Billiard Traveler

New Year Pool Overdose - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia!

2012-01-16T11:18:00.004-05:00

The Petronas twin towers, and a chunk of the Golden Triangle, viewed from KL tower.

Kuala Lumpur, or KL as everyone calls it, is an incredibly diverse city. Large percentages of Malays, Chinese and Indians, but I also ran into Philippinos, Iraqis, Germans, Finns, Nigerians, Brazilians, Americans and a host of other nationals.

Petaling Street, Chinatown KL

I stayed in Chinatown, home to a frenzied galaxy of street vendors who setup shop every morning and tear down every night in a logistical Gordian knot of commerce. You can find anything in Chinatown. $8 Rolexes, bongs, live frogs, burkas, bedbugs... Anything but a decent game of pool.

Kuala is a large city, both in height and area.

The first couple of nights, I went to Reggae Bar, an overpriced expat restaurant/bar/club - I wouldn't normally go to a place like this, let alone return the following day, but they did have two 7-foot pool tables. I'm not even going to post any pictures from this place, the equipment was sub-par and the pool experience was quite bad. I ran into just about all of the perils of billiard travel here, including the oversized cue ball and a constantly changing set of rules (that's what happens when your customer base mixes UK patrons who know British pool rules, Americans who think they know proper 8-ball rules, and locals who have their own range of rules. There were even Norwegians who did not understand the concept of winner stays on.

the only good thing : they had pool on TV the second night. OK!

I spent the next couple of days looking for a more serious pool establishment. This resulted in visiting 4 different halls, some seedy, some trendy, but all invariably with poor equipment and no shooters (Coin ops in a pool hall? Carlsberg felt? Really?). I came to understand that KL is not traditionally a pool city. I did manage to find more serious cue artists and good equipment, but from the snooker world (still won!).

In my research, I had several times ran into a chain of establishments called "Golden Break", but all their locations were way outside of the city center. I finally asked a Malay azbilliards forum member where the action was, and he kindly replied that I should try to get out to the Golden Breaks. It turns out that yes, they are far, but I found one which was (seemingly) easily reachable by public transport.

Golden Break Mentari

I set out from Chinatown on New Year's eve at about 5pm, with my route all planned out using the KL Komuter train. Oh boy. The train was packed to the brim, I barely squeezed in. The ride took about 40min, stopping at every station, with even more people getting on at each stop. Finally made it, only to find out my phone GPS was not getting satellite reception - I had another 2km to walk, but only a faint idea of which direction to go in. It took about an hour of wandering through a questionable neighborhood before I finally ran into a local who knew where the Golden Break (Mentari location) was.

Some of you know not to bet against me at this game.
Everyone else gets half my score spotted and 3-1 on the money.
Open challenge!

The place was nice. Real nice. Simonis cloth! Aramith balls! Employees who share their personal cues with random customers who look like they can shoot a little! The Megatouch machine also came in handy during the lull in shooters around dinner time.

I did not know it yet, but I was in THE place to shoot pool in Kuala Lumpur (and perhaps all of Malaysia).
I played a bunch of 10-ball and 8-ball for table time, with a Yemeni expat. Good people, good players. Lost. I found out that the place was open 24/7, every day of the year - great news, as I wouldn't have to find transportation back to Chinatown that night (now THAT would have been an adventure).

Mr. Lim (light blue shirt) checking in on his regulars

After my Yemeni pal left, I settled down with a Heineken, ready for the long night of shooting that was ahead of me. Two guys were playing on the "feature" table, and when they were done I asked one of them if he wanted to shoot. I always want to play one-pocket, and this guy knew the rules and was willing to try it. We played about 8 racks, I did well but he was definitely catching up towards the end. We talked a bit, and it turns out he's an internationally certified pool and snooker referee, and get this, he's the general manager of all 10 Golden Break outlets in KL.

We talked pool, snooker, he told me about how he got to be manager, a couple road stories from his days as international referee, and I got a sense that the pool scene was on the up and up in Malaysia. As I was to stay in KL for another few days, Mr. Lim proposed that I also visit some of his other, larger locations.

I shot a bit more, and suddenly he says "Come with me, I'm going to show you some of the other outlets, let's go right now!"
We hopped in his car at around 11pm on New Year's Eve, and went on a whirlwind tour around the KL suburbs visiting one pool hall after the next, a billiard traveling experience I won't soon forget! He knew everyone everywhere and I was treated as an honored guest, offered some free single malt whiskey, chauffeured around by a pool personality with an acute understanding of the pool hall business and a willingness to discuss everything and anything.

In this video, Mr Lim shows me one of his pool halls, the one with the tournament room!

The stairwell - at one of the Golden Break outlets

The pool halls went from nice and nicer, to the best pool establishments I'd ever seen.

Each outlet had its own specific personality, each had been meticulously designed, and yet there was a common feel to all of them, a testament to the hard work of Mr. Lim and his employees. No expense had been spared to make these the nicest pool halls in the country (and perhaps more... what do you think?)

Wouldn't you like to have a place like this open 24/7 in your neighborhood?

Tasseled private pool side-rooms! Fancy!

Fully stocked bars, friendly staff, great lighting...

Stadium seating tournament room, suited for snooker and pool! Oh my!

Snooker fanciness too!

Oooooh look at all the pretty colors!

Mr. Lim checking in with yet another one of his branch managers

Trophys won by local players (got to meet a couple of them later on too!)

The Secretary General of the Malaysian Snooker and Billiards Federation........

........and his son, banking out the six on a 9-ball break and run. Scary.

First impressions from Vietnam

2011-12-21T13:38:00.000-05:00

The border crossing between Laos and Vietnam. Cold!

Vinh is not on anyone's list of places they would like to someday visit, but it's a large city on the main road between Hanoi and Saigon and serves as a bus hub for travelers in Vietnam. Most tourists try not to stay here for the night.
I came here from Phonsavan, Laos and when I arrived at 8pm there was a bus ready to go straight to Hanoi. I decided to stay in Vinh for the night because 13 hours on a cramped public bus had been enough of a day for me.
I had just spent 6 weeks in Laos, a country largely forgotten by tourism (although that is changing quickly). Laos is an incredibly laid-back place, where time doesn't exist and people are friendly but largely detached. Voices are never raised, saying no is impolite, and there is no real bargaining culture. Prices are low, the internets, as the drivers, are mind-numbingly slow. Although I didn't realize it till I left Laos, my concept of patience was radically transformed in those six weeks. I have much to write about Laos, its diverse culture and its incredible landscapes, and this will come in due time.

Invited to chiken feet and rice wine dinner outside the pool hall!

A culture shock was waiting for me in Vinh. Now I was in a comparatively huge city, with insane motorbike and bus traffic, and people who were much more direct and inquisitive.
I found a pool hall that night, called Lan Ann Billiards Club. It's right next door to another pool hall : the Vietnamese seem to love pool, and also billiards (Lan Ann has two full-size heated slate billiard tables).

Lan Ann Billiards Club storefront

I returned to Lan Ann the next day and then decided to stay for a few days more - in fact, I am there right now at a coffee table with free wi-fi.
The place is packed with shooters of all levels and ages (although almost no women save for the racker girls). Here are a few first impressions from pool and billiards culture in Vietnam :

It's an intensely social activity : each table has 2 to 6 players, and a slew of onlookers
Pool etiquette is non-existent : the spectators lean with both hands on the table, bump into the players and each other, talk loudly, put ashtrays on the tables and no one seems to mind.
There is no emphasis whatsoever on precision in the rules or game mechanics. I saw the same racker girls placing the head ball anywhere from below the 2nd diamond to almost the middle of the table, the rack skewed up to 15 degrees, and sometimes no where near the center of the short rail. There was no checking for tightness of the rack. Again, I was the only one apparently concerned about this.

Of course I will have to check out other places in Vietnam to verify that this is indeed the case everywhere - but what a difference compared to Germany for example, where there is very little talking, the rules are very strictly respected and enforced, and the houseman will be very vocal if an ashtray or drink gets anywhere near the table.

What is going on here? If you know please comment!

It seems that there are two main games played on the pool tables here (they are proper American 9-foot pool tables, but with VERY tight pockets (see pic). I have not been able to figure out the names of the games, but one of them is played with playing cards (see previous post) and the other is not. This second one was the one I got familiar with here.

3-cushion anyone?

In this game, you use all 15 object balls racked randomly. After the break, one of the players will have the even balls and the other the odd balls, meaning one player has to sink a total of 7 balls and the other 8 (and I'll have a post someday about other asymetrical games that can be played on a pool table). There is no prescribed order the balls have to go in, simply the first one to finish his or her group wins. Fouls result in ball in hand. I did quite well against several players at this game, although it took some time to get used to the unusual ball groups - it was difficult at first to get the "big picture" of your pattern when some of your balls are stripes and some are solids. The game isn't bad and resembles 8-ball in many ways. The tighter pockets did cause some changes in my shot selection, mainly to make sure that the object ball would stay close to the pocket in case of miss.

The VIP room at Lan Ann Billiards Club

Billiards (as in without pockets) is quite healthy here as well - they play mostly Straight Rail, but also 1-cushion and 3-cushion billiards. I did not see any advanced Straight Rail play like I saw in Germany, and the highest scoring inning I witnessed here was 10 (I saw over 100 in Germany, and I believe the world record is over 5000!).

Although virtually no English is spoken here, it was a great place for me to start playing real pool again after the Laos lull. I am off to Hanoi tomorrow afternoon, where I am sure to find more pool!

The 5 perils of billiard travel

2011-12-08T18:20:00.000-05:00

We've all been there - you're in a new place, looking for a good game of pool, but something about the table is not quite right. You might say a good player should not worry, since the equipment is the same for both players, but occasionally it's just a bit extreme...

This is a compilation of common and less common problems, annoyances and pet peeves about playing in unfamiliar places.

1. The chalk

Everything's perfect in this new bar you just found. Cheap gin, loose women, clean balls. You put your quarters up on the table, wait your turn. You get called over, your opponent breaks, runs 3 balls, informs you that you have stripes. You grab a cue, and proceed to look for chalk. You don't see it, so you ask your opponent for it, and he just laughs and says something dumb like "a good player doesn't need chalk". You look at the tip of your cue, and suddenly realize that this bar has never had any chalk. You painfully shoot through the rack, miscue 18 times in the process, win, and refuse to stay on your rightfully acquired table to play the next banger.

Solution : Stash chalk everywhere in your car, on your person, or find a secret spot inside your favorite bar to hide a emergency cube!

2. The balls

Raleigh, NC

Another common group of annoyances involve the quality of the set of balls.

Incomplete set : "Only 6 stripes?... Okay, I guess errrrr take out one of the solids and we can rack them up without the wing balls" "This sucks!!!" "Yeah! Now I hate pool!"
Over-sized cue ball, presumably dating from before the discovery of magnetism - all the cut angles change and drawing the ball is more difficult
Under-sized cue ball, sometimes still found on snooker-type coin-ops in Europe.Cut angles are a mess, and applying follow is pointless.
Cue ball has more craters than the moon. It rolls erratically at low speed, it even sounds weird when it collides with other balls. You have to make sure you don't stroke onto the edge of a canyon and ruin your tip

Solution : Carry your own set of balls, or at least keep your own personal cue ball behind the bar.

Raleigh, NC

3. "House Rules"

These can be a minefield. At best they are just stupid but don't take away too much from the game. Examples :

The 8 must go in clean. Occasionally found in backwoods bars in the US, this rule is total garbage and is often not mentioned until after you just made what you thought was the game winning carom.

Siem Reap, Cambodia

If the cue ball is in the kitchen and you have no shot, one of the legal object balls can be spotted. Similarly, this is not mentioned when you are in the described situation, only when your opponent is!
Scratch on break is loss of game. This is just about the worst one of all, and its adherents will vehemently defend it saying that's how it's done on TV, have you never played pool in your life?
No shooting with the bridge. Ridiculous.

Solution : Learn to be comfortable playing a wide range of variants. Agree to the rules beforehand. Do not over argue your point, even when you know you're right, just play the damn game and beat them at their own rules.

4. The Table

Don Det, Laos

By far the source of the majority of problems, the table is rarely perfect. Some of the following issues can be dealt with by experienced players, and others affect the game so dramatically that the good player loses any advantage.

