Cowboy pool, sometimes just called cowboy, is a hybrid pool game combining elements of English billiards through an intermediary game, with more standard pocket billiards characteristics. The game employs only four balls, the cue ball and three numbered balls, the 1, 3 and 5. It is played to 101 points, with points being awarded for a host of different shot types.
The parent game of cowboy pool, English billiards, is itself a hybrid of three pred...
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Cowboy pool, sometimes just called cowboy, is a hybrid pool game combining elements of English billiards through an intermediary game, with more standard pocket billiards characteristics. The game employs only four balls, the cue ball and three numbered balls, the 1, 3 and 5. It is played to 101 points, with points being awarded for a host of different shot types.
The parent game of cowboy pool, English billiards, is itself a hybrid of three predecessor billiards games – the winning game, the losing game and the carambole game (an early form of straight rail) – and dates to approximately 1800 in England. There are a number of pocket billiard games directly descended from English billiards, including bull dog, scratch pool, thirty-one pool and thirty-eight. Thirty-eight is the intermediary game from which cowboy is directly derived. This precursor game was first reported on in The New York Times on January 21, 1885: 'there is a new billiards game called "thirty-eight." It appears to...
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