 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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December: Posting December 2025 [Reprinted from April 2007] “You trust your mother but still cut the cards,” goes the ancient and cynical gambling saw, and that wisdom is as true in pool as anywhere else. Why else would players pore over one another’s racked balls as though searching for incurable disease cures, world peace solutions or the existential abyss? And ever since the 17th century, when the very first billiards authors warned of “sharpsters,” men who enjoyed gambling at the cue games have sought to ensure that the winner would indeed be paid.
I’m not sure that this was ever an actual on-the-books ordinance, but for decades the prevailing wisdom in Chicago poolrooms was that playing for money was an offense for which you could be arrested — but only if money actually crossed the table surface. Merely take a few steps away to pay off, and everything was fine. So, some of the first stakes posting I saw made use of a link in the chain that secured the table lighting. Before the advent of Gold Crown tables, the older Brunswick models had pocket liners that were not glued on all four sides, thus stakes money could easily be folded into them. If the stakes were meager enough, and the posting players careless enough, pocketed balls would sometimes sweep the stakes out of the pocket and into the ball return. The sight of pool players frantically hitting their flabby backs and clawing at the table’s underbelly in a spastic backstroke was frequently worth more than the game itself. But by using the lighting chain or pocket for their stakes, the players were technically not passing the money across the table surface and thus passed muster.
It’s much more common today, though, to simply have a third party serve as stakes holder, and depending on the relationship between the players, that may not even be necessary. A bit over 40 years ago, my close friend Freddy Bentivegna and I each began to play one-pocket. We matched up multiple times weekly, and it was always understood that the loser would get the benefit of the last game on credit. In pool, this is known as a “hip” game; the reference is not to contemporary social awareness but rather to an empty wallet resting on that part of the anatomy, and another anatomical reference is frequently used too.
When a stakes holder’s services are required, though, a modest top, or “consideration,” is appropriate. It’s also appropriate to select an individual with minimal need for food, drink or indoor plumbing; should any of those needs arise, the holder is expected to advise both competitors. And beyond the needs just mentioned, stakes holders have been known to develop sudden wanderlust.
In Freddy’s younger, wilder days, one of his road companions was the notorious Johnny “Sugar Shack” Novak, widely recognized as a good guy to have watching your back. He would back down from no one, regardless of size or reputation, or even number. Unfortunately, he was also a little absent-minded, and walked away with the other players’ stakes more than once. Catch-22 was that you couldn’t do much about it even if you caught up to him.
“I was playing ‘Tall Bob’ Ogburn once,” Freddy recalled, “and we were betting high, and Sugar took a walk with the stakes. Bob charged me $2,500 for that session, but I claim extenuating circumstances. He was being staked by a guy who, in his way, was as deadly as Sugar. Instead of keeping my mind on the game, I spent most of the session trying to think of an explanation for why Sugar was in the wind.”
But the first time I saw stakes holding go awry is, like the first of many things, unmatched in my memory. The competitors were two old coots named Joe and Edgar, who regularly faced off at the downtown Bensigner’s. On this night, they had a squabble before their customary 100-point, $2 match, and agreed to raise the stakes to $3 in indignation. For stakes holder, they chose a character named Murphy, a potato-shaped man well known for his Gatling-gun flatulence and eyeglasses the approximate thickness of a Dublin beer stein. Edgar reached 99 first and was stuck there, with Joe running out the game, when pool Murphy slapped his wrist to the bridge of his nose (as he always did when checking his watch), broke wind in apparent deep dismay over the lateness of the hour and keeled over and lay there like a lox. Joe, somewhat to his credit, continued his run through game ball, and then surveyed the source for his spoils of victory. There was no CPR know back then, just hollering and toe nudges, and Murphy was most unresponsive to all of these.
“Pay off,” Joe commanded Edgar. “He’s gone.”
“Up yours,” barked Edgar in his one-hole loss misery. “I posted. There’s your money, down there on the floor. Go fish.”
“I ain’t goin’ in there,” Joe said. “He mighta peed his pants, or worse. Leave the money for his kids. Gimme my six bucks.”
“Kids? He’s holdin’ up his pants with a laundry rope, fer chrissakes. This is your idea of a family man?”
“Not the point. Pay off.”
“Sweet Jesus Christ!” bellowed the suddenly recovered Murph, as he bolted to a sitting position, the way sometimes corpses do in the morgue. “I ain’t dead yet, and I heard every word. I’m disgusted wit’ d’bodyez. G’bye!”
“Where the hell you think you’re goin,?” Joe screeched. “I got six bucks comin’!”
“You want it, come and get it” Murphy called back. “Cuz I think I mighta peed myself at that.” And off he did go, perhaps wetly, into that good night. |