The most common affliction is the non-level table. When slight, it's not so bad, you just have to shoot a little harder than normal to avoid the roll-offs. When it's massive, you can tell because all the balls tend to migrate to the lowest point on the table, and you can actually use the table roll to curve object balls around other balls.

At least an effort was made to try fix this one!

As we all know, it's exceedingly rare to find Simonis 860 cloth on a random bar box. Additionally, the cloth is often mistreated by ignorant bar managers and clueless customers, commonly by means of spilled drinks, cigarette burns, "tapped in" spot ball mark. The felt does not sit fast to the slate, so it bunches up like cheap carpet when you form your bridge. The balls roll unpredictably and tend to settle in local minimums of felt thickness.

Recently, I've run into many tables with the peculiar property of making balls jump when they make contact with the rails. This is usually due to having cushions that are set too low, and can drastically alter the banking properties (to the point of balls jumping clear off the table at certain angles). Another common rail problem is when the rubber is too old or of poor quality, the balls come out very slow from the banks and the angle of reflection is greatly lengthened. Rail issues are difficult to adapt to, but at least they don't affect the simple "make the ball" shot. This tends to disadvantage the best players more than the worst ones.

Solution : Treat the table with respect, even if it's bad. There's a reason it got the way it is, do not contribute! Ask about other places to play in the area. Have your bodyguard, personal chef, or butler learn basic table maintenance and repair.

5. The Extreme

Then, there are the worst of the worst. Places with one stick, with no tip. Tables that have been kept outside for months, then brought back in on a whim. The table that doubles as the all-you-can eat buffet on Thursdays. The game room that is also a working barn. The closest table mechanic lives 400 miles away and is from an ethnic group that is currently involved in an armed conflict with yours.

Below, a selection of some of the more extreme things you find when looking for pool around our strange planet.

If you know of a particularly decrepit table or place to play please share with us in the comments!

Truck stop in the middle of the desert, Ethiopia

Hamed Ela, Ethiopia - see previous post

Don Det, Laos

Vang Vieng, Laos - This place calls itself the Q-Bar.

The 4000 Islands, Laos

Phnom Penh nights, custom tables, and the gaming culture of Cambodia

2011-11-16T08:48:00.001-05:00

Phnom Penh traffic, minutes before I was drenched in monsoon rain on the back of a motodup

Cambodia struck me with its apparent contradictions :

- Some of the most impressive historical sites in the world, and a disturbing recent history that appears unacknowledged from within.

- Extreme wealth side by side with poverty

- Tourists come to Phnom Penh for the genocide rubbernecking, stay for the raging nightlife

As soon as I arrived, greeted by the famous and ubiquitous Khmer smiles, it was obvious that the people here loved taking their minds off of the numerous difficulties they face, in particular through a wide appreciation for games of all sorts. These games include Makruk (which they simply call "oh" here), an acient relative of chess as we know it, and people do play it everywhere... Tuk-tuk drivers waiting for their next fare, kids at the market, they all love playing.

After being convinced by other tourists, I did go visit the genocides sites including the S-21 prison and the killing fields. It was worth it, and I guess I would recommend it, although I still do think some people go there for morbid emotional stimulation and I'm not really sure I'm cool with that.

One night, along with another American I had met and traveled with from Koh Chang, we were looking for some bar to go to and had hopped into a tuk-tuk. Riding through the center, I saw a sign : "HOWIES BAR - FREE POOL" and immediately ordered the driver to stop.

The pool table at Howie's which some would characterize as a gaff table

We walked in and were greeted by a horde of girls behind the two tiny bars inside the tiny place. They were all playing games, with tourists, with locals and with each other. Connect 4, and a strange little game played with dice were the big hits. They would play the tourists "for a drink", but of course when the girls would win they would order the most expensive drink on the menu, which did not contain much alcohol at all. No giant worries, though, because that drink was still only $2.50.The girls simply never lost, though, so if you have too much pride you will windup leaving with a very light wallet!

Clearly a customized table!

Walking from the connect-4 bar 5 feet, I bumped in to the pool table, with its uncommon (to be polite) lavender felt. I played a few games that night, pick-up pool with a whiteboard list on which to write your name and wait your turn, winner-stays-on style. The pockets were enormous, the balls rolled relatively true given the looks-like-it's-been-through-several-wars state of the felt. However, there was definitely something unusual about that table, and finally I figured out what it was : the table was not proportioned normally - it was too skinny! About 2 inches were missing from the short rails! That night I played a few games and we went back to the guesthouse relatively early after a full day. I wound up staying in Phnom Penh for over a week, after having met some very cool expats living in the city. I came back several times to Howie's bar, and met Howie himself on one of those nights. Turns out he had worked for Boeing in Seattle, and that's where he fell in love with pool. He told me all about his table...

He cut 2 inches off the short rails because the 7-footer was too wide for his bar. He built and added a ball return system to the original drop-style pockets, and he widened the pockets in order to increase the speed of the games so that his customers would keep interest and to even out the chances, giving more people a chance of winning. Although I like tight pockets for practice, I think these customizations are what made this table so enjoyable for simple bar pickup pool.

Another thing designed to speed up the games were the house rules, which differed from the Phnom Penh and general South East Asia regular rule folklore (for a later post). This is what he had :

The game is 8-ball
Fouls result in ball-in-hand, anywhere on the table, for the opponent
The table stays open till you make a called shot
No defensive shots allowed (Howie clarified to me that not all defensive shots are illegal, only the ones where you slowly push the ball with no chance of messing up)
You have to make contact with a ball of your group
There is no rule regarding touching a rail after contact (making the no defensive shot more of a necessity)
Any foul while shooting at the 8-ball is a loss

Part of the homemade ball return on this unique pool table

Howie does know the "normal" rules for American 8-ball, but put these special rules in place again to accelerate the play, and make it simple for weekend players to enjoy the game in a competitive sense, and I think these are overall a great set of rules for that purpose - and yet the game is still a lot of fun for more serious players.

I really enjoyed Howie's, the great staff he had, who were friendly and quite skilled at their gaming craft, Howie himself and his great stories, and the general atmosphere in Phnom Penh. If I ever go back to Phnom Penh, and I hope I will, I will stop by Howie's and try my luck at staying on the table as long as I can! Go and pay a visit to Howie next time you are in Cambodia!

One of the ball rackers at Howie's bar, along with Howie's son

Ko Chang : playing pool with playing cards, in paradise

2011-11-05T00:06:00.004-04:00

My view on most days on Ko Chang

Ko Chang is a large island in the east of Thailand. Although tourism has been present here for quite some time, it is far less developed than in the south Thailand islands of Samui and Phuket. In fact, the entire eastern side of Ko Chang is almost devoid of tourist accommodation.

After consulting with some experienced backpackers, I decided to stay in Bang Bao, a tiny fishing village on the very southern tip of the island - this was a good compromise between lost island paradise and tourist commodities.

Life on Ko Chang is pretty laid back - activities in which I partook included snorkeling, boat tours, circling the island on a motorbike, sampling all sorts of spicy soups, and a ton of just kicking back in a hammock.

The bay right under the cottage - decent snorkeling here too!

Life is slow and easy here. Cheap, too, for the most part.
I had a nice bungalow for the first few days, with air-conditioning and a private bathroom (while still getting used to life post-Ethiopia, these were drastic but welcomed luxuries!). Towards the end of the stay I moved into a more rustic bungalow, right on sunset cliff. There, I just had a fan and a mosquito net, but hearing the waves splash below definitely helps with having a good night's sleep!

Lunch on the snorkeling boat. Pineapple and shrimp go well together.

It was my first time snorkeling - this was definitely a highlight of my stay on Ko Chang. Sea urchins with giant black spikes and centers colored in iridescent blues, greens, yellows and oranges, a mind-blowing variety of coral formations, fish large and small, a few beautiful jellyfish are just a few of the things for which I would have liked to have an underwater camera, but alas...

Matthias takes the shortcut to the snorkeling waters

During my first hours on Ko Chang, I met a group of three French tourists (from southern France - they pronounced "gauche" with the "O" sounds like we Normandinians would pronounce "roche", which cracked me up every time). Great people, all with a love of traveling and lots of cool stories to share, made for lovely long dinners and conversation as well as solid partners for daytime activities. More about Elodie, Simon and Matthias in the obligatory pool material further down this post!

Motorcycle fuel is stored in old Samsong whisky bottles...

Another highlight of the trip was meeting Tim, an American living in Barcelona working remotely as a freelance web designer. We got along from the start and wound up traveling together after Ko Chang, all the way to Phnom Penh. Tim and I rented motorcycles (more like glorified scooters, but still - it was the first time for each of us!) and circled the entire island. About 1.5 hours each way (there is no road completing the circle in the south), we saw the gradient of development, going from 5-star spa-resorts in the western strip to abandoned temporary fishing hamlets guarded by tourist-hungry dogs in the south eastern end.

We had heard that the road on the eastern side of the island had some damage. This was confirmed when we got to a spot on the road with a single cone and a sign that explained "The road has aproblem. Please use careful.". A couple of kilometers later we were greeted by a gigantic gap in the road caused by a recent landslide. As first-time bikers, we had some apprehension about going around the massive hole on the strip of mud that was propped up for that purpose (this is the only way to get to that side of the island!). We did make it across without problems, very fun!

The road deteriorated quite a bit in the south eastern end. Unfinished pavement, no pavement, more landslides and crazy dogs were par for the course, but we were rewarded with breathtaking views from lesser-known vantage points. It will still be a while before the whole island is covered in bland tourist paraphernalia, but it will happen - maybe 5 or ten years. Things are changing very fast in southeast Asia, some of it is good of course, but the price to pay is traditional lifestyles and unspoiled paradises such as Ko Chang will not realistically be the same tomorrow.

Snooker-sized american pool ball set, on a snooker table

Night life in Bang Bao is virtually non-existent. There are a few restaurants, but they close quite early in general and by 11pm you have nothing to do but go back to your bungalow, flashlight in hand, dodging mosquitos and the occasional sleeping hound. After one such restaurant dinner with the French, as we were walking back we saw some locals playing what appeared to be snooker in a local food shack. I got the French to come with me on promise of buying them a beer, were it to be available, and everyone had a great time trying to figure out the rules of this crazy game in spite of the insurmountable language barrier.

This guy is explaining the rules to me. I'm not getting it.

This game is played with a deck of playing cards. I have a feeling this a version of the game that my good friend Jonas experienced in Cambodia (see this old post).
Each player gets dealt 5 cards face down. If any player sinks a ball, then all players may reveal and discard the corresponding card. Whoever plays all his cards first, wins. For example, on my turn, I may have an 8. If I shoot and make the 8, I play my 8 card, but the other players also get to play their 8 if they have one (or several for that matter).
The game is actually quite interesting tactically, because you can actually figure out the contents of your opponents' hands by observing which shots they attempt (if you are relatively sober).
There is quite a bit of defense. In fact, sinking a ball for which you didn't have the card, or fouling in any way meant you had to take an extra card from the deck (and if that one had already been played, too bad for you!). Unfortunately I only won 1 rack and came out down about $12 after 2+ hours of play, not so bad for such an experience. The locals were super friendly and happy to try to teach the game (and to take my money).

The whole crew

I leave you with a Ko Chang spicy soup pr0n selection. Can you name them all?

Gambling in Bangkok

2011-11-02T12:47:00.001-04:00

After 3 weeks in adventurer mode through Ethiopia, a dramatic reversal of lifestyle seemed appropriate.
Addis Ababa -> Bahrain, Bahrain -> Uneventful
Bahrain, Bahrain -> Bangkok : Secured the "ghetto upgrade" (you are on a giant aircraft and the flight is so empty you can claim and entire central isle) :

The elusive ghetto upgrade

Coca-cola in Arabic

List of things I learned between Bahrain and Bangkok :

Coca-cola is still identifiable as Coca-cola by westerners when written in Arabic
The average Greek sexpat to Thailand doesn't believe that Greece is at fault in the Eurozone crisis
The average German ecotourist is profoundly upset with Greece
Walking out of a plane in Bahrain, three temperatures - normal plane temp, followed inside-a-steel-walkway-in-the-desert-heat, and finally ICE FRIGGIN COLD air-conned airport luxury overload does not help with jetlag
Most taxis in Bangkok are hot pink. Very hot.

