According to my dictionary, "iconoclastic," means assailing of cherished beliefs. This is just the word that comes to mind on reading this book. It is said of Willie Smith, that, on being asked which of the rules of snooker he did not like, he replied, "all of them." Here, Geza Gazdag, a noted exponent of the European game, is saying much the same thing of English billiards. For good measure he throws in a critique of playing conditions, cloth, cushions, balls, cues, of the "Establishment," and of the way the game is analysed in the literature of billiards. Just incidentally, he is a master of close cannons in all forms and has in addition coached the former snooker champion Joe Johnson. These last, inconvenient facts make it necessary to give his book more than the cursory reading and the outright condemnation which the above-listed heresies clearly call for! Is the book worth what it costs? Judged solely on the basis of length, it has to be. Although the book is only some 170 pages long compared with, for instance, the 200 of Smith's, "Match-winning Billiards," or the 300-odd pages of Newman's, "Advanced Billiards," it contains some 100,000 words against the 50,000 and 75,000 of the other two. It has roughly the same number of diagrams as the other two quoted books put together. The book, as I discovered, is worth the trouble reading. It seems to owe little to its predecessors and so one is seldom bothered by echoes of books one may have read before. So when Gazdag writes about the theory of aim for pots or in-offs, or about how to play close cannons, he is giving us his own ideas, many of which don't seem to have occurred to previous authors. The serious player of the game is thus bound to come across viewpoints which are novel to him, leading him to new insights, improving his game. On these grounds alone rests a good argument for reading this book.
Readers of the book will find therein a theory of the mechanics of the game (albeit one with which The Academy of Quantitative Billiards is not always happy) and a thought-provoking exposition of the practicalities of stroke-making (an area which The Academy sensibly leaves to others.) There will be few who will learn nothing at all from the sections on close cannons and the various forms of the masse. The section on in-off play are also of interest for their originality, and they complement J. P. Mannock's fine exposition of such play of 90 years ago. As hinted above, this book is about rather more than how to play billiards. Any game of antiquity likely to have features which can be labelled anachronistic, is ripe for change. Thus Gazdag urges the displacement of napped cloth by the napless type used in his native game (and the writer thinks that the average league player, who every other week in the season tries to cope with a table very different from his home table would welcome such an innovation; after all, Lindrum made his record break on such a cloth. The problem is that an alternative use for large numbers of bales of West of England cloth would be a prerequisite for such a change. Gazdag recognises this, and has hard words to say about the conservatism of the game's legislators in this and many another matter. This all makes for interest for the reader. The text is also interspersed with asides - humorous - and at times a little risque - anecdotal, which all adds to its readability. It is a book not to be overlooked, by both the player it assists and the establishment it castigates.