 Tips & shafts By George Fels Consulting Editor George Fels has been writing for Billiards Digest since 1980, and his "Tips & Shafts" column is usually our readers' first stop when they crack open the magazine. For better or worse, pool has been his only mistress for 40-plus years.
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November: Tightness November 2025 [Reprinted] When a plague of locusts exacts its toll, any shortstop of an entomologist can at least explain, with the customary wisdom of hindsight, how that plague occurred — where the creatures came from, where and how long they were dormant, what will happen next, and so forth. While this does nothing whatsoever to compensate luckless farmers for millions and millions of dollars in crops lost, at least there’s an academic form of closure. This gives locusts a giant leg up on the phenomenon known as “tight pockets” on a pool table. Absolutely nobody knows their origin, exactly when they came about, or whose sadistic idea they were.
For their part, Brunswick Billiards has steadfastly maintained that they have done nothing to fiddle with pocket dimensions since the first official rulebooks detailed what those dimensions should be. And even those stingy pocket jaws first appeared on the sleek Brunswick Gold Crown models of the early ’60s, the giant manufacturer is being truthful: Table makers don’t want to make tight pockets, table mechanics do.
Thus, tight pockets can almost always be traced to a commercial room’s asking for them, and if room management knows what it’s doing, these will be rooms catering to bona fide players. In fact, many top professionals have been clamoring for narrower pockets in tournament play for years; indeed, the charge is widespread that generous pockets, in combination with Simonis 860 cloth, have made the game to easy to play.
The first players’ room to acquire a tight-pocket reputation was undoubtedly Manhattan’s famous Paddy’s, or as it was far more commonly called, “711”, in deference to its street address, 711 Seventh Ave. “You put two balls side by side in them jaws,” ungrammatically recalled the late Vince “Pancho” Furio. “You couldn’t pull ’em through wit’ six weightlifters.” Furio’s theory was never put to the test, as far as anyone knows; instead, it was proven by untold numbers of road players who would actually be strolling nonchalantly to what they thought was their next shot before they noticed the ball they had just sent traveling was wiggling in the jaws, spitting in the shooter’s eye.
“Shoulda seen the double-takes,” Furio would say. “Bee-yootiful! Then the telephone wires would hum with collect calls home.”
In Chicago, the first room to sport more demanding pockets was a place called 20th Century, and, as the room was far better known for its bowling lanes, the appearance of strict pool tables was puzzling to say the least. They didn’t slow my game down a whole bunch, largely because there wasn’t much to be slowed in the first place. I was in my mid-20s then, and, for a guy who had worn glasses of the Coke bottle persuasion most of his life, was still a pretty fair shot-maker; in fact, my reliance on shot-making alone kept my long run at somewhere around three racks for years longer than it should have been. So, I tried to limit my competition to players who would be spooked by the narrower targets, and consequently did fairly well, for stakes within reason, in that room.
Historically, there was an easier economic reason to make pockets easier. Years ago, many rooms, especially in the South, charged by the rack rather than by the hour. In such places, bigger pockets meant games would end sooner, thereby raising the possibility that more games would be played, and the room could cadge a few more dimes or quarters out of the competitors. So, not only did the mouths of those tables yawn like hippos sunning themselves, but the pocket jaws were also angled out into the table surface. A ball struck imprecisely enough to wiggle between those jaws was still deflecting backward, or toward the hole; Gold Crown tables, by contrast, set the pocket jaws parallel to one another, so the object ball would pinball back and forth maddeningly without disappearing. No wonder so many road players victims at 711 were of Southern heritage.
But in the modern era, many top players have been known to turn down seemingly attractive action after no more than a handful of practice shots, excusing themselves simply with, “The table’s too tough.” And indeed, a really demanding table dares the player to attack near-the-rail shots with any but the most cautious speeds. Even comfortable position ploys, such as two-rails-out-of-the-corner are now fraught with peril. Players begin to worry about missing by a sixteenth of an inch and suddenly find themselves missing by a foot. An object ball that brushes a rail in the softest, most subtle way is doomed to remain in the daylight. The pocket’s jaws metamorphose into a railroad’s dreaded “third rail”: Touch me and you’re dead.
Yet pool has conclusively demonstrated that there will be times when she cares not a whit or a fig about her players’ comfort level. Hard shots must occasionally be chosen over easier ones, speed must be prioritized over finesse now and then, and the players who is consistently intimidated into settling for what’s easiest will almost certainly go home minus cash. In the final analysis, the pockets, no matter how mean, are still wider than the ball; the little sucker, fired accurately enough, still fits in there. We’ve already proved that with our terrified scratches.
Yet the fact is, if you can only stay upbeat about it, tough pockets actually force you into better playing decisions. If they slow your pace down slightly, that is frequently a good thing. And as the great Hall of Fame player Buddy Hall says, “Just use the center of the pocket, and tough pockets don’t mean a thing.” It’s sound advice, but good luck implementing it. For most of us, tough pockets are where are innings go to die.
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