Pool (cue sports)

Pool is a family of cue sports played on a billiard table with six pockets set along the rails, into which players shoot balls with a cue. The Wikipedia lead names the most popular games as eight-ball, blackball, nine-ball, ten-ball, seven-ball, straight pool, one-pocket and bank pool, and says eight-ball is the most frequently played discipline and is often treated as a synonym for pool itself. The generic term pocket billiards is sometimes used instead and is favored by some pool-industry bodies, but it is technically a broader class that also covers snooker, Russian pyramid and kaisa, which are not called pool games. Hybrid games that mix pool with carom billiards, such as American four-ball billiards, bottle pool, cowboy pool and English billiards, are named separately. The article adds that the pool games played today, one-pocket aside, descend from two English games brought to the United States during the nineteenth century.