What Cushion Billiards Is
The distinction is this--you can play cushion billiards games on a pocketless table. The goal is simple yet elusive, touch the balls together and touch the cushions with your cue ball. To "carom" or "kiss" balls together was considered far too simple for the masters of the carom game, requiring just three balls on the table. If I got the balls huddled close together along a rail or in a corner of the table, I'm going to gently nurse the balls with each stroke and run dozens of caroms in a row while you watch helplessly.
The great ones could nurse the balls together for unending thousands of points taken at one single inning! Opponents, spectators, heck, the players making the shots were falling asleep during tournaments. The answer was again simple. Three Cushion Billiards.
Cushion Billiards Is So Tough, Most Are Afraid To Play It
Put three large balls on the large sized pocketless table. You have one designated as your cue ball, another is your opponent's ball. To score a point and continue your turn, all you need do is touch three cushions with the cue ball and also touch the other two balls. The three cushions must be struck before contact is made with the second ball.
Now think about those strokes for a moment. If the two balls lay near one corner, say the lower right pocket, and your cue ball was near the lower left pocket, you just take that easy shot around three rails and score on both balls. You know the one, it has about a ten inch margin for error to go around the table dramatically to score. But what do you do for the second shot on those three balls to score again and continue your turn?
An average of one point per turn sounds like the worst pool player you've played in league the last three years--and one point per turn is also the average of a top three cushion player. One-and-a-half to the grand average of two points per inning is the score of a tip top pro playing world class billiards.
The Source Of The Pool Of Confusion
The misunderstanding that has been around for decades was caused by a lapse in using clear terms. Since the carom or activity where two balls touch is also called a "billiard", then cushion billiards and three cushion billiards are games where you carom balls together on a pocketless table. Pocket billiards or pool games involve caroming the cue ball into an object ball to bring the object ball to a pocket. That is, to shoot pool.
And know you know.
Use Cushion Billiards And Three Cushion Billiards To Build Pool Skills
You can combine carom specific games where you shoot the cue ball into an object ball and then into a second object ball with pocketing balls to make an added challenge--a challenge that is good for your game indeed. The greatest living players such as Efren "The Magician" Reyes played carom almost exclusively when they were first introduced to the game. Say it with me--"whoever controls the cue ball controls the world". Total mastery of pool is not far off when you can make the cue ball go exactly where you aim it.
If you have a good stroke and know the cue ball is going where you aim every time, then pocketing balls will get better and better since you'll know you are needing to adjust where you hit the object balls and not your stance and stroke.
A great new game on this horizon is called "ScratchBall," which uses a standard pool table but a unique set of balls to play carom and build caroming skills.