Of the many suggestions that have been made for the restriction of specific strokes at billiards that brought forward and publicly demonstrated during the past month by J. P. Mannock, an experienced and popular billiardist tutor and proprietor, is not the least interesting. It consists in the substitution, so far as the losing hazard phase of the game is concerned, of a triangular space, with bases of 11½ inches, for the familiar D area, and the idea is to have an apex of this triangle at the central spot of the baulk line, thus leaving an increasing margin for the placing of the cue ball in hand when it is retired laterally. Two test games, with the table thus marked, were played in the middle of the month at the Hotel Victoria, and it was at once seen by the critical and technically-expert company present that the losing hazard game was rendered immensely more difficult by the restriction that had been imposed. Another thing was also noted, and that was that the players practically ignored the triangle and confined themselves largely to cannons and winning hazards, and mainly to those forming the winner-cannon movement at the top of the table.
Here is seen at once a prime weakness in the proposed restriction, another and even worse aspect of which is the altogether heterodox class of game that an adoption of the triangle system would bring about. Top of the table play, created to defeat spot stroke restriction, would be practised and performed even more than at present and might eventually be carried to such a pitch of perfection that, with the D area regarded as a thing to be dreaded, a new game of billiards might eventually come to be established that only required a top-end table measuring six feet by three feet for its exploitation.
A still more deplorable result would be the upsetting of all orthodox) and system in the game as we at present know it. Not for nothing was the D devised in its present form and size. It is the grand base of safe retreat and. renewed attack and it is scientifically perfect for all exigencies of the game. Unless a losing hazard at any part of the table, either from play or from hand, has been badly played, there 5s a certain stroke to follow from the D, which, as in the case of artillery placed on a hill, commands and sweeps the field. From either of the three spots the firing takes place and for more accurate adjustments the intervening spaces can be used at will Then there is the area behind, by the judicious utilization of which any necessary increased rotation of the cue ball can be ensured. But the grand utility of the D space is its latitude, which could not, in our opinion, be either restricted or enlarged by so much as an inch without seriously impairing the science and versatility of the game.
Perhaps all of our readers have not given much thought to the strictly mathematical principles on which the playing surface of the billiard table is marked out. To begin with, the D occupies longitudinally exactly one-third of the baulk line, and lines produced from the end spots to the top of the table divide the whole of the playing surface outside baulk into three equal compartments, the central of which, almost up to the billiard spot, is a useful half-ball losing hazard area By the triangle method it is proposed to make this central area difficult instead of easy, and if this applied only to the immediate stroke there might be something to say for the innovation. But what would be most seriously assailed and injured would be the present beautiful and subtle ramification of positional play from the D, which follows fixed mathematical laws and affords an unerring example of cause and effect. There would, to be sure, still be cause and effect in operation from the triangular space, but they would be different causes and different effects, involving long distance run-throughs or fine shots and other more or less speculative strokes which few professional players would feel inclined to resort to in the present game unless very seriously pressed indeed. At nearer range, too, the various after-happenings that are now diagnosed at a glance would be unproducible, and the whole spirit and genius of what has come to be recognised as "the game" would be injured beyond repair.
No, this triangle method will not do, nor will anything do in English billiards that seeks in any way to modify the present standard and classical playing proportions and conditions.
For "cramp" games, in lieu of conceding points as between player and player, let such a device be employed if desired, or let the equally disconcerting, and still simpler, use of the three baulk spots alone when attempting losing hazards from hand be adopted. When a good player chooses deliberately to penalize himself there is any one of a dozen things that he can elect to do instead of giving the start in points. He can play left-handed; score no break lower than double figures or 20; ignore any given pocket or pockets; limit any given sequence; or in one way or another restrict his chances and multiply those of his opponent as much as he chooses. But this is a radically different thing from organically changing the playing conditions of a time-honoured pastime and imposing those conditions, willy-nilly, upon all the hundreds of thousands of cueists of all shades of efficiency.