Different Types of Billiard Balls

Every set of billiard balls is made in the same basic way. They are all round, and made of some variation of a plastic compound. The earliest pool balls were made from wood, with ivory being the next most common material used. This stopped, however, when people realized that they were killing all the elephants off because only 8 balls could be made from the tusks of a single elephant.

Celluloid was used for awhile, but it can sometimes be harmful, so now different chip-resistant plastic compounds are used. Billiard sports experts have their favorite brand of balls to use. The untrained person, however, will probably be happy with any brand of ball. Each billiard game is played with a different size and number of balls.

Each game of billiards uses different billiard equipment. The game that uses the biggest set of balls is Carom. This game only uses three or four balls, and they are red, white, and white with a dot. There are several games that can be played with these balls, and they are usually played on pocket-less billiard tables. American billiards pool uses the next biggest ball. All of the American games use pocket games, and there are 16 of them. The first 7 balls are solid colors, and the last 8 are stripes.

The cue ball is always white. Some games use all the balls, but others use only 10. The next biggest sized game balls are used in British billiards, which is sometimes called blackball. These balls are 16 again, with half red and half yellow, and a white cue ball and a black 8 ball.