Guides5 minute read
The Heyball table, explained
Baulk, the D, the spots and every named part of a Heyball table, drawn to the real measurements.
The numbers
- Playing area
- 2540 × 1270 mm (9 ft × 4 ft 6 in), exactly 2:1
- Height
- About 850 mm from floor to cushion top
- Head string
- 635 mm from the head cushion
- Foot spot
- 635 mm from the foot cushion
- Corner pocket
- About 85 mm across the mouth
- Ball diameter
- 57.15 mm — the American pool ball
- The rack
- 15 balls, the black in the middle of the third row
These are the governing body’s figures for a Heyball table, and the drawing above is built from exactly these numbers rather than sketched to look right.
The parts, named
- Head string
- The line across the table a quarter of its length from the near cushion. The cue ball is played from behind it at the break.
- The kitchen
- Everything behind the head string. Borrowed from American pool, and used the same way here.
- Foot spot
- A quarter of the length from the far cushion. The apex ball of the rack sits on it, so the rack is always in the same place.
- The rack
- Fifteen balls in a triangle, the black in the centre of the third row, and one solid and one stripe in the two back corners. Getting those corners wrong is the most common illegal rack.
- Pocket jaws
- Cut and rounded like a snooker table’s rather than squared off, and about 85 mm across the mouth against an American pool table’s 115. This single measurement is most of what makes the game hard.
- The nap
- The cloth’s fibres lie in one direction. A slow ball drifts with it, which is why soft safety shots rarely finish where a beginner aimed them.
- Cushions
- Rubber rails, faster than a snooker table’s and slower than a pool table’s. Reliable off a firm shot, less so off a dying one.
- Head and foot
- The head is the end you break from; the foot is where the rack sits. Snooker calls them bottom and top, in the opposite order, which confuses everybody who plays both.
Nine feet is not the point
The instinct is to assume a harder game means a bigger table, and it does not. At 2540 mm this bed is about a foot longer than the eight-footer in a pub. Side by side you would struggle to say which was which from across the room.
What you would notice, standing at the pocket, is the mouth. Eighty-five millimetres against a hundred and fifteen, with jaws cut and rounded rather than squared off. A 57 mm ball has about fourteen millimetres either side of it going into a corner here. On a pool table it has nearly thirty.
That is the whole difficulty of the game, and it is why somebody moving across from pub eight-ball finds their potting has apparently collapsed overnight. It has not. The margin they were relying on has gone.
The cloth has a direction
The other thing the drawing cannot show is that the cloth is napped, like a snooker table’s rather than a pool table’s. Run a hand up the table and then down it and you can feel the difference.
A firm shot barely notices. A slow one drifts, which is precisely the shot you play when you are being clever, and precisely why a first attempt at safety ends up somewhere you did not plan. Learnable in an evening, but only once somebody has told you it is happening.
Where the variation is
Bed size and ball size are standard. Pocket cut is where tables differ most, and a tournament table is usually cut tighter than a club one. If a table feels unusually unforgiving, that is normally what you are feeling rather than anything you are doing wrong. The tables and the cues.