posts per week. I appreciate and encourage all feedback, positive, negative and other.

Gabe

Post written here.