6 comments

  2. Tracey

    “French Billiard” (as I’d always heard it called) or “Carambole” (as Wikipedia seems to know it) is a much different beast from 8-ball or snooker…
    It’s played with 3 balls only (though being French, they are of course notably bigger :P) and no pockets. The goal is to hit both your opponent’s and the third ball (the red one) as well as a certain number of cushion sides (in competition, exactly 2 sides, but most people loosen that rule). The table is usually also much bigger than regular 8-ball, but this being a Parisian apartment we’re talking about, the billiard table we were playing on is roughly the size of a snooker’s.

    I used to play this a lot as a student, turns out I seem to play much better inebriated… and since I’m dry for the month…

  3. What happened to your blog??? How do we call a website again with pix in it and a few words to describe them… an Album?! 🙂

    xxx

  4. IIRC, there are different rules in competition. The “carambole” is hitting both other balls, no matter how you do it as long as there are no faults. There is also the “3 bandes” in which you must hit at least three sides before hitting the last ball. And the “cadre” in which some players have found the “carambole” so easy, once they managed to get a particular position known as “l’américaine”, than they could easily score hundreds of points in row, making both the row limits and the points limit useless : the first player starts and finish in a row (point limit) and if the second doesn’t, he looses.

    So in the “cadre” rules, the billard is split into squares (six or nine) and in a square you can play a maximum number of points (one or two) : this way, you cannot play the “américaine”. And then again, there are some technics to play along the line of each squares. Ho, and a billard is, in competition, 2.80m or 3.10m long.

    But, to have fun and bet some drinks, playing the casin (a pub game), is a good idea. You have a certain number of plays to succeed, one of them being the “casin” in which you must hit the red ball to make it hit the opponent’s ball.

    French billard is really really nice 🙂

  5. Hej,
    just passing by… I am living in Denmark right now and they have a very nice local version of billard indeed. It is a mixture between our French one (three balls, points for the touch thing), the pool (pockets and points for that) and some weird thing with pins (5, arguably of different size) to top it all… I am willing to debate it if anyone is interested.
    And the fact that an awful lot of either Carlsberg or Tuborg (which is the same for us fool foreigners anyway) is to be drunk while playing makes it a lot of fun…
    I am totally willing to start a trend on that, providing I manage to buy another set of pins (mine was “confiscated” by a friend seemingly uninterested, or maybe it is me who doesn’t understand psychology…) and find a pool place where I don’t get thrown out when putting them out of the box onto the table!

    All the best to all of ya,
    hrn

  6. I personally like the idea of French billiards but try to find a carom or three cushion billiards table in the united states I can’t find one to buy over the internet I did find this website [link removed] that explains carom and has some good videos though. If anyone knows where I can find a table over the intenet tell me.

    thanks.

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