Bangkok for me consisted mostly of having an upset stomach and moving up in pad-thai spice-level. Also, I found a pool scene.

What Jim looks like when he's 2 ahead in a race to 5 for 1,000

Pool in Bangkok is mostly drunk farangs trying to impress Thai prostitutes for reasons that escape me. Redeemingly, for this young but storied city, it's winner stays on (read carefully you silly Frenchmen, you are the only nation in which I've never see a winner-stays-on table!). This means you can put your name up on the board, and wait till your turn to dispatch, one by one, a legion of drunk bangers. Each rack, the loser pays about $0.50 after losing and the winner breaks the next rack. Rules alternate between British style 2-shots-on-foul and the less insane "ball in hand" rules more familiar to American players, but either way, the rules are enforced by a neutral cohort of bar-employed racker girls who actually know their job well.

I was in one of these bars, winning hard, when Jim came along and played some instantly recognizable "serious pool". After he beat me he asked if I would gamble, for minimum 1,000 Baht. So we went to a nearby and more serious pool hall that I had previously scouted out. I played some of the most fun big table 8-ball in my life and came out exactly even after about 4 hours of play.

After Bangkok, it was time to find the famed island paradise of Koh Chang - for next post!

Alien Earth - The Dallol volcanic explosion crater

2011-10-31T08:33:00.000-04:00

Green lakes of acid, the lowest subaerial volcanic vents in the world, and sulfur-crusted landscapes combine to create the Dallol volcanic explosion crater.

It's very hot here, sulfur and acid fumes define the olfactory landscape. Gurgling sounds of various frequencies and volume meter the progress of what will become the world's newest ocean in about 10 million years.

In pictures :

The land cruisers put the size of the Danakil salt flats into perspective

Geo-shrooms!

Ibrahim, our driver, standing on a stone mushroom

Lake of sulfuric acid

Our Afar guide for the day. He did not bring any water for this trip, unreal.

Hamed Ela

Billiards in the hottest inhabited village on the planet

2011-10-29T13:55:00.000-04:00

Hamed Ela, Dallol region, Danakil depression, Ethiopia.

Flirty donkeys in the burning morning winds of Hamed Ela

From Wikipedia :

"Dallol currently holds the record high average temperature for an inhabited location on Earth, where an average annual temperature of 34°C (94°F) was recorded between the years 1960 and 1966. Dallol is also one of the most remote places on Earth. There are no roads; the only regular transport service is provided by camel caravans which travel to the area to collect salt."

National Geographic has an excellent article about the region :

"Already, following our week in Hamed Ela, a dust-and-fly-stricken hamlet, I'd formed some opinions. One was that people can and will live anywhere—even in the Danakil, a place of dry sands and even drier gravel beds, rocky lava flows, active volcanoes, burning salt flats, temperatures that often top 120°F, winds that choke you with dust, and suffocating days of no wind at all."

Getting to Hamed Ela was no picnic. Our expeditionary force consisted of :

3 tourists who were not sure what they were really getting into
2 expert drivers
1 excellent guide
1 wonderful cook
A rotating outfit of teenagers armed with AK-47s and hand grenades, anywhere between 2 and 5 of them depending on the day's destination and activities
Various passengers hopping on and off between random desert settlements
2 Toyota Land Cruisers in excellent condition, with 6 days worth of fuel, food and water for the crew

The lead land cruiser, expertly piloted by Biniam

The Danakil depression is home to the Afar tribe of Ethiopia. These are some of the fiercest people on the planet. They consider themselves Afar first, and only really cooperate with Ethiopia when the territorial integrity of the country is at stake, when they will take up arms and fight alongside the ethnic Ethiopians. The Afar sharpen all of their teeth into points using metal files. Most of them are salt miners and salt-trade nomads, crossing the desert back and forth with huge camel caravans loaded with salt slabs from the Danakil flats. Until relatively recently, the Afar used to cut off the testicles of visitors and hang them up in their tents to dry, although if you asked them today about that they would say "No, we never did that. And we only did it if they really deserved it". Allegedly some visitors have seen the dried up packages hanging in Afar tents as recently as a couple of years ago...

Could I possibly find some pool or billiards in this place?

The Ert'Ale lava lake, from about 100 meters away

The reason we had come to Hamed Ela, was to explore the geologically incredible region of the Afar. The unquestionable star attractions of the area are Ert'Ale, the only permanently erupting lava lake in the world, and the absolutely alien volcanic landscapes of Dallol (for a future post). We setup camp at the base of Ert'Ale, where the Land Cruisers could not go any further. We were about 6km from the volcano by bird's flight. The climb had to be done at night, because it's just too damn hot during the day.

Two members of our Afar escort contingent of teenagers in skirts with AKs

We started walking right after sunset, and I'll spare you the difficulties we encountered with our armed Afar "guide" which ultimately lead to the two other tourists having to head back to camp just 2km into the trek. I continued on with our real guide, and two armed locals who had not - as of yet - caused any problems. The 5-hour climb was incredibly difficult, due mostly to the terrain, which consists of all types of more or less solidified and jagged lava which occasionally gave way under your step. This is dangerous - a serious cut would be a show stopper here, as you could imagine. Other difficulties included the relentless ambient heat, the loss of my flashlight, and the remote but real possibility of running into Eritrean insurgents who occasionally cross into the area.

But man, was it worth it!

Selected pics of the lava lake :

I spent an unforgettable 45 minutes right on the edge of the crater, in the volcanic heat, complete with suffocating gusts of sulfuric acid fumes. You can also see a couple of videos I took on my youtube account.

We slept for about 3 hours at the top, then started back down about an hour before sunrise. We had commissioned a camel to meet us up top with more water (I drank 5 liters on the way up) and I was happy to load my backpack onto it for the way back.

Treacherous lava tubes are part of the hazards of this trek

This clown decided to start shooting his gun without warning, for "practice"

Back in Hamed Ela, we had some well-deserved rest, and in the afternoon I went to explore the local bar scene, which consisted of two shacks and no fridge. They had beer, although not much of it. As I sat there, watching Braveheart with the military and potash-mining clientele in the debilitating heat, I suddenly heard that sound so familiar to pool junkies, the clanking of billiard balls in the general vicinity. It turns out that they had a pool table right next door. As I stepped in, this is the scene I was greeted by :

Everyone loves billiards, even Afar salt miners in the hottest village on the planet

This game is called "carambola" in Ethiopia - its closest relative is the Italian game of Bocette, which I have had the pleasure to play in the Tuscany region of Italy.

Billiard Traveler doing his best not to get beat too thoroughly. Just like Bocette, Ethiopian Carambola is played without cues - you roll the balls with your hands!

This is how you get the balls back out of the pockets - from what I can deduce, this is an Italian table from the 1940s, a relic of the short-lived Italian occupation of Ethiopia.

For more about the details of Ethiopian Carambola and the Italian game of Bocette, come back for a later post!

Soon, I will have some pictures up of the alien landscapes of Dallol, and a story of playing the Ethiopian rotation game called "straight" in Bahir Dar.

And I leave you with this.

Me, clueless as to what to do about the goat in my shower

The churches of Lalibela

2011-10-24T09:22:00.001-04:00

As I have mentioned before, Ethiopia is the second ever country to declare itself christian - this has resulted in a very rich cultural and architectural heritage, the most famous of which are the church complexes at Lalibela.
Lalibela is an ancient town situated on an incredibly beautiful hill side between the lowlands and high plateaus of northern Ethiopia. It is named after the king of Ethiopia, Saint Gebre Mesqel Lalibela, who had been on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and according to the local historians, decided to build up the city as a "second Jerusalem", possibly following the fall of the real Jerusalem to the Muslims in 1187. Indeed, all the place names and church names reflect ancient Jerusalem locations - even the river that runs through the town is named "the river Jordan".

There are 13 churches in total, arranged in 4 separate complexes. The church complexes are mind-boggling - the churches were made by starting from one gigantic piece of rock, and built by carving the church out, meaning each church is just one continuous piece of rock. In some instances, they started from the side of the rock and carved the church by digging into the rock horizontally, kind of like in Petra, jordan. In other instances the church was built "in reverse" by starting from the flat top of the rock and digging down, and these are truly the most impressive feats of the ancient builders.

A few pictures :

UNESCO recently built the cover, and although visually disastrous, it is necessary to protect this church, the oldest one in the complex

It's difficult to overstate the skill of the ancient rock carvers

Each church has a well thought-out drainage system to avoid erosion at the base

Here you can see the "mother rock" from which the church was carved

This inside is no less impressive

Only one of the churches has elaborate internal carvings and paintings

The Saint George church, the most well-recognized and also the most recent church in Lalibela - still dates from the early 12th century though!

Although I did spot a few "pool houses" in town as we walked through, I had no time to actually play any as our ays were packed with exploring the churches and the myriad passageways, tunnels and ridges linking them...

Ethiopia Part !!! - Aksum and The Semien Mountains

2011-10-07T02:39:00.002-04:00

It is difficult to have to distill all of these landscapes and experiences into a few pictures and paragraphs!

Ethiopia is grossly underrated as a tourist destination. There are no real issues of safety and security (until we get to the Danakil, a post or two in the future), the people are friendly, the scenery is breathtaking, and the history is unexpectedly rich. If anyone is interested, I do have some contacts and suggestions so please do not hesitate to let me know.

On the road to the Semien Mountains - more volcanic plugs!

The view on the high plateaus

For the city of Aksum, I will quote directly from my parents' blog :

"Axum is the holiest city and the most ancient capital of Ethiopia! And yet, very little research or excavation has been done up until now. From around 400 B.C. to the 10th century, Axum was a major trade center. Under the influence of two Syrian missionaries, King Ezana embraced christianity in 340 AD and that was the start of the Ethiopian Orthodox church. According to the Orthodox religion, the original Ark of the Covenant was taken from Israel to where it has been kept ever since in the Holy of Holies in a chapel in the center of Axum. Another attraction here are the stellae fields, the northern one being the most famous. Stelae are believed to be funeral monuments to kings and markers of underground tombs and treasury chambers that form an intricate well-preserved network of catacombs often going back as far as 1700 years. Excavations are underway but the areas are huge. Finally, tourists usually visit the ruins of Queen of Sheba’s palace and her swimming pool but keep in mind that it is difficult to differentiate between fact and legend concerning the Queen of Sheba. For more information, check the wiki link at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_Sheba and judge for yourself."

An ancient manuscript inside the largest church

Coffee ceremony (the roasting of the beans part) outside of the Aksum archeological museum

The Semien mountains were formed between 40 and 25 million years ago and are essentially the remains of a massive volcano. The highest peak, Ras Dejen, towers at 4,543 meters (14,905 ft) and is the 4th highest mountain in Africa. The biodiversity is very strong here and many species of both plants and animals are endemic and not found anywhere else. Of particular interest is the Ibex and the Ethiopian Wolf, although we did not have any luck spotting any - they are extremely endangered.
For most of our small trek we were above 3,000 meters and the altitude can felt a bit - shortness of breath, but also the very cool air and fog. Seeing te Bleeding Heart baboons through the mist, just a few meters away, was a real treat!

Our little trek :

View Larger Map

Bleeding heart baboons in the wild

Local kids singing songs and selling wares.

Wild mountain goats doing their thing

Ethiopia Part II - the Blue Nile Falls and pool in Gondar...

2011-10-04T10:59:00.000-04:00

Smoking Water - the translation of the Ethiopian name of the Blue Nile falls - and you can see why. We were there towards the end of the rainy season, hence the large flow rate and the brown color showing off the rich sediment coming from the highlands.

The Blue Nile Falls

The first stone brisge in Ethiopia, built by Indian engineers supervised by Portuguese missionaries

What my Dad calls a "fake fig tree"

As one of the foremost tourist attractions in Ethiopia, the path to the falls is full of children trying to sell you stuff. They are quite talented with languages and high-pressure sales techniques, but still cute, somehow.
The scenery is very green indeed, because this is the rainy season. During the dry season, the countryside will become brown and dusty.

The road to Gondar was peppered with interesting geological oddities.... The following are volcanic plugs (according to my own amateurish geological opinion). These form when a column of magma hardens, and then the sedimentary rock around it erodes.

