The definitive work on pool and billiards (National Billiard News) by champion player Robert Byrne Now updated throughout and expanded with new material on strategy in eight- and nine-ball, trick shots, and billiard memorabilia, Byrne's New Standard Book of Pool and Billiards is the classic guide to cue games complete with detailed diagrams and photographs to help improve play at every level."
More than 80 principles of the game, presented with 250-plus precisely scaled illustrations and photographs, offer players of all levels a thorough overview of the fundamentals of 8-ball and 9-ball, including grip and stance, basic shots, position play and strategy, bank and kick shots, and advanced techniques such as carom and jump shots.
Mathematical billiards describe the motion of a mass point in a domain with elastic reflections off the boundary or, equivalently, the behavior of rays of light in a domain with ideally reflecting boundary. From the point of view of differential geometry, the billiard flow is the geodesic flow on a manifold with boundary. This book is devoted to billiards in their relation with differential geometry, classical mechanics, and geometrical optics. Topics covered include variational principles of billiard motion, symplectic geometry of rays of light and integral geometry, existence and nonexistence of caustics, optical properties of conics and quadrics and completely integrable billiards, periodic billiard trajectories, polygonal billiards, mechanisms of chaos in billiard dynamics, and the lesser-known subject of dual (or outer) billiards. The book is based on an advanced undergraduate topics course. Minimum prerequisites are the standard material covered in the first two years of college mathematics (the entire calculus sequence, linear algebra). However, readers should show some mathematical maturity and rely on their mathematical common sense. A unique feature of the book is the coverage of many diverse topics related to billiards, for example, evolutes and involutes of plane curves, the four-vertex theorem, a mathematical theory of rainbows, distribution of first digits in various sequences, Morse theory, the Poincare recurrence theorem, Hilbert's fourth problem, Poncelet porism, and many others. There are approximately 100 illustrations. The book is suitable for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers interested in ergodic theory and geometry. This volume has been copublished with the Mathematics Advanced Study Semesters program at Penn State.
From the bestselling author of "The Miniature Book of Miniature Golf" comes an original gift: a complete miniature, working pool table, plus balls, rack, cue, and bridge, packaged with a 48-page full-color book that explains how to play more than 30 games.
Whether you want to play on the pro tour or just have some fun with America's fastest indoor sport, this book is for you. It gives you: All the rules, as compiled by the experts who play and win by them; Tips for keeping your game on cue; A pocket history of the game and its greats.
Improve your billiard/pool skills by playing Bullseye Billiards!No more need for dull practice drills when you can play against friends and practice at the same time. This billiard training aid is played as a game, so you won't even realize you are working to improve your skills! The shots in Bullseye Billiards are designed for beginning to intermediate players who want to run more balls and win more games.Anyone can pocket a ball, but running racks also requires cue ball positioning. The shots in Bullseye Billiards are designed to help you gain more control of the cue ball through deliberate practice.
Welcome to Byrne's Wonderful World of Pool and Billiards, a medley of instruction and lore from the best-selling authority on billiards technique. Here, clearly explained and illustrated, are tips on improving your pool game ("Three-Shot Planning"), unusual shots, technique in three-cushion billiards ("Handling Tough Leaves", "Kilgore's Opposite 3 System"), and clarification of the games people play (five pins, snooker, box billiards). In his inimitable style, Robert Byrne also entertains with stories, sage advice ("How to Cope with Sore Losers"), and profiles of top players - plus one of an infamous poseur.
'This book offers one of the few places where a collection of results from the literature can be found … The book has an extensive bibliography … It is very nice to have the compendium of results that is presented here.'zbMATHA mathematical billiard is a mechanical system consisting of a billiard ball on a table of any form (which can be planar or even a multidimensional domain) but without billiard pockets. The ball moves and its trajectory is defined by the ball's initial position and its initial speed vector. The ball's reflections from the boundary of the table are assumed to have the property that the reflection and incidence angles are the same. This book comprehensively presents known results on the behavior of a trajectory of a billiard ball on a planar table (having one of the following forms: circle, ellipse, triangle, rectangle, polygon and some general convex domains). It provides a systematic review of the theory of dynamical systems, with a concise presentation of billiards in elementary mathematics and simple billiards related to geometry and physics.The description of these trajectories leads to the solution of various questions in mathematics and mechanics: problems related to liquid transfusion, lighting of mirror rooms, crushing of stones in a kidney, collisions of gas particles, etc. The analysis of billiard trajectories can involve methods of geometry, dynamical systems, and ergodic theory, as well as methods of theoretical physics and mechanics, which has applications in the fields of biology, mathematics, medicine, and physics.
This book is a complete guide to learning billiards, with instructions on all related aspects from holding a cue to mastering difficult shots. With simple instructions and a wealth of invaluable tips, this book will be of considerable utility to beginners and amateur players and would make for a fantastic addition to any bookshelf. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new introduction on snooker, pool, and billiards.
