Q: Your new book describes techniques and strategies for people out of the beginner class. What should novice pool players do to improve their games?
A: True, the book is aimed mainly at players who have some experience with knocking balls into pockets, but I knew that it might fall into the hands of beginners. That’s why the first chapter is a review of basics, how to stand, aim, and stroke for example, how to spin the cue ball to get it into position for the next shot, when to go for the score and when to play safe. Those topics are covered in greater detail in my earlier books, particularly in Byrne’s New Standard Book of Pool and Billiards, and in my first two instructional videotapes. The new book shows the surprising and even amazing things that can be done on a pool table by players with good fundamentals. Outstanding skill isn’t required, just a bit of inside information. Novices who want to improve quickly should take a lesson or two. Typical mistakes made by beginners include the failure to provide solid support for the front of the cue during stroking and aiming and holding the rear of the cue in the wrong place. A teacher can correct such things in minutes.


Q: You’re quite a player yourself and have won tournaments in several forms of the game. As a competitor, what are your greatest strengths?
A: I don’t collapse under tournament pressure because I know that it’s just a game, not life itself. Missing a shot or losing a game doesn’t make you a bad person (I keep telling myself). In my case, it usually means that I didn’t spend enough time practicing. If a shot is so hard you can only make it one time in five and you miss it in a game, it simply means that the odds caught up to you, not that evil supernatural forces or at work or that you are the unluckiest person in the world. I have an engineering background and have always been interested in how it is controlled by friction: friction between the cuetip and the cueball, between the cueball and the other balls, between the balls and the cloth and the cushions, and I like to think that my technical approach helps me as a player. Maybe it hurts . . . the best players in the world don’t think about friction, conservation of momentum, and coefficients of restitution and other terms from the world of physics.

I love the game of pool, have a pool table in my home, and have studied the world’s best players for fifty years, but the game I play best is three-cushion billiards, which is played with only three balls on a pocketless table larger than a pool table. I like the geometry of it. In 1999, I won both the National Amateur and the National Senior three-cushion tournaments. It’s hard to find a billiard table in most American cities, unlike in Europe, Asia, or South America. To see this elegant and intriguing game demonstrated, visit the Web site caromcafe.com.

Q: Pool has taken on a new angle with the introduction of online games. Does it surprise you to find that thousands upon thousands of people are playing pool via computer simulation? How does this compare to playing on a real pool table?
A: I am surprised, because just a few years ago the technology wasn’t very good and the onscreen balls didn’t behave in a natural manner. The simulation programs now are excellent, and a student can learn a lot about, for example, cueball spin and speed that can be carried over to the real world. The growth of online competition in pool is great for players who don’t have a good place to play or who are housebound or disabled. I hope the increase in online play will contribute to the overall health of the game by creating new players and fans, but there is no substitute for playing on a real table. The smell of chalk, the sound of colliding balls, the feeling in your hand and arm when you hit the cueball, the groan of opponents as they sink into defeat, the applause of spectators, the atmosphere, and the socializing in a billiard room or tavern, the whole poolhall subculture, all of that is missing when you are hunched over a keyboard staring at blips on a screen.

Q: Speaking of computer simulations, many people are surprised that you did not use one for the books shot diagrams—you handcrafted these by hand. Why did you choose this seemingly tedious process?
A: It’s not seemingly tedious, it is tedious. When I was writing my first book on the game in 1977, computer technology was relatively primitive and to make accurate and attractive pool diagrams with the graphics programs then available was both costly and clumsy. Instead, I hired a technical illustrator to make an 8 x 10-inch line drawing of a pool table complete with wood grain on the rails. He also made a drawing of me aiming a shot based on a photo taken from the top of a stepladder. I made a thousand photocopies of each. Using drafting skills I learned in engineering school, I made an ink drawing of each shot, then pasted on the shooter, using a razor blade to cut away the excess paper. If the shot called for left-hand English, I was careful to position the cuetip on the left side of the ball. When a diagram was done, I held the sheet up to my eye and look down the line of aim. If it didn’t look right, I did it over. The hand-crafted diagrams have become a kind of trademark or logo for me, so I stayed with them in subsequent books and in my articles in "Billiards Digest." You can spot one of my diagrams from across the street. With the technology available now, I suppose I should abandon my old-fashioned methods, but computer-generated diagrams strike me as somehow cold and lifeless.