Credit : http://www.unmuseum.org/devtowergeo.htm

Gondar itself is quite a large town, and is the capital of medieval Ethiopia, where King Fasiledes established himnself over the country in the 16th century - pictures of his palace :

The royal kitchens, alas now empty :(

This is the royal pool - one day a year, the basin that surrounds the building is filled with water and pilgrims from all over Ethiopia come to bathe in the blessed water.

The pool

And finally, a different kind of pool - the kind that is played throughout Ethiopia, which they simply call "straight" - after our tour of the Gondar architecture, I asked my guide to take me to one of the many "pool houses" in Gondar where I had my first experience shooting pool in Ethiopia. These pics are from my cellphone, please excuse the quality...

The Dagem Modern Pool House

In front of the pool house is a major "line taxi" stop - a bit hectic, but it is he main mode of urban transportation in Ethiopia.

The "pool houses" in Ethiopia usually only have one table. It works by challenge - you say you want to play, and the person in charge calls you when it's your turn. After the match, if you win, you stay on, if not, you pay for the loss. You do not pay for wins :)
I lost my first rack - my opponent asked me to play again, and the lady took note that I had lost a game. I won the second game. My opponent then proposed a "bist" match - thanks to the help of a railbird who spoke good English, this meant that the third game would be played for the entire bill - meaning the loser of the third match would pay for all three racks. I won! Nothing to pay this time!

The lady sitting down is in charge of racking the balls and counting how many games you lose....

I had never played this game called "straight" before. A basic run down of the rules...
The balls are racked like this, with the three ball up top and the cue in the kitchen :

The official way to rack a game of "straight"

This is a rotation game, meaning the first contact has to be with the lowest numbered ball on the table (the 3 on the break). The balls are worth their numeric value in points.
If you fail to make contact with any ball, your opponent scores two points. If you make contact with the wrong ball, that ball's numeric value counts as points for your opponent. The game is quite interesting as there are definitely tactical approaches to it - one of the problem is that the balls so often sit in their starting positions that divots form under them, making them sometimes near impossible to "walk" down the rail, and significantly affecting the banking behavior.
Pool is doing very well in Ethiopia - in the center of all the towns we visited their were several pool houses. Even inthe middle of nowhere you would often find them. The other major game, locally called carambola, is everywhere as well. For another post!

In part III, the Simien mountains and Lalibela! Stay tuned, there will be baboons!

Ethiopia Part I

2011-10-03T15:06:00.001-04:00

Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia. I landed in the morning after an overnight flight from Cairo. First of what would turn out to be many stereotype-shattering experiences, it was actually COLD in Addis. As in sweatshirt required...

After getting through a simple visa-on-arrival process, I was greeted by my parents who are volunteering in Ethiopia, accompanied by my sister who had landed earlier that morning from Korea. The next day we were set to embark on a week-long tour of the major religious, architectural and natural sites of Ethiopia - but the first order of the day was lunch!

The "Special Foul"

You can see here normal bread, which they tend to serve to "ferenji" (the term for foreigners) as well as the traditional injera bread (top right).
Edit : thanks to my sister who looked into it, the normal bread is actually served with the "foul" dish to everyone, not just to ferenji!

Basically everyone eats from the same dish by tearing off pieces of injera and using them to scoop from the main dish. Awesome.

I was amused by the name of the restaurant.

Addis was a lot more developed than I had expected. Tall buildings, asphalt roads, cars in good condition, signs and menus in English... However there were definitely signs that this was still a developing country. Particularly striking to me was the scaffolding used for construction. All made of eucalyptus wood, hand assembled! Incredible...

We set off early the next day for Bahir Dar, city on lake Tana, one of the largest lakes in Africa. This is a vacation resort of sorts, as relatively wealthy families from Addis come here to enjoy the lake shore. There are also many monasteries around the lake and on small islands, of which we visited three. It may be a surprise to you to learn that Ethiopia is 63% christian with the main persuasion being Ethiopian Orthodox. In fact, Ethiopia was the second officially christian country (4th century!) after Armenia! Muslims make up about 30% while the rest is mostly animist.

Inside one of the monasteries. Our guide was extremely knowledgeable and explained each painting...

This is wild coffee! Coffee drinking originated in Ethiopia, and the tradition is quite strong as we will see later.

This monk is showing off a 13th century icon from the church.

A fisherman on lake Tana - he is holding the fishing line with bare hands.

After the monastery visits, of course lunch was in order. Again, I was completely amazed by the diversity, quality and quantity of food available. Ethiopia is by no means a starving country at the moment. I did see some evidence of malnutrition in some of the remote tribes (for another post) but for the vast majority of the country there are no food shortages. In fact their culinary tradition is rich and unspoiled, as Ethiopia is the only African country to never have been truly colonized by Europeans. Save for a 5 year period of Italian occupation in the 40s (with billiardly legacies I shall get to later) the country has had a continuous, homogenous history dating back over 3000 years.

Fish Dulet

Here you can see the injera bread very clearly

The coffee ceremony

After lunch, we treated ourselves to the obligatory coffee ceremony. Ethipians do not mess around with coffee. The beans are roasted right in front of you on a coal fire, it is unfiltered, and always served with burning frankincense. At first, the scent reminded me of the French catholic church we went to as kids which abused the stuff. Now, church will remind me of Ethiopian coffee :)

You would think the ceremony would be some traditional thing that is only done on special occasions, or worse yet just for tourists - not the case. Everyone we asked said they did the coffee ceremony at home at least once a day!

For the next post, we will travel to the Blue Nile falls and the Simien Mountains. Now I'm off to watch a Muay Thai boxing match!

Please comment and ask questions about Ethiopia!

Unexpected billiards 001 - Istanbul Airport!

2011-09-06T12:38:00.000-04:00

About 3 days ago I started my journey to Ethiopia. This involved leaving Istanbul on a noon flight to Cairo, followed by an 11-hour layover before the Cairo to Addis Ababa flight.
I arrived to Istanbul Airport with about two hours to spare, and the check-in and security procedures were a breeze. Thanks to my Star Alliance Gold status, I had access to the Turkish Airlines business lounge - I was expecting it to be nice, but I was actually blown away by the luxury.
As in most business lounges, all you can drink. As in some lounges, there was food available. As is almost no lounges, the food was varied and excellent (I am more used to the potato chip stands and free saltines lounge variety).

TV room from the future

Olive bar from Heaven

All you can drink, all you can eat, free pool.

Piano that plays itself

And now for the icing on the cake - there was a pool table. 8-footer in great condition, with sticks and chalk. It could have used a leveling, but otherwise a nice table. The setting is perfect - in a library!

The mortal nuts of billiard travel

Can you believe this place?

Pool table in a library - the dream

I only had about an hour to enjoy the lounge, which I spent eating 3 bowls of lentil soup and ravaging the olive bar. I also played a couple of unremarkable racks of 8-ball with a dude from Chechnya who was heading back to Grozny.

Landing in Cairo, I learned that Egyptair had included a 5-star hotel, dinner, and transportation to and from the airport because of my unusually long layover. They had not mentioned this to me when I reserved, so I had to make sure I wasn't getting conned - turned out legit. I decided to hire a cab for a couple of hours and head out to Gizeh to see the pyramids. The cab driver knew a guy, so I also rented a horse and went out to the lookout point for sunset. I can now add "seeing the pyramids" to my awesome layover list (also see previous post where "playing Preacher Ron a couple racks of one pocket at Kolby's" was scratched off the layover bucketlist). Then, back to the hotel, buffet dinner annihilation followed by two hours of happy sleep before heading back to Cairo airport, home of the most incredibly stressful check-in of my traveling life. But I made it to Ethiopia! I hope to be posting more from here, there are some promising billiard leads so far...

Oh and btw I rode a horse out to the pyramids at sunset on a layover :)

Sunset over the desert. That's Lybia in the back (pretty far though)

Vilnius Biliardo Klubas!

2011-08-29T08:15:00.002-04:00

Vilnius, Lithuania - The bus that took me here from Riga was very comfortable, and even had internet. In general, the buses in the Baltic states were very nice, and tickets were purchasable online, and most had free cofee and tea.

KGB prison - new prisoner "orientation" room

After so much constant travel for the two weeks prior, I spend some time relaxing and catching up with friends and family. I did manage to visit the "KGB museum", which was in fact built in an old KGB prison in the center of Vilnius. This place was an eye-opener to the brutal methods of the Soviets used during their subjugation of the Lithuanian people. When you learn that the prison was still in use as late as 1991, it becomes significantly closer, more real.

Fresh out of the KGB museum, I walked a couple of blocks and was looking for a place to sit down and grab some coffee, when I ran into a place called Biliardo Klubas -

It was 3pm. As good a time as any to explore the Vilnius billiard scene.

The place was on the second floor, quite large, with about 15 pool tables and one Russian pool table. If you have read my HELSINKI POST you know that Russian tables use gigantic balls and tiny pockets. However in Helsinki they did not play Russian billiards, but their own version called Kaisa. Hence, I still had, up to this point, still not tried actual Russian billiards.

Could you handle the tightness of these pockets?

The pool hall was completely empty except for the girl behind the counter, who was very friendly and offered to teach me the rules of Russian billiards.

We played two games of Russian billiards, she beat me both times. The rules are very simple : first person to sink 8 balls. Any 8 balls, including the ball you use as your cue ball. You can choose to strike any ball as your cue ball, and any ball as object ball. This means playing a carom to what would be a "scratch" in American pool is actually worth a point and therefore becomes a big part of the game. The pockets are so tight that the game still takes a while.

We talked a bit and I inquired about the pool scene in Lithuania. It turns out that Monika is a teacher of American Pool and has young students that she actually brings to tournaments in Mainland Europe where the play is stronger. In her opinion the play in Lithuania is relatively weak because of the small number of players, and it is important to bring her students to tournaments in Denmark etc. because of the experience gained by exposure to better players. She mentioned that she used to compete in Lithuania but now prefers to travel to the more serious tournaments herself.

Monika in a delicate straight-pool situation

After Russian billiards, we went to the pool table where we played some straight pool. I can't remember exactly, but I think we played two games and I won the first and she won the second race to 50. We als played some 9-ball and she obliterated me, I think I scored 3 games in a race to 9.

Through some more talking I found out that she is actually the owner and she is working to improve the image of billiards in Lithuania in order to attract younger players to the game. In the summer, there are not many players at all because like in the other baltic and scandinavian countries, people prefer to be outside when the weather is nice. In the winter though the place does fill up.

Loved this place!

Around the time we were done playing 9-ball, a couple other players showed up and she had to take care of the customers so she introduced me to a guy and we played a couple of 9-ball races. I won the first and he won the second. We then played many racks of 8-ball and I was playing excellently at that point (at least the way I remember it, but I had had a few drinks by that point). We played late into the night, and I enjoyed hanging out with a few friendly lithuanian pool players.

So yes, if you go to Lithuania and find yourself in need of a 12-hour pool fix, definitely visit this place and say hi to Monika for me!

Novuss - interesting version of carrom played in Latvia

2011-08-19T13:41:00.001-04:00

"Carrom" is not mispelled - it is actually a set of games which are possibly ancestrally related to billiards. It is played on a small board, with "pockets" in the corners, and you use your fingers to snap your stricker (i.e. cue ball) into the other game pieces to try to make them into holes. Carrom is thought to have originated in India or Pakistan, although surely some other similar game existed before that, just like billiards came from an indoor version of croquet or similar game. I do find it interesting that the name of the game is carrom, in my opinion very likely to be etymologically linked to the billiards term "carom".

I was in Riga, Latvia for a couple of days and while walking around the old town came upon this :

Novuss table, Riga, Latvia

Now I had seen carrom tables before. In fact I even played a bit of carrom in Germany - but what I had played was the "standardized" carrom game, which most definitely did not use a cue, and the table was smaller - more on standardized carrom on wikipedia.
Here I was at the wild frontier of cue sports, unable to play or even learn about this game, as the establishment to which it belonged was closed for the day.
I did do some basic research later when I rejoined the soothing internet bubble. The game is called Novuss, it is quite popular in Estonia and Latvia, to the point where semi-pro or even pro players exist. Fifty-five thousand practitioners? Really? That's enormous for such small countries (2.2 million in Latvia, 1.3 million in Estonia!)

