A detailed chronology of billiards and pool follows a brief pictorial introduction to the games and how they evolved. If you’re short of time and looking for something in particular, please try using CTRL-F to find it.
Who was the first pool hustler? … The Dutch Baron, John Carr, Edwin “Jonathan” Kentfield, “Lookout,” or Marie Antoinette?
Who was the first road player? …. John Carr, John Roberts Sr., John Roberts Jr., Mary Queen of Scots, or Napoleon?
Who was the first American pool champion of a game that is still being played today? … Albert Frey, Gottlieb Wahlstrom, Cyrille Dion, or Alfredo de Oro?
Who was the greatest proposition gambler? … “Titanic” Thompson or “Minnesota Fats”?
Who invented “english,” draw (backspin) and the massé? … François Mingaud, John Carr, Mike Massey or Efren “the Magician” Reyes?
Who was the first person to mention billiards? … Anacharsis, William Shakespeare, Cleopatra, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, Charles Cotton or Abbe McGeoghegan?
Who was the first person to spell “billiards” the modern way? … John Florio, Dr. Samuel Johnson, or the creators of the Oxford English Dictionary?
Who was the father of American pool? … Michael Phelan, George Washington, Ben Franklin, Lafayette, or Ralph Greenleaf?
Who was the best billiards and pool player of all time? … Harold Worst, Willie Hoppe, Alfredo de Oro, Johnny Layton, Willie Mosconi, Mike Sigel, Earl Strickland, or Efren Reyes?
Who was a famous “pool nut”? … Shakespeare, Mary Queen of Scots, King James I, Mozart, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon, Josephine, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, Wild Bill Hickok, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Vincent Van Gogh, Charles Darwin, Queen Victoria, Pope Pius IX, Teddy Roosevelt, Neville Chamberlain, Al Capone, Babe Ruth, Cap Anson, Jackie Gleason, Paul Newman or Tom Cruise?
The last is a trick question, because they were all nuts for pool!
Another interesting player to consider as the best ever is Albert M. Frey, who was winning nearly every match almost as soon as the first native American pool games had been invented. According to Michael Phelan, the father of American pool, the first national pool championship took place in 1878. Albert Frey the “blonde boy” wonder and darling of the crowds, made his public debut on December 30, 1880. He won the first professional eight-ball tournament at Republican Hall, NYC, in May 1882. He became the world champion of another new game, fifteen-ball or 61-pool, also in 1882. By 1884, Frey was “almost invariably winning” according to Phelan, while competing against stars like George F. Sutton, James L. Malone, Cyrille “The Bismarck of Billiards” Dion, Alfredo de Oro and Jake “The Wizard” Schaefer. From 1881-1887, Frey won every fifteen-ball championship match or finished second. In 1888, Frey won the first continuous pool (straight pool) tournament, beating Malone in a playoff. In 1889, Frey was tied for first place in the national championship tournament, when he died suddenly of pneumonia. At the time of his death, he had been dominating the American pool scene, whether the game was fifteen-ball, eight-ball or continuous pool. Frey was “widely known as the champion pool player of America,” according to his obit in The New York Times. Malone had a crown delivered to the funeral, a touching tribute since he had been Frey’s greatest and most determined obstacle to the crown.
If we can look northward, another fascinating player is Cyrille Dion, a French-Canadian born in Montreal in 1843. Dion was the billiards champion of Canada in 1865, at age 22, with a high run of 138 and a grand average of 12.76. He won the 1866 Tournament of State and Provincial Champions, again going undefeated with a high run of 127 and a grand average of 11.28. In 1870-1871 he won a series of four-ball championship matches against stars who included the French champion A. P. Rudolphe and Americans Frank Parker and Melvin Foster. Dion won the American four-ball championship in 1873, with a high run of 127 and a grand average of 11.28. He won the straight rail championship in 1875. In 1876 Dion won the four-ball championship by such a wide margin, 1500-392, that The New York Timespredicted there would never be another four-ball championship match. In 1878, Dion won the first American National Championship pool tournament. He died just six months later, at age 35, from severe lung congestion that had plagued him for years. He was the undefeated champion of the first major Canadian billiards tournament, the undefeated champion of the last American four-ball billiards tournament, and the undefeated champion of the first major American pool tournament. He had nerves of steel and was ready, willing and able to play anyone, as reported by the Fort Wayne Daily Gazette on July 18, 1871: “Cyrille Dion has issued a notice in which he challenges anyone in the world to play him a game of three-ball or French carom billiards, the amount of stakes to be not less than five hundred dollar a side. It is thought in billiard circles that an International contest will be the result of this challenge.”
In the modern era, Efren “The Magician” Reyes may well be the best all-around player. Reyes is a master of eight-ball, nine-ball, ten-ball, rotation, one-pocket, straight pool, snooker, 18.1 balkline and three-cushion billiards. And he claimed the richest purse in pool history, $163,172 in the 2001 Tokyo Nine-Ball Championship. But whether he’s better than Worst is a matter of speculation, if you’ll pardon the pun.
A Brief History of Billiards and Pool
But where, how, when and why did billiards originate? Would it surprise you to know that billiards is closely related to golf and croquet? Think about it … Why was pool table cloth historically green? Because grass is green. Why the term “bank shots”? Because billiard table “banks” (now more commonly called rails) resembled river banks. Why were the pockets of early billiard tables called “hazards,” as on a golf course? Because billiards originated as an outdoor ball-and-stick game related to croquet and golf. This “ground billiards” game later migrated to indoor tables in England, Scotland and France, probably due to long periods of inclement northern European weather (i.e., cold, damp and dismal). We know the game is truly ancient because it depicted in works of medieval art. For instance the woodcut engraving below, circa the 1600s, was based on a medieval tapestry commissioned by the St. Lo Monastery of France, circa the 1500s. The images on this page will help us see and understand the evolution of billiards from an outdoor game played with cudgels, to an indoor game played with maces with tapering cues (the French word queue means “tail”), to the modern games we call billiards and pool.
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