Q: What is the most challenging shot in the book?
A: I’m proud of having found a way to make a shot that has always been considered impossible. Place a 9-ball (or any ball) against the long rail a foot from the corner pocket and the cueball against the same rail three feet away from the corner. Both balls are touching the cushion and are two feet apart. Try to make the 9-ball in the corner with outside (on the side away from the cushion) sidespin on the cueball. You’ll find that it can’t be done…unless you use a perfectly legal special technique that’s never been described before. See page 100 . . . or my 2003 video "Gamebreakers."

Q: You’ll soon be attending the Midwest Expo and other pool tournaments to promote your book and lend your support to the leagues. What is the most engaging part of these visits?
A: Tournaments and trade shows are gatherings of cue makers, equipment manufacturers, and players both famous and obscure. It’s fun to see them all in one place and to interact with them as well as with the spectators. And of course it’s a pleasure to be asked to autograph a book, or to be told how much I’ve helped a player’s game. A man once told me that a book of mine was the best book he’d ever read, adding that it was also the only book he’d ever read.

Q: The Appendix of Byrne’s Complete Book of Pool Shots discusses the culture of pool and billiards. Tell us a little about the culture, both historically and now—is it all about “ruffians and wastrels?” How closely do today's game rules follow those in the first billiard books, such as La Maison des Jeux Academiques (1668), and The Compleat Gamester (1674)?
A: Pool and billiards go back more the 500 years. They probably derived from lawn games similar to croquet that were brought indoors and put on tables. Cloth for tables is traditionally green, the color of grass. The game was hugely popular with royalty in England and France, and eventually became so widely played by the working classes that Cotton in his 1674 book spent several pages warning his readers about hustlers. Billiards shows up frequently in English novels and short stories of the nineteenth century, and many famous artists have depicted billiard scenes. Van Gogh and Gauguin, for example, once did paintings of the same billiard table in Arles, France. Mozart was an avid player, but never mentioned the game in a song or aria, unlike Gilbert and Sullivan (The Mikado, 1885) and Merideth Willson (The Music Man, 1957). The game appears in popular songs beyond counting from the 1880s to the present.
While hustlers are still with us, the games Cotton was familiar with 329 years ago are much different from those we play today. Cues weren’t widely used until around 1800—before that the cueball was shoved by a flat-headed stick called a mace. Slate for table beds replaced wood around 1830, rubber for cushions ten or fifteen years later, and electric lights for gas lamps about 1910. Eight-ball, nine-ball, and straight pool, the most often-played games today, are less than one hundred years old. Playing conditions were so bad in the early years, I’m surprised the game survived.


Q: With your reputation it’s easy to see why you would write books about your favorite sport, but you have other interests as evidenced by your novels and other works. Tell us about Bob Byrne once he steps outside of the pool hall.
A: For the record, I was born in Dubuque, Iowa, graduated from the University of Colorado in 1954 with a degree in civil engineering, and worked for twenty years in San Francisco for a trade journal called "Western Construction," now defunct. I have a son, Russell, an electrical engineer with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. I returned to Dubuque with my wife Cindy, an artist, in 1995 and haven’t regretted it for a minute.

Of my seven novels, two are about coming of age, and five are about engineering disasters, like bursting dams and collapsing tunnels. I often use names of pool players for minor characters. My novel Thrill, about a sabotaged roller coaster, was NBC’s "Monday Night Movie" in 1996.

My five collections of humorous quotations are out of print as individual books, but in January of 2003, Simon & Schuster published an anthology of the first four called The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said. Byrne’s Complete Book of Pool Shots is my 23rd book.