I did not see any chalk around - not sure if it would be needed? Can you really put spin on the small hockey puck visible on the bottom right corner of this pic, the Novuss version of a cue ball?
Just for size reference, the table was about 3 feet by 3 feet and stood about3 feet high.

Here are a couple of facts about Riga :

The Christmas tree was invented here
The food is awesome and cheap
The only pool hall I found had 8-foot tables only and was almost empty, the few people that were there were weekend bangers and a couple of shady Russians telling us to go to the one nightclub which is on the american embassy list of known Latvian scam operations (they might have gotten me there by telling me there was a 9-footer in the back of the club though)

Pics of Riga :

Party houses built in the 14th century by rich, young and single German Hansa league merchants that dug Latvia

Plaque marking the location of the first ever Christmas tree. No joke.

Normal everyday life for the pillory boy

A clean, calm and pleasant city.

$5 buffet. The sausage was spectacular.

Pork knuckle!!! Yes!

as anyone played Novuss before? How about carrom? Comments please!

The only Snooker hall in Sweden, and a good one-pocket battle

2011-08-08T11:15:00.000-04:00

As I sit here in Vilnius, Lithuania waiting for the overnight bus that will bring me to Poland, I'd like to share with you my brief stay in Stockholm last week.
First, a brief look at the the Swedish language, which is hilarious to me.

After having been to Edinburgh and Oslo playing absolutely zero pool and billiards, I had some time in Stockholm to explore the scene a bit. Looked online and found a pool hall about 35 min walk away from my local secret headquarters.When I walked up I was happily surprised to find a snooker hall, of a different name. At the time I just figured it had changed owners and turned into a snooker hall, but after talking to the owner found out I was just on the wrong side of the building and the pool hall did actually exist as well. Two for one!

The place was nice and very well maintained. Scandinavia is not the best place for cue sports tourism in the summer, as people spend the few truly nice days of the year outside. Consequently, there were only a couple of people playing (quite well I must say) so I ordered a beer and chatted with the owner who turned out to be a nice gentleman with great command of English, as has come to be almost expected in Scandinavia in general and Sweden in particular.

Snooker sized pool balls! So Cuuuuute!

We discussed many current cue sports topic, including the precarious situation in America, the rise of snooker on the European continent and the risks involved in the billiards industry in general.
He showed me these cute little snooker-sized pool balls that he gives to the clueless customers that come in and play "pool" even though there are no pool tables in his establishment. Would have loved to watch some bangers trying to play 8-ball on twelve foot tables for a bit, but then again, it would probably be detrimental to the perceived approachability or our beloved game.

According to the owner, the first snooker table came to Sweden in the fall of 1982. He was actually there to see it installed, at a place called BilliardPalast in Stockholm where he was working at the time.
There are very few snooker players in Sweden, and again according to him, only 10 or so are capable of a century break (100+ point run in snooker), and perhaps more tellingly, only 30 or so capable of a 50+....

As the conversation meandered through discussion of various cue sport personalities, Earl Strickland came up and he mentioned that he had breakfast with the Pearl in the early 90s in Helsinki as they were staying in adjacent rooms in the same hotel for a tounament - said he was a nice enough guy and nothing of Earl's nefarious table antics transpired through their discussion.

By then, the two players had left (turns out one of them was a previous swedish snooker champion) and the owner agreed to play a quick frame with me. I am by no means a snooker genius but did manage to hold my own for a while before he trounced me when we got to the colors.

As he was closing up for the evening, I left and rounded the corner to check out the "regular" pool hall. This turned out to be a rather large drinking establishment, with many tables and also a restaurant. They also had a small pinball parlor, and I was in heaven : they had my favorite machine,, Medieval Madness. It was setup in tournament mode, so my arcane knowledge of this game's hidden cheap extra-balls turned out to be useless and I was not able to beat it (left ramp was very difficult to reach because of a weak right flipper). They also had a Family Guy pinball, one of the rare machines made after 2005. If you think the pool world is in a sorry state, you should be merciful not to be a pinball fan.

What more could you ask for?

After investing a few Swedish crowns into the troubled future of pinball, I waltzed over to the pool room itself, and it was full of bangers drinking with their friends. Except for one guy who was practicing some 9-ball patterns by himself. I introduced myself and he turned out to be a cool guy, and we played a few racks. It was getting late so we decided to meet up the next day for a more serious session.
I returned the next day and I taught him the rules of one-pocket and he took an immediate liking to the game. As some of you know, one-pocket is fundamentally different than any rotation game and it is virtually impossible even for someone with great mechanics and position play to beat an experienced player within the first couple of racks. I won 3 or 4 racks and asked if he'd like to change games as I was sensing some frustration on his part, but he declined. In the next few racks his focus was palpable and we went to one-pocket war. He took a few and I took a few and in the end a great time was had by all. My favorite part of traveling is meeting people like David, who I can relate to and make friends with very naturally. David, if you are reading this, keep in touch!

David running a rack of 9-ball

Expect more regular postings as I travel on - very soon, a post about Vilnius, Lithuania and a great place I found there!

Kolby's Corner Pocket - Tempe, Arizona

2011-04-18T18:51:00.000-04:00

Today's post : the best layover of all time!
I had been in Europe almost since the beginning of the year. I had long planned on being back in Pennsylvania to hang with my brother this week, but it turned out he had to take a business trip out to Santa Cruz. Luckily, my company has an office in San Francisco, and I had a standing invite to go out there for several business reasons - so I arranged to fly to SF with my brother (awesome!)
The flight plan was Philadelphia->Phoenix->San Francisco. We landed in Phoenix a half hour ahead of schedule, and were promptly notified that our next flight would be delayed two and a half hours - DAMN!
Then I remembered that we were in Phoenix, and that there was quite a pool scene, especially in one-pocket . I quickly turned on the GPS on my phone, and found out that Kolby's Corner Pocket (home of Scott Frost, one of the best, if not the best one-pocket players in the world at the moment) was actually just 4 miles away. So naturally me and my bro hoped into a cab and headed out there in between flights.
After watching so many On The Rail TV live streams out of this pool hall, it was quite cool to be there in person. Preacher Ron (author of one of the best one-pocket shots ever recorded on camera - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63itJ9RCnks) was there and wanted to shoot some cheap one-hole, so I obliged. He gave me 10-8 the first rack, and proceeded to easily destroy me. Then we adjusted to 13-8 and I took the second game, it was awesome. I was playing a bit over my speed and had some good rolls. The freshly re-felted 9-foot diamond was an absolute pleasure to shoot on, and everyone at Kolby's was super nice. Unfortunately we had to roll and after a rack or two with other players we packed up and left (with an order of hot wings that we ate in the cab :D)

Me with Preacher Ron

Tomorrow, I will meet with Mike from the Angle of Reflection blog in San Jose, on my way back up to San Francisco from Santa Cruz where I am at the moment with my brother.

So far, this California trip has been just perfect! Talk to you all soon...

Gabe

Santa Cruz, California

No-Pocket!

2011-04-18T18:11:00.000-04:00

Since it seems to be the latest fashion to talk about ones favorite games, we (Gabe and I) would like to join in. Those of you who happened to read my first post can probably guess where this is going.
Exactly. Pins. And to help you appreciate my favorite game more, I want to share this link with you: LINK. This is the website of the italian Rai-Sport-TV-channel.
Just scroll down a little and click on "bilardo". Its on the left. They have entire matches between the best players there, and you should definitly check it out.
But enough of that. The Poolsynergy authors did a good job explaining their favorite games, and I don't think I have to state the obvious here. I'm a pinhall-junkie :)
This said, Gabe and I came up with a novelty game we would like to share here. We have literally taken one pocket to the next level by inventing the awesome game of no pocket.

What you need is a 3-cushion table and two pins. Oh, and also fifteen red, yellow, or blue balls and a white cue ball. Put a ball in each of the two corners by the footrail. It must touch both rails. Now place a pin exactly in front of each ball. Take the balls away carefully and rack a full rack like you would for one pocket (as in the picture above - you can see the red and white pin in each "pocket").
Each player is assigned a pin to shoot at (their "no-pocket"). Points are scored by knocking over that pin with any red, yellow or blue ball. The ball that hit the pin is then removed from the game.
Knocking over any pin with the white ball will result in ball in hand in the kitchen.
'Inventing' this was obviously a sad attempt to play one pocket with no pool table available at the time, but it shows that there is more to this concept of game than one would think. That is because balls that knock over a pin have to roll to a complete stop before they are taken off of the table. If you shoot too hard, they will most likely hit the remaining stack and move more balls to your opponents side. Or they might attack your cue ball, ruining your position.
So you need to be even more careful with your speed-control, using only pin-speed unless you are sure to control the object ball after it returns.
Sometimes it is also possible to utilize this to break up positions that favor your opponent or to move other balls around.
The game has many similarities to one-pocket, but using big 'ol billiard balls and a heated 10-foot slate. I can assume with a reasonable certainty that you didnt know it before.
If you ever get to play some no-hole (haha), tell us in the comments!
We have also invented a particularly interesting 3-player variant using only one pin, but with assigned ball colors - maybe for a future post...
Wishing you all the best rolls,
Jan and Gabe

Hello Everyone!

2011-02-04T17:44:00.003-05:00

For those of you who care, my name is Jan. I live in Marburg, Germany where I met Gabe and was offered a chance to write a few posts for this blog, so from now on you will be treated to some of my random thoughts on billiards from time to time. Soon you will notice that I have a favorite subject when it comes to cue sports: Five-Pin-Billards or, as the italians call it, cinque birilli.

When it comes to carom billiards, most people are a little suprised by the distinguished lack of pockets on the table. Also, there are only three balls (white, yellow and red), and one player uses the white ball as his cue ball while the other one shoots with yellow. You score points by caroming your ball off another ball into the third. If you find this confusing, please feel free to consult Wikipedia for more info.

There are an amazing number of variations to this game, some requiring the use of at least one or three rails to score, others dividing the table into scoring zones, forcing the player to move the balls around the table in a more elaborate way.

One of these variations is Five-Pin-Billards. As the name suggests, there are five pins in the middle of the table (four white pins arranged in a square and a red one in the center), in addition to the regular three colored balls.

And now it gets more confusing: Player A starts the game from a designated position with ball-in-hand for the white ball. Player A must hit the opponents ball first, which is the yellow one. He may or may not score points afterwards, but missing the opponents ball is a foul, punishable by ball-in-hand. Lets assume he shoots correctly, sending the opponents yellow ball through two white pins and caroming the white ball into the red ball. This will result in eight points, as one white pin counts for two points and the red ball is worth an additional four if hit with ones own ball. In case you are wondering: hitting the red with the opponents ball is only worth three points. So 2+2+4=8. Player A may now go to the board, mark his points and sit down, since its player Bs turn now.

This may be the most messed-up thing for people who have played any other cue game before: No matter what happens, you will never shoot two or more times in a row, regardless of any points you make. There is an easily understood implication to this : every shot should be at least a half-safe, because if you manage to make any points, the last thing you want is your opponent scoring more points on his next shot. A fairly useful way to keep opponents from scoring is hiding your ball from theirs, so they will have to shoot a kick, thus minimizing the chances for a good hit.

If you have trouble visualizing this (I know I would), here is the Wikipedia entry for five-pins.

Or you could just go and watch some of the masters at work via Youtube.

In the video you will see Andrea Quarta playing Ricardo Belluta, with Quarta as the eventual winner by three to one sets. The sets themselves are races to 60 points, although the distance may vary for different tournaments.

You can see the score at any time in the upper left corner, if you feel like following it. Notice how many banks and kick shots come up during this nine-minute-video and how perfectly those guys execute these shots. This is actually the bread-and-butter of pins-players. Since every shot is played with a saftey in mind, the pins are rarely available by shooting at them directly. It is very common for a player to have to bank or kick a ball into the pins, using precisely measured speed to achieve a safe position for his opponent. Just watch the video, you will see stuff like that coming up every other shot.

