NUTS & BOLTS : A how-to for homeowners : Ready for a Pool Table? Better Check Your Pockets
If someone had asked me, when I was 16, to describe my dream house, I would have instantly said any place that surrounded a pool table.
I was crazed for pocket billiards. Forming a proper bridge with my left hand and learning to put ferocious English on a rail shot were, to me, rites of passage. Things that adults did. Adults with dash and flair and icy, surgical confidence. Dressed in velvet smoking jackets. And if they did it at home, on their own carved oak, slate-bedded, tournament-sized tables, they automatically became cooler than James Bond.
Anybody, after all, could have a Ping-Pong table in the garage. It took vision and commitment to have a pool table in the den.
It still does. Because any room you put a pool table in immediately stops being a den, or a family room, or a guest bedroom. It’s the billiard room.
A tournament-size pocket billiard table probably will be the largest piece of furniture in the house, at 4 1/2 feet by 9 feet, and you’ll need a room at least 13 1/2 feet by 18 feet to accommodate it (remember, you have to have room for a regulation length 57-inch cue to swing around). Smaller and less expensive tables, known as home-size tables, can be had, however. They generally measure 4 feet by 8 feet and require a room 13 feet by 17 feet.
Let’s say, though, that you’ve decided that stroking a combination shot with a martini (shaken, not stirred) waiting for you on the sideboard is a lot more important than getting your abs ripped, so you’ve yanked out the home Nautilus gym and prepared the room to receive a tournament-size pocket billiards table.
The first thing you’re going to need, apart from a door big enough to shove the thing through, is at least $1,000. That’s how much Brian Dieleman, the general manager of Triangle Billiards and Bar Stools in Orange, said a beginning-of-the-line table is likely to cost, although he added that it’s possible to go as high as $13,000 or more for the ornate sort of table that you’d expect to see in Roger Moore’s rumpus room. These prices, at Dieleman’s shop, include delivery, setup, several cues and a wall rack to hold them, balls, a ball triangle, chalk and a rule book. Other retailers, he said, may or may not offer such package prices. Others offer used tables for sale at reduced prices.
The most expensive tables can make the garage look like the Taj Mahal, with delicately curved hand-carved legs and pockets woven of rich, supple leather. And their beds, said Dieleman, are inevitably made of slate--a hard, flat, true rolling surface. Also, he said, such tables seldom are fitted with ball-return mechanisms.
“Most of the home tables,” he said, “use the basket-type pockets. The look is much more aesthetic and not as bulky. You see the ball-return tables pretty much in bars and garages, not in homes.”
The lesser offerings may have ball returns. They are also more likely to have beds made from particleboard, which can provide the equivalent of an alpine adventure in pocket billiards if they’re exposed to extremes of temperature and humidity. They can warp.
On the other hand, standard-issue generic cues, properly handled, should work fine, unless you’re something of a shark. They cost anywhere from about $15 to $50 each, said Dieleman. However, if one of your names is Silk, Fats, Fast, or Kid anything, you’re probably going to want one of the richly inlaid, perfectly machined and balanced, two-piece unscrewable treasures that can cost as much as a new car.
“They’re like a piece of art,” said Dieleman. “You’re paying for the amount of craftsmanship. For a professional player, the sky’s the limit. We stock cues up to $3,000, but you can go quite higher than that.”
Pool tables require specific lighting, said Dieleman.
“Overhead lighting is a must,” he said. “Fluorescent lighting is superior to incandescent, and you should have a minimum of two tubes, the longer the better. You want to light the whole surface of the table, and the light should hang about 36 inches above the felt.”
Oh yes, the felt. There was a time when it was only available in the color of money. Today it’s an interior designer’s palette.
“There are 35 different felt colors that are standard now,” said Dieleman. “Tables are being designed into the house, rather than just being thrown into it. If you want pink, sea foam, mauve, they’re all available.”
The serious player, however--the one who would rather stare at the top of a pool table than sleep--”is going to prefer the green,” said Dieleman. “It’s the most soothing on the eyes.”
A table with peach felt isn’t the only way to be exotic. If you want to be almost insufferably cool, you can be part of the 1% of buyers (as estimated by Dieleman) who purchase not a pocket billiard table, but an actual billiard table--the kind with no pockets--or a snooker table. Both billiards and snooker are far rarer in America than in Europe and other parts of the world, and many aficionados say the two games rely more on pure accuracy, finesse and a geometrically attuned eye than does pocket billiards.
I still vote for pocket billiards. See, if you rig your den with a billiard or snooker table, your friends will walk into the room and say, “What the . . . “ and mention something about having an early day tomorrow. With a pocket billiards table--a pool table--you should get the reaction you want:
“Rack ‘em! Nice smoking jacket, by the way.”
