Pool Accessories

When you are playing pool off-line, does your bridge hand often get too sweaty to grip? Does your glasses frame disturb you from seeing the full picture? Lucky for you, greater minds have found solutions to these issues.

Pool Gloves

Wearing gloves while playing pool often feels awkward and makes it difficult on the bridge hand, on the other hand, pun not intended, bare hands tend to get too sweaty, and the result is a chain reaction that starts with the cue stick slide and ends with a miss. Nancy Cote special "ungloves" or "finger slides" were designed to prevent such occurrences. This unique pool accessory is made of breathable fabric and it covers only the part of the hand in touch with the cue at a closed or an open bridge, i.e. the middle and the index fingers, the web between them and the thumb. The pool finger slides come in 4 different sizes and 4 colors, and they are priced at 15$ a pair.

Pool Glasses

Being a bespectacled pool player is not easy: when aiming the glasses slip down your nose, when trying to peep at the cue ball above the lenses, a blurry image of the pool table appears in front of your eyes. So, if you don't want to wear contact lenses or look like Dennis Taylor, special billiard eyeglasses can solve this problem. There are several products designed especially to deal with short sighted pool players. Most of them offer more or less the same thing: undersized frame, large spectacles (usually start from the middle of the forehead all the way down to the middle of the nose), higher bridge and those handle extensions to protect the glasses from falling or moving out of place (as in children's glasses).

Billiard Players Mental Injuries

Though billiard is one of the safest sports, professional pool and snooker players are not 100% bullet proof. Not long ago I mentioned the Repetitive Strain Injury, known as RSI, the most common pool injury, which also attacks people with keyboard attached to their fingertips. And in an amazing coincidence I read about the mental injuries typical to snooker players.

The World Snooker Championship, which ended yesterday with the triumph of Ronnie "The Rocket" O'sullivan, drew millions of viewers mainly from the UK and China. So while the home viewers were fascinated to O'Sullivan, or whoever was playing at the moment clearing the table, his match opponent had to do the same thing. Or in the Telegraph's words: "…the mental strain of being forced to sit powerlessly through your opponent's century break can scarcely be underestimated. Protocol demands that you have to sit there and watch it… Plugging yourself into an iPod, or reading a newspaper, would probably be frowned upon…"

It is not surprising why top ranked snooker players (O'Sullivan among them) tend to suffer from clinical depression, while others develop drugs and alcohol dependency.

But that's nothing comparing to the comment committed by one Wilson, who witnessed, a rare but apparently true, snooker physical injury: "Playing a shot, on a rather old table, his hand ran along the side of the table and a large splinter of wood came off and was embeded between his thumb and forefinger. He did miss the pot."

OUCH! THAT HURTS!!!