You will probably notice quickly that my posts are a little bit more technical than Gabes, the reason being that I don't travel as much as he does, so there's only the billard-related part of BillardTraveler for me to write about. I am quite fascinated by the systems used in various cuesports to determine the aiming point for bank and kick shots, which is an important part of pins. So you can expect most of my posts to be about these systems, the best situations to use them in and maybe a couple of anecdotes about how I used them or how they were used against me. Maybe, if you do read Michael Reddicks great blog Angle Of Reflection, you came across this little story about a well executed safety and an amazing kick. If you did not yet read it yet, do so. It is very informative and has an unexpected ending. Also, Michael is a great storyteller, so it is probably worth your time.

I actually managed to pull off the same thing his opponent did, including the not-pocketing of the ball, about a week ago during a small tournament at a club in a town nearby. When Michael described the preparations his opponent took before this kick I could not help but chuckle, because I know them all too well. It is a system you can use to find the aiming point for three- and five-rail-kicks, and basically it is really simple once you get used to it. Also it is described in many books about various games, so it will not hurt to do it all over again, right?

I left myself the following desaster after a specifically careless shot in a game of ten-ball:

(All pictures thanks to pool.bz and their cuetable software)

So, not much to do but grind my teeth and swear under my breath while my opponent cannot wait for me to miss this shot, getting him ball in hand and a routine runout. Well, maybe there is. Here we go:

This is, to a reasonable degree of accuracy, what I managed to do. The 8-ball was stuck to the long rail, the cueball was sitting right above it and my opponent looked a little uneasy now.

Of course there is no way to be sure this is going to happen, but to me this solution makes a lot more sense than the only 1-rail-kick available.

To be fair: my opponent made the bank I left him and I eventually lost the set, but hey, I bought myself a chance and did not make it easy for him.

Plus, I also had a chance (ever so slight) to actually make the eight myself and run out despite my immensely stupid mistake.

So, whats the secret here? You will have to memorize the following values and the diamonds they correspond to:

The red numbers mark the values for diamonds in the corner you are shooting from. The green numbers are the paths the cue ball will take off the 3rd rail after doing the math and taking the shot. And the blue numbers are what its all about: they are your aiming points!

To determine these you will first need to know which path is the one you want. In my example I needed to get on the path for 30. Now you find a path through your cueball by substracting blue numbers from red numbers to end up at your chosen green number.

For me that was 41 – 11 = 30, telling me I need to aim into the eleven-spot on the blue numbers.

It is very important to realize you are aiming at the actual diamond for this system to work, not at the point in front of the diamond on the rail. Shoot with a fair amount of running english and a tip of follow. You will find that this is not true on all tables, and especially not on old cloth, so correct for bad equipment by using more running english, and if you have to, leave out the follow to get more running on the balls equator.

Once you get used to this shot it is a very convenient and accurate way to get out of a large number of safeties brought onto you by your opponent or even yourself :)

The range in which it works can be extended, but that is for another time.

Also, for the perfectionists among us, there are minor corrections to use, but I will get into that in more detail in a later post. This will let you hit balls, and that is all I tried to let you know for now.

This post is running freaking long by now anyways.

If you try this shot in your training routine and you have trouble getting it to work, please let me know in the comments. I will be glad to help you.

Have fun shooting, I hope to see you again soon.

I'm off to practice pins now.

Jan.

The height of coincidence

2010-12-20T14:41:00.000-05:00

Bermuda Billiard and Darts

I've been playing quite a bit of one-pocket here in Germany. I introduced my friend Jan to the game - he is an excellent 5-pin billiards player, and immediately took a liking to the cerebral strategy aspects of the game of one-pocket.
On one Thursday evening, we had taken a cab to go shoot some 1-hole at Bermuda Sportcenter, and I started off wining the first couple of racks. At this point Jan murmured "I can't deal with this anymore, I hope I didn't forget it" and proceeded to dig through his bag looking for something. Finally he pulls out his trusty clip-on chalk-holder, and it dawned on me that he usually ALWAYS has it on when he plays.
Naturally, his game improved dramatically and he caught up the score as we kept playing.
Next morning, I have an 8am meeting at work. I call a cab at 7am to pick me up from the hotel at 7:40 and go to the work campus.
7:35 : I am outside waiting. No cab.
7:40 : No cab.
7:45 : I call the cab company again. "He's 2 min away"

A very lucky 1-pocket break from a couple of nights ago

7:50 : Still no cab
7:55 : I call again. "He is just about there"
8:03 : The cab finally shows up.

At this point I am flip-out angry with the cab company. It's about a 10 min ride to work, which I spent moaning and groaning at the poor driver, in my best Angry German emulation. So now I'm 15 minutes late for my meeting, in an execrable mood. As I step out of the taxi I notice something on the floor of the back seat of the cab. Low-and-behold : it's Jan's chalk-holder!!! Obviously my mood immediately changed as I pocketed the billiard war relic and pondered the magnitude of the coincidence. I decided to interpret the event this way : billiard travel permeates the universe and manifests itself to hacks when they least expect it, brightening their day!

Straight pool in the heart of Tuscany

2010-10-26T13:04:00.001-04:00

Siena, Italy - Piazza del Campo
viewed from the Arch

I have the pleasure of sometimes working in Siena, Italy. Siena has become one of my favorite places in the world, and if you ever go to Italy I recommend visiting this incredible town. To this day, the city projects a medieval aura through architecture and tradition, perhaps most evident during the two horse races that are run each year in the middle of the city on the Piazza del Campo.

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All that is great, but there is ABSOLUTELY NO POOL OR BILLIARDS in Siena. The closest pool hall is about 20 km away in a town called Poggibonsi. A couple of weeks ago, I made my way to Poggibonsi to try to find me some pool, and was lucky enough to meet a great player there, Vittorio.

Vittorio's game is straight pool, which.... I suck at. He trounced me a few times that night, but we exchanged information to try to match up in the future (oh and he also trounced me at 10-ball).

The next day, he contacted me saying that he would be having a few people over for lunch that Saturday at his house. Awesome!!!

I went over there, through buses and taxis - he lives in the Tuscan countryside, absolutely amazing views from his place- lots of Chianti wine and olive oil is produced around here, as you can see :)

Vittorio's olives

View from Vittorio's driveway

The house is about 200 meters from a small castle, the Castello della Paneretta. Vittorio's house actually incorporates an 11th century tower which served as outpost to another castle which no longer exists.

Il Castello della Paneretta

Vittorio's 11th century tower

The house was amazing - especially the setting for his beautiful 8-footer - you can see some of Vittorio's collection, including a crossbow, various pool trophies, porcelain dishes etc...

Vittorio destroying me at straight pool

A classy chalk holder

Check out his pool lamp : the fixing is made from an old yoke from an ox cart. Fits in great with the fireplace, the house, and the entire countryside for that matter!

Coolest lamp fixture I've ever seen

Vittorio cooked up some amazing food - part of it traditional italian, but also RIBS. Yes, ribs - and he did have to specify "I did not make these special for you, I have been planning on trying to make ribs for the last three months"! Indeed, ribs are hard to find in Italy...

Ribs cooking in the fireplace :)

In addition to the ribs, some fantastic turkey and chicken, beef steaks, prosciutto, artichoke paste, potatoes, peppers, and myriad other traditional Italian food was served. It was a feast.

The other meats

The wine :

Non-traveling wine

See the label? That's the castle pictured earlier in the post - talk about local products!

Turkey and chicken, cheese and prosciutto, bread, honey

After lunch, we went to the tower, where we proceeded to jam out a bit, me on piano, Vittorio on drums and a friend of his on bass. It was OK, but I really suck at playing the standards, even with the fakebook. Turns out Vittorio is an excellent jazz drummer as well.
After that short jam session, we shot some pool. Scratch that, we shot a TON of pool. Plenty of straight pool, plenty of one-pocket, a couple other silly games, but we played for hours and hours. took a bit of time to get used to the table, but I got in stroke after a bit and enjoyed every second.

While Vittorio and I were indulging in our addiction to billiards, a couple of the other guests went out into the woods to pick mushrooms - they came back with a nice, full basket of all different kinds of mushrooms. Vittorio went through the lot and threw out all the poisonous/untasty ones and this is the filtered result.

Mushroom harvest!

Vittorio drove me back to the bus station in Poggibonsi just on time for me to catch the last bus to Siena.
Back in Siena, I sat down at some random restaurant and wound up talking the whole time to this guy from Ecuador who was telling some crazy stories about how he was in jail in Tijuana and how he got stabbed in the back in Ecuador. Great stuff! All in all, that was one of the best Saturdays I've had in a while.
Cool thing is that Vittorio has a buddy in Siena that is willing to drive me over to Poggibonsi whenever so that we can all shoot some pool!

Pool Sushi

2010-09-15T18:56:00.003-04:00

Weird idea after getting out of work at 9pm yesterday...

There is a place right by the hotel here in Cary, NC that has really good sushi : http://www.wasabicary.net/

Wasabi
107 Edinburgh South Drive
Cary, NC 27511-6452
(919) 460-7980

This place is always reallllllly good. But this time I had something different in mind...
I went to Hotshots Billiards, which is right next door, and asked for a rack of balls for 2 minutes. I took a picture of a nine-ball rack and headed straight for the restaurant. Not much was going on there (perfect!! Now they have nothing better to do than cater to my frivolous requests!).

I showed them the picture of the rack of the nine-ball rack and asked if they could make me a sushi plate of some sort that would look like it.

These were apparently not the most creative/adventurous sushi chefs. After I insisted for a while, they finally wound up just saying they couldn't do it.
Alright.
So I went through the A-la-carte sushi menu and started ticking off the most colorful sushis (sushies? Shushii?) that I could find. Finally, one of the chefs started to participate and helped me pick them. He even went and found a green "background" to simulate the felt.

Yes, it was delicious.

1- Sea urchin
2- No blue edible materials were found. So I picked white tuna because I like it
3- Red Tobiko
4- No purple edible material found - picked tuna because it was fresh and tasty (could have used ginger for TV pink!!!)
5- Masago
6- Green Tobiko
7- Ikura
8- Well, it has kinda sort of black stripes.... Mackerel
9- Omelet

Here is the result... Okay I guess. But now, every sushi place I go to will be asked if they can do it better.
Tell me about your own poolsushi experience in the comments!

Durham, North Carolina - The Green Room

2010-09-10T18:00:00.001-04:00

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I'm back in North Carolina, staying in the Raleigh area for work for a couple of weeks. I like staying here, in part because there is a cool little pool hall/bar right next to the hotel I usually stay at, called Hotshots. I will be writing about this place more some other time - this time I wanted to talk about an interesting poolroom in Durham. I was shooting over at Hotshots (getting spanked at 8-ball by an APA 7) and asking around about the different action spots in the area. I was told about a place called "The Green Room" in Durham. Supposedly tons of action, storied pool hall with great people - so I drove out there last night, which was a thursday. About 30min drive from the hotel, not too bad.
When I saw the sign on the door, I knew I was gonna dig this place:

The sign on the door of the Green Room

Not much was going on, but there were a couple people there. I was invited to play a game of chess, and was happy to oblige, as I hadn't played in FOREVER. I did well, 2-0 ! I wound up not shooting any pool, but I did take a few pictures of the place, which had indeed a nice atmosphere, a piano, a pinball machine, shuffleboard, and darts.

Bar area - really nice beer selection

Shuffleboard! Don't see these around much anymore..

Piano, pinball, pool. Nothing else needed.

Ghosts of past racks - wish I would have worked harder at getting this pic right.

Interesting seating

Alex, my opponent at chess

I didn't stay too long, needed to be early at work the next day. Nice atmosphere, very friendly people, but not much pool going on, and no action that I could tell.
Have you been to this place? Should I go back and check it out maybe on a different day of the week? Let me know in the comments.

Canonsburg, PA - Polish Horseshoes

2010-09-07T00:32:00.002-04:00

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I hadn't been to this annual party since 3 years ago I think - so my bro, his girl and I drove up to Pittsburgh because, well, Ryan throws a damn fine labor day party. Tons of food (including Reuben casserole :p it was like chopped-up reuben sandwiches), great people, and a slew of outdoor games including horseshoes, cornhole, and a new one - Polish Horseshoes....

Cheech explains the game - and towards the end tells us the fantastic deal he is offering for his pool table lol

A great time was had by all.

