
Billiards Is a Good Game (1975) - thomasjudge
https://mag.uchicago.edu/billiards
======
aidenn0
> After watching Michelson play bridge for a while, you could predict more or
> less the kind of mistake he would make, and it was not unrelated to the
> American champion’s description of his chess game. He would make a bid short
> of game, but, after getting the bid, would see that, if he took and made two
> long finesses, he could come in with a little slam. Of course, a little slam
> would make only a few points difference since he hadn’t bid it, but he would
> take the two finesses and not only lose both but lose his bid on an
> absolutely “lay-down hand.” He was a rather small man, as you know, and he
> would look with almost childlike incredulity at the ruined remains of his
> daring invention of two long finesses where none was a sure thing.

If anybody needs translation:

In bridge you bid how many tricks you will take; there are 13 tricks and the
minimum bid is 7 (i.e. you will take over half). If you make at least as many
as you bid, your score is positive, if you make fewer than you bid your score
is negative. You get bonus points for bidding at a certain level; "game" is
9-11 tricks depending on the situation (10 tricks is the most common for
reasons I won't get into here). "small slam" (or little slam in this article)
is 12 tricks and "grand slam" is 13 tricks.

You have two opponents in bridge and a finesse is a play that depends on cards
being in the correct opponents hand. Most common is which opponent holds a
king when you have an ace and a queen. If you can force them to decide to play
the king or not before you play, then you beat the king with an ace, or beat
the lower card they play with the queen. A "long finesse" (called a "deep
finesse" today) requires more than one card to be in the correct position, so
attempting one is a move of last resort.

Now the translation. He bid to make 9 or 10 tricks, but saw that he could make
12 tricks if all of the cards were in the position maximally lucky for him.
Since he did not bid high enough to get the bonus for winning those, the
reward is tiny, and he should just make the obvious plays to cover his bid.
Instead he took the risky play and ended up not even making the 9 or 10 that
he bid. This is the sort of mistake that even an intermediate bridge player
learns not to make very quickly, but a beginner couldn't make this mistake at
all because they wouldn't see the opportunity. So Michelson is smart but a
_terrible_ bridge player.

I'm struggling to think of an equivalently bad play in poker; maybe staying in
the pot when your hand is the low-pair after the flop and several others have
already called?

~~~
strgcmc
A potential poker analogy is probably just getting lost in leveling games.

Level 0: My opponent made a large bet because he has a strong hand. I should
fold.

Level 1: My opponent made a large bet because he knows that I will think it
looks like he has a strong hand, when in fact he has a weak hand. I should
call.

Level 2: My opponent knows that I think his large bets are bluffs, so he is
now making a large bet assuming that I will wrongly assume he is bluffing. I
should fold.

Level N: (if N is odd, I should call; if N is even, I should fold)

Beginner players will only think at level 0 or 1, but intermediate/advanced
players may sometimes end up "leveling" themselves into a bad decision.

~~~
Swizec
So what’s the good decision?

~~~
taheris
The best players will avoid trying to make an exploitative decision (e.g.
guessing the correct level the opponent is thinking on), and instead make
something approaching a game-theoretically optimal one (e.g. a maximally
unexploitable strategy).

For example, if you're facing a big bet where you can only beat bluffs (e.g.
all missed draws), but lose to any value bets (e.g. sets, straights, flushes),
then you'll need to mainly be folding, but to avoid being exploitable you'll
also need to call down with some percentage of these mid-strength hands (where
the exact number depends on the bet size relative to the pot).

To decide which bluff-catchers you want to call down with, you'll want to pick
hands that don't block any of your opponent's bluffs (e.g. you don't want to
be holding the Ace of Spades on a flop that had two spades but a third didn't
come by the river, since having this card eliminates a number of likely missed
flush draws that your opponent might be bluffing with). In addition, you'll
also want to pick hands that DO block some of your opponents value bets (e.g.
your hand contains one or two cards that block your opponent from having
straights, flushes, sets).

Naturally, calling down with the correct ratios is rather hard and only the
best players can do so with any consistency, but it does remove the whole
levelling guess work and reduces the decision to something you can reason
about.

------
mrbrandonking
Whenever the author refers to “billiards,” he’s talking about a game played on
a pocketless table with three balls.

He says “Pool” whenever he’s referring to pocket billiards, the game that most
people are familiar with.

~~~
yumraj
> Whenever the author refers to “billiards,” he’s talking about a game played
> on a pocketless table with three balls.

You're right about 3 balls, but there are pockets in a billiards table and you
do get points for pocketing the correct ball.[0]

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_billiards](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_billiards)

~~~
frobozz
The no-pockets version is French Billiards

~~~
yumraj
Ah, didn't know that. For me while growing up in India, Billiards was
synonymous with the English version.

~~~
GrumpyNl
Thats called snooker.

~~~
yumraj
As the sibling comments mentioned, while snooker is also played on the
_English_ billiards table, it is a different game.

Snooker is played with 21 colored balls which must be pocketed in the correct
order.

Billiards is played with 3 balls, 1 white per player (one has a black dot and
the other doesn't) and a red ball.