Cambodian pool - eyewitness news from Jonas

2010-09-05T14:21:00.001-04:00

So my friend Jonas is currently undertaking a 7-week backpacking adventure through Asia, mostly in the south east. I gave him my smartphone because he can make better use of it than me (plus it could be healthy for me to get used to not checking the internet every 4 seconds). This allows him to upload pics on-the-fly and also to log his GPS coordinates so that his steps can be retraced for posterity. Jonas left Germany about 2 weeks ago and has already been through a bit of Thailand and Cambodia, and now he is in Vietnam. I highly recommend his blog (original German version - English version).
Of course, Jonas being a fellow billiard traveler, I have entrusted him to document any billiardly experiences he might chance upon along his way. Here is his post from Siem Reap (right by Angkor Wat) where he encountered some locals shooting an intriguing game. Here is a pic he emailed me from there, and a transcript from the English version of the post.

"Another addendum to yesterday : I lost $2 playing pool against the locals. An interesting variant in which all players (in this case, there were four players) get a certain number of cards. Each card represents the value of a ball (jack = 10, etc.), and the objective is to sink the balls corresponding to your cards - after each ball you sink you "play" the corresponding card. If an opponent has already played that card, it's worthless. Whoever has played the most cards wins. The next game is started by the winner of the first round. The order of the following players seems to be guided by the cards. For more detailed rules, the language barrier was too great and my budget too small."

Also, notice that they are playing with american pool balls, on a small snooker-type table (you can tell from the rounded pockets and lower rail height).
Anyone play this or anything similar to it before? It would be cool to get the full set of rules...
If you know of any other pool or billiard games that are played with a set of cards, I would love hearing about it.

Uniards - if every other game is too easy for you, try this

2010-09-04T01:55:00.002-04:00

I had my first encounter with Uniards by watching a youtube video of Semih Sayginer playing Daniel Sanchez.
I was in Marburg, Germany at the time, this must have been towards the middle of 2009. I immediately brought this fabulous game to the attention of fellow billiards junkie and friend Jan, who is a regular at the private club I frequent in Marburg (Marburg Billiardfreunde 86 e.V.), and we proceeded to try it on our heated 10-foot billiard table. Someday soon I will write a post just about this club, one of my favorite places on the planet to kick back, shoot billiards and snooker and discuss all matters of cue sports with great friends.
In the video, Semih and Danny play by the following rules:

Danny has the white cue ball
Semih has the yellow
The game is only played with those two balls
You score a point by making contact with the object ball, having your cue ball then go at least three rails before again striking the object ball.

This has GOT to be one of the most difficult games in existence. Semih and Danny are two of the best billiards players in the world, and they average far below 0.5 points per inning. Gives you and idea of the ridiculous skill required.
The game is profoundly frustrating. Often you get very close - but alas, getting 3 millimeters away from that invaluable second kiss counts for nothing. Points are very rare at my and Jan's level.
After trying the version of the rules that Semih and Danny play in the video, we modified the rules a bit to allow us to finish a race to 7 points within 1.5 hours:

Each player can use either cue ball on each shot
A point can be made not only in the way described above, but in any shot in which there was at least 3 rails with the cueball and two kisses between the balls : this means you can go 3-rails first, then double-kiss the object ball (Jan's knowledge of a wide variety of billiard systems allows him to convert this type of shot with *relative* ease).

Here are a couple videos from some of our uniard sessions:

Jan gets a solid one, followed by one of the infinite variety of "sooooo cloooooose" misses

Me and my hacktacular stroke somehow pull off this ridiculous after-contact "umdreher" :

Felix pulls off an absolutely wonderful shot : (he's chiefly a snooker player, but sometimes wanders into the billiards area intrigued by the exotic games that Jan and I come up with)

We also have two 7-foot billiard tables in the club - here is Jan running ALMOST A 3 POINT SERIES!

Check my youtube account for more selected uniard shots - but remember that it's kinda like watching poker on TV, they never show the hundreds of hands that are played where nothing happens ;)

Have you played uniards? Tell me about it in the comments!

Update : My brother just reminded me that when I showed him this game he made a point on his FIRST try.

Helsinki - 17-20th June 2010

2010-08-22T14:46:00.002-04:00

15 min before landing at Helsinki Airport

I’ll do my best to keep this one to billiard-related material, but it’s gonna be tough. Helsinki during the week of the summer solstice was a stupendously great idea, and I enjoyed many things which I will only mention here briefly. Luckily for the Billiard Traveler’s trillions of fanatical followers, there is definitely some billiard lore and gore to be scripted into the pool junkie historical archives.

We landed in Helsinki on Thursday, June 17th 2010 (we is me and two most excellent work buddies, Kuke and the Chad). The picture above was taken somewhere over the Baltic see, at about 10pm. The cool thing is that the sun stayed at that spot until about 12:30, after which it finally dips just below the horizon for an hour (not low enough that you can see stars, not even close – sky is still blue!) and then starts rising slowly again around 2:00 am. It’s kind of…. The opposite of tiring. Like detiring. We didn’t sleep much on this trip, but still didn’t feel tired – the constant daylight is energizing.

The Chad (left) and Kuke (right).
You can probably smell the lack of interest
in billiards wafting from this pic,
but I did manage to get them to come out and
shoot on Friday night.

We went out for a couple of drinks after checking in to our hotel at around 11:30pm (Kuke conveniently had Skandic points saved up so we only had to pay for 1 night!). We stayed out till about 2am, waiting for the sun to finish setting, but it didn’t and started rising again. When we got back to the room we definitely made sure we had good blinds on the windows.

Friday morning we went on a bus tour of the city, which was pretty good. They had a nice selection of languages including Latin (!) that you could choose from for your tour. I did mine in French, Saw lots of cool landmarks and got a short taste of the summer daily life in Helsinki.

Daily life in Helsinki - as I am tricking my brain into remembering it.

And... something different.

On the Bus, we were briefly taught about the Suomenlinna Island Fortress and decided to go there in the afternoon. Here is a map of Helsinki overlayed with our recorded path for June 18th.

As you can see, to get to Suomenlinna Island, you take a boat (duh). The boat goes through plenty of little islands with little red houses on them, and in 20 minutes you dock at Suomenlinna.

The bastions of Suomenlinna

We did a guided tour of Suomenlinna, during which we learned all about the history of the fortress. Very cool.

Russian 6 inch 35 caliber naval gun

During the visit, I got a txt msg from a knucklehead friend of mine Jeff who had told me a month before that he would just happen to be in Helsinki that weekend with his girl, as the first leg of a tour of the Baltic countries and Russia. The text message said he had arrived to Helsinki and was about to “head to some Island fortress and grab some food and drinks there”. Unfortunately, my outgoing text messages were not getting to him, so I couldn’t communicate back. So we are on this island in Finland and essentially Jeff and Kathy just happen to also be coming there. This remarkable coincidence was just the beginning of a string of good fortune, and very soon I will show you this as we transition to the meatiest morsels of billiard discoveries.

Russian Pyramid table at the restaurant on the island.
Totally random discovery which led to awesome things.

The only problem is that I don’t know what time Jeff and Kathy will show up. So I decided to wait at the arrival dock on the island while Kuke and the Chad went to look for a place to grab some food and drinks, as well as watch the USA vs I FORGET soccer match. They come back about 25 min later, and tell me they found a place which has beer, a table with a TV, food, and also happens to have a POOOOL TAAAAABLLLLLLLEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!

I immediately ask them a billion questions (is there anyone shooting? What does it cost? What kind of pool table is it and so on, and they say either no or don’t know to all my questions, get bored with my pool nerdiness and go back to the restaurant while I still wait for Jeff and Kathy to show up. Basically I'm sitting on the dock with my spyglass that I always carry around, scrutinizing incoming ships...

Finally I spot Jeff and Kathy getting off the boat, meet up with them, and we head to the restaurant.

It turned that there was no “pool” table. There was a Russian Pyramid table! First time I had ever seen one in real life.

Do those pockets look tight to you? Maybe you need a couple of close-ups:

Side pocket... a bit tight

Corner pocket... Does it even fit?

Strangely, though, I didn’t see a set of Russian Pyramid balls there… Instead, this is what they had :

BALLS OF MANY KINDS

The pool balls, OK. But what in the world are those sets of 5 balls?? I really want to find out at this point, but the others are watching the soccer game and drinking beer in the back room so I join back up with them to eat and catch up with Jeff and Kathy whom I had not seen for a while.

From left : Kuke, Kathy, Jeff

Awesome steak with herb butter and believe me or not, the best potatoes I’ve ever had.

So we are drinking and eating for a while, and suddenly I hear that familiar clank of ivory : somebody is shooting!!! I leave the others to their stupid world cup soccer match and this is the scene:

Finnish dudes playing a game I had never even heard of

Jani explaining the game of Kaisa to me

There is a group of 4 Finnish dudes playing with the set of five balls. They are keeping score on a chalkboard. I'm just staring at them playing this game, trying to understand what is going on. All I can tell is that pocketing balls is a good thing and that they always shoot using a white ball (but there are two white balls). After they finish a match, I ask one of them about the game (everyone in Finland speaks pretty much perfect English). He proceeds to explain the game to me. Essentially, you have one of the white cue balls and your opponent has the other. You make points by pocketing any ball (except your own). White ball is 2 points (you can pocket your opponents cue), red is 3, yellow is 6. If you pocket a ball and also make a carom in the same shot it gets you extra points.

The game is called Kaisa, and is the Finnish national cue sport. So here's the crazy thing. Jani is actually a complete pool junkie - and a knowledgeable one at that! Here he is detailing the history of the game of Kaisa:

Are you kidding me?? I happened to walk into THE place where the Finnish national cue sport was likely invented!! Not only this, but Jani is quite modest. Through later conversation he admitted that he is currently ranked 24th in Finland in 9-ball (as he says, he had a poor season lol) and that he is sponsored by Suomen Biljardmyynti (Finlands Billiard supplies) and Jasalste corporation - Actually Jasalste are sending him to the US open this year! Hoping we can meet again in October :)

One-pocket with Jani - Baribal pool hall, Helsinki

After many beers at this historical establishment, we took the boat back to Helsinki. We made plans to meet Jani at a pool hall in Helsinki later that night. The pool hall was recommended to me by @PoolJar on Twitter.
I managed to drag Kuke and the Chad out to the poolroom, and we did meet Jani there. I played a bit of one-pocket and a bit of 9-ball with Jani, but mostly we were just talking. When the place started closing shop (and I can't remember what time it was, but the sky was a bit dark so probably around 1 or 2 am) we went to a club/bar place in Helsinki which is open late. It was great talking to Jani about cultures, language, gambling and many other things. I'm not sure again what time we walked out and headed home, but the sun was shining bright as it usually does at equinox in Finland!

That's that as far as pool goes for that weekend.

The next day, we took a daytrip to Estonia - here is a brief summary.

We're about on the 7th floor of our hotel - when we wake up, this is the scene down below in the plaza:

Hockey is life.

Young addicts

There is just HOCKEY everywhere. Who would figure that one of the coldest places on earth would actually MISS playing hockey during the summer, so come up with rules and layouts and tournaments for ALSO playing it in the summer?

We keep walking, trying to reach the port on time for our tickets for the "cruise" to Tallinn, Estonia. It's about 2 hours each way, on a really nice cruiseship! I think it was 36 euros roundtrip. Not bad!
So apparently the Finns love going to Estonia, in large part because of the fact that the alcohol is soooo much cheaper on the other side of the Baltic. On the way there we saw a ton of people, but very few had any luggage. On the way back, just about everyone had a roller-trolley loaded up with asstons of beer and liquor. and they are all drunk, and drinking on the boat too...

It was raining when we got to Tallinn, but lightly. Reminded me of October or November season in Normandy, France (where I am from). Tallinn is an interesting city - it's not at all like I had imagined it. It's has a commercial center with high-rises and lots of industry, and also an old-city area which is an extremely well preserved walled medieval city.
Here is the trip from Helsinki and a bit in Tallinn, before my reception gave out (Verizon you suck! On the other hand, am I being unreasonable to expect mobile data coverage in the middle of the baltic?)

The old medieval city of Tallinn

We walked around Tallinn for a bit, looking for a good place to eat. Wikitravel had recommended Olde Hansa: The ruling king among Tallinn's restaurants with some of them trying to copy its style.

" The place is simply medieval, not just in terms of food but also in the sense of performance - no electricity, no music except live and authentic, no modern inventions. The house special is bear meat "marinated in rare spices and cooked over a fire in honour of Waldemar II, the brave King of Denmark" "

So we went there, and it was indeed really cool. I had a wild boar stew, Chad had some kind of goose leg and luke had the elk, boar, and bear (!) sausage.

The Olde Hansa menu. It was very well done and quite funny, zoom in and take a look

Kuke's assorted sausage plate

Ye Olde Tallinn Towne Halle

We also quickly visited the Tallinn orthodox cathedral at the top of the hill (during a service, which was quite different from anything I had seen before. Unbelievable amount of incense!!!) and we toured the grounds of the main castle complex.

The Chad "touring the castle complex"

See this ledge on this picture here on the left?Obviously, it looks like a quick challenge for us idiots. The Chad starts climbing it (pictured) but cannot make it all the way up. So I decided to have a go at it and I got up there. Coming down was less easy... let's just say it doesnt look as high on the pic as it does in real life when you are up top!

After this pleasant but all too short visit of Estonia, we got back on the boat, now fully loaded with fully loaded Finns and their beerstash for the week.

The next day we did not do too much - visited the awesome fish market (where there was a pan-flute band... which everytime I see pan flutes I cannot stop thinking about that South Park episode lol) and also visited this cool church built into a ginormous rock.

And i'll let you go with a picture of your favorite billiard traveler getting in touch with his Estonian pirate sensibilities....

Estonian Pool-Hustling Pirate

1985 World Snooker Championship Final

2010-04-16T21:54:00.000-04:00

I'd like to tell you today about one of those moments of legend, a culmination of skill, luck, excitment and grown men playing with their balls.

The noble game of Snooker has a storied evolution - starting as a hybrid of English Billiards (an interesting game in its own right, related to Carom billiards but with pockets), and Pyramid Pool (also called Life Pool), a gambler's game played in England in the 19th century. There are many good online reads about the history of snooker - if you find a particularly good one, please post in comments!

Anyway, the popularity of snooker had been increasing since the 1930s, reaching its apogee in the mid-1980s. Through what Doc Brown may have called the junction point for the entire space-time continuum, 1985 coincides with the height of snooker TV viewership, the setting for back to the future part 1, and the most amazing conclusion to a cue sport championship EVER.

It was the final of the World Snooker Championship, at the Crucible Theater in Sheffield, England (Sheffield is the Mecca of Snooker, I hope to visit there sometime soon). Steve Davis, three time previously world champion, was facing Dennis Taylor, who had reached the finals once before. Steve was the heavy, heavy favorite to win.

The final was a race to 18 frames (for my American readers, 18 "racks"). If you have tried snooker before, you know that a frame takes quite a bit longer than a rack of 9 ball (probably more on par with the duration of a rack of 1-pocket than any other pool game).

This particular final lasted 14 hours and 50 minutes (!!!!), the longest ever recorded for what would become a 35 frame match.

Yes, this means it went hill-hill in the finals - can you believe it? There's more - get this : it came down to the FINAL BALL of the final rack of the final of the world championship. Great Scott!!!!

From then on, this match has been snookerpropriately referred to as the Blackball Finish.

Here is a pretty good summary of the events, and the pertinent shots of the match are shown along with good commentary.

Once you have returned from the edge of your seat, try to think of other awesome moments in cue sports and tell me about them, I will blog them up and post for the enjoyment of all!

Written in Siena, Italy on Friday, April 16th 2010.

Pool Stories part 002 - "I guess he was in heat for action"

2010-04-12T11:05:00.009-04:00

This is my favorite story so far... Again Steve from Drexeline tells it excellently.
Filmed Thursday, April 8th 2010 at Drexeline Billiards in Philadelphia.

Do you have a good gaff game story? Or any other story related to pool that you would like to share? Let me know!

Delft, NL Tips and tricks - Unusual (at least to me) bridge shot technique

2010-04-12T08:02:00.031-04:00

So maybe this is a technique common in many places, but no one had showed me this one until last night in Delft, The Netherlands.

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Have you ever been in a situation where you needed to use a bridge, shooting over the top of a ball, and the only bridge available is one of those X ones? I mean, the ones that are a simple cross, too low to shoot over a ball...
This situation happened last night while I was playing some 1-hole with Niels, the bartender out at the Snooker & Pool Palace. Niels simply grabbed the bridge cue, and held his left hand underneath the cue so that the butt of the cue and his knuckles were on the felt.

This allows for control of bridge elevation and doesn't seem to be very difficult to master. I tried it myself after seeing it and found it surprisingly stable and comfortable.

A bit more about the Snooker and Pool Palace:
14 American Pool Tables (Brunswicks, 9-foot, well maintained)
6 Snooker tables
6 Free dartboards
Full bar (cheap beers)
Open until 1am every day
Their busy season is November through April, because during the warmer months people tend to spend their time outdoors.

The local level is quite good - Niels says he ran 6 racks of 9-ball and has a top run of 46 in straight pool - Niels, if you are reading this, I know you are also a snooker player but just realized I did not ask you what your top break was!
A view of the Pool area:

A tough 1-pocket spot I put Niels in :

A view of the bar from the snooker area:

And of course, no trip to the Netherlands would be complete without windmills and tulips!

Incredible stories - part 001 - "The strongest thing I ever saw"

2010-04-08T12:25:00.012-04:00

My friend Tony and I headed down to Drexeline a couple of nights ago, to shoot some italian 5-pin billiards on their nice heated Chevillote 10 footers, and to try some 1-pocket on their trip-shim table.
There is a guy Steve that has been working there forever, and although he doesn't really look old enough for it, he has asstons of stories to tell, having seen Cory Deuel grow up shooting pool at this fine establishment. Drexeline Billiards has been a Philadelphia staple since 1989 and houses an impressive collection of Billiard memorabilia. I highly suggest a visit if you are in the Philadelphia area - I'm sure the guys working the counter would be happy to show you through the collection.
Anyway, after Tony and I were done shooting, Steve just started telling stories, one after the other. I caught a couple of these on video. He's a great storyteller and I have enough material for two or three posts!

This first story is about about a gaff game that Cory Deuel once got into.

Do you have a good pool story? Send me it!

The Philippines

2010-04-08T12:06:00.005-04:00

Man, I love Efren...
In my dreams this is how every pool hall is every day in the Philippines.
Make sure to watch this till the very end. For me, Efren is the greatest player that ever lived, not only for his inhuman skill but also for his adorable attitude. Gotta love a guy that laughs when he misses - compare to Earl Strickland for example...

Pool tourism?

2010-04-06T22:48:00.006-04:00

I recently had the idea that I would like to go to the Philippines specifically to explore the pool culture in this fascinating country.

Is this a crazy idea? Going to foreign land for the specific purpose of billiard tourism?

I figure I can start by making contacts over there through facebook and emails to any relevant bloggers I can uncover from teh innarnet. Also, http://www.couchsurfing.org/ may be of help. Anyone got any advice?

Many, many excellent pool players are from the Philippines, names such as Francisco Bustamente and Efren Reyes should be familiar to all pool players. I have heard that there have more pool tables per capita than any other country in the world. Beyond just the pool, I am also interested in the geographical and historical aspects of the country, the language, and of course the food.

Here is the wikipedia entry on the Philippines, and here is the one on Efren Reyes.

Has anyone been there? Do you have any insights or resources you could recommend?

I'm looking forward to planning this trip :D

2010-03-25T17:34:00.005-04:00

Here's a good one-pocket shot I once made ftw in Marburg while playing Jan at Bermuda Billiards.

FTW!

Valley Forge Super Billiards Expo

2010-03-21T10:39:00.004-04:00

I have many things I should have blogged since last post... Let's see, when I left off I was in Basel, Switzerland, it was right before Christmas.

Since then:

French alps for new years, Normandy for a couple days with my parents, Liverpool, Manchester, Marburg (Germany), Siena (Italy), back to Basel, Zurich, Liverpool, Philadelphia, Raleigh, Philadelphia, Boston, Siena, Marburg, Frankfurt, Philadelphia, Raleigh, Philadelphia.

Today is Sunday, March 21st 2010, the last day of the 2010 Super Billiards Expo at valley Forge.

This event has been going on for a few years now, and is one of the largest pool expos in the world. It also happens to take place in one of my ex- "home" neighborhoods, as I lived in this area for about 7 years.

Now if you haven't been to expo, let me tell you about expo. IT IS AWESOME. They have all sorts of events, amateur and pro, everything on bar-sized tables. That's right, every table is a 7 foot diamond, and there are HUNDREDS of them.

For 4 full days and nights, this place is filled to the brim with everything POOL. It doesn't close. Pool 24/7. Thousands of shooters of all skill levels. Trickshot events. Cue vendors. Cue repairmen. The parking lot is full of campers, from all the road players and other pool junkies coming from far away lands such as Florida or Arizona. Hustlers everywhere.

The local Philadelphia suburb area shooters simply call it "Expo". Elsewhere in the country, is it usually referred to as "Valley Forge". It is quickly becoming famous for the ridiculous amount of action that takes place, in particular in the "pit".

You see, most of the tables are used for the pro and amateur tournaments. But they keep about a dozen tables open for anyone who wants to shoot. These are infested with hustlers, most of them playing 9-ball and 10-ball. Out of that dozen tables, there is one that has MASSIVE amounts of action. This is what people refer to as "The Pit". Imagine 300 people in a circle around a 7-foot Diamond with some of the best shooters in the world playing no-call 10-ball for several hundred dollars a rack, winner-stays-on. And the people around this are not just watching, they all have part of the action. You wouldn't believe this place. Each rack, even before the 10-ball is sunk, you start hearing yells : "I got the breaker for $100!!!" "Who likes the racker??? Who wants the racker for $300" You gotta see this, I don't think there is anything like this anywhere else in the world.

I flew in from North Carolina thursday evening, headed straight to my friend Brian's place in Conshohocken, and later shawn picked me up from there and we headed to expo. Shawn had never been, so I showed him around a bit. I bet some racks for $20, some for $40 and actually made $100 thanks to the shooter I was betting on who ran 3 racks. I was about to stop betting, but got convinced to take the breaker again for $40 and lost.

Friday night, I went back with my brother and his girl to see my friend Robyn play in the women's 9-ball open. Unfortunately, she lost in the first round. We met up there with Doug (the guy in the red hat at the beginning of the video) and Rob (our APA league operator). We drank beers and bet on pool for a while, did allright. I got my tip redone. There were flyers at the expo saying that Markley Billiards was open 24/7 during the expo and that they had a 1-pocket tournament on Saturday at 2pm!! One-pocket tournaments are a rarity in this area.

At about 2am saturday morning, we headed to Markleys, where they were playing winner-stays-on 1-pocket for $500 a rack (pic).

Also, poker in the back. We stayed until 5am. The next day, got a cab back to Markleys and played in the one-pocket tournament. I lost my first match, but then won 3 and was 1 win away from the money when Adam Kieler (?) destroyed me 8 to -2. He proceeded to win the tournament, I actually have the whole final match on video. The guy he beat in the finals was the guy who beat me in the first round, so I didn't have the luckiest of draws. Still proud of myself tho. My bro picked me up from there and we went to BJ billiards with Brian, Scotty and Shawn and had a more relaxed evening, messing with Brian's new camera (I think we took some really good pictures, about to check them out with Brian).

I took 20 min of walkabout video of expo on Friday night - all one continuous shot. Check it out and get a feelof the Valley Forge Super Billiards Expo!

Doug gets his tips back from Big Sexy over here :

0:00 to 3:31 - quick tour of the upstairs : vendors, open tournaments.

3:35 to 3:56 - the "small money" tables

3:56 to End - THE PIT

Beginning: I get paid lol

1:10 - the women's open

2:25 - The poor girl gets to be filmed missing this shot...

2:35 - just walking around the TAP event, some vendors and the food stands

6:25 - THE PIT again.

6:45 - Check out the break. lol.

9:15 - Gambloor wants the racker for $100

Written Sunday, March 21st at noon in Conshohocken, PA

2009-12-23T11:24:00.001-05:00

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

2009-12-22T18:10:00.001-05:00

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.