Billiards table is bigger than the American Pool tables.

------
andreygrehov
I wonder why there are so few billiard (Russian billiard) [0] places in US?
When I lived in Ukraine, where I'm originally from, we usually got together
with friends/co-workers to play billiard after work and it was a hell lot of
fun. There were usually 10-15 billiard tables for adults and 1-2 pool tables
for children. For comparison, this is the size of a pocket in Russian billiard
[1]. When I moved to US, we had a few team outing events at a pool hall and
the game was pretty boring (at least to me). I could easily pocket all the
balls without giving a chance for the other players to even start playing.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_pyramid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_pyramid)

[1] [https://i.redd.it/tbph52kvpngy.jpg](https://i.redd.it/tbph52kvpngy.jpg)

~~~
Symbiote
Does anyone play snooker in the USA?

That has tighter pockets than American (or English) pool, although not as
tight as these Russian ones. It adds significant difficulty with the structure
of play with the coloured balls.

~~~
ucarion
Yes -- although it's rather rare. There's only one place in San Francisco with
snooker tables, to my knowledge, but such places do exist:

[https://www.yelp.com/biz/legend-billiards-and-snooker-sf-
san...](https://www.yelp.com/biz/legend-billiards-and-snooker-sf-san-
francisco)

------
rubinelli
Tangentially, billiards is a great game to play after a few hours in front of
a screen, as your eyes focus on the balls and holes at different distances.

~~~
spyspy
If I ever start my own company I will outright ban ping pong, but a pool table
would be a must in my office. It's an amazing game to take a break with, I
find the noise relaxing, and people can have a full conversation while
playing.

~~~
eru
Ping pong is fun. Just make sure to put it into a room that's sound-isolated
from people trying to concentrate.

------
tkfu
There's a line in there that I find a bit jarring and difficult to parse. I
understand that this was written in 1975 (Not long before I was born, but
nonetheless an era that I can't really say I understand), but when the author
mentions this:

> The waitress told us he drew sketches of the faculty he did not care to eat
> with. She said they all had long noses.

...it sets off strange alarm bells, but I don't quite have the cultural
context to figure out how I should interpret it. Of course, everyone knows
that long noses are a Jewish stereotype, and that in the 70s when this article
was written, anti-semitism was far enough out of fashion that it would have
been impolite to express it in more than an oblique way. Can someone explain
to me what MacLean was trying to say here? I know Michelson himself was of
Jewish descent, which makes the comment all the more confusing.

~~~
jhbadger
At the time he was writing about (pre-WWII), many people of Jewish descent who
by looks and/or surname could "pass" as non-Jewish, did so to avoid anti-
semitism. Many of them even practiced a degree of anti-semitism themselves.
MacLean is suggesting that Michelson (who didn't identify as Jewish despite
his heritage) was such a person.

------
clairity
"Cue your ball in the center as often as you can. Don’t use something hard to
control unless you have to." [edit: referring to too much english on the ball]

this was a nice life lesson for me, learned while playing 3-cushion in
college. the KISS principle was something i'd heard of before, but sometimes
only experience can knock sense into you.

------
every
Good read. And in the future I shall write off my deficiencies as merely a gap
in my genetic tape...

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newsreview1
What a great article! So well written, and thoroughly enjoyable. Thanks for
the share.

~~~
sjburt
The author is Norman Maclean, who wrote _A River Runs Through It_.

------
tln
"I saw him run over forty several times, and it was not unusual for him to put
a string together of twenty or thirty"

I wonder if thats 40 caroms in cowboy? or 5 racks of 8 ball?

The caption mentions (and shows) cowboy pool: you play with 1, 3, 5 and can
score with carom, bouncing the cue off 2 other balls, pocketing also scores
the number on the ball till 90; till 100 only caroms score. to get 101 and
win, you must scratch off the 1. Fun game, my favorite when not paying for
each rack.

~~~
jnewkirk
The description of play in the article corresponds most closely to (straight)
carom billiards rather than a variety of pool (or even three-cushion
billiards). A run of forty is creditable; runs of 100 or more aren't uncommon
among good players. There's a billiard table just behind the foreground pool
table in the photo of the Quadrangle Club.

~~~
mrbrandonking
“... Michelson would run ten or twelve billiards with a touch so delicate that
the three balls could always be covered by a hat.”

Michelson was playing billiards on a table without pockets.

I agree that Michelson wasn’t playing 3-cushion because not even Willie Hoppe
(best player of that era) had runs 10 or 12 on a daily basis.

Balkline was still popular as an amateur game in the 1920s, so Michelson could
have been playing one of the balkline variants rather than straight rail.

Level of difficulty in billiards ...

Straight Rail < Balkline < Cushion Caroms < 3-Cushion

------
anotherevan
I remember I once saw a single panel cartoon of two people playing billiards
and the caption read, "Actually, it is rocket science!" but I've never been
able to find it again.

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jstarks
A wonderful read on a Friday morning. Thanks for sharing.

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tbjohnston
Thank you for sharing this. Great reading!

