Glossary of cue sports terms Glossary of cue sports terms The following is a glossary of traditional English-language terms used in the three overarching cue sports disciplines: "carom (or carambole) billiards" referring to the various games played on a billiard table without ; "pool (pocket billiards)", which denotes a host of games played on a table with six pockets; and "snooker", played on a large pocket table, and which has a sport culture unto itself distinct from pool. There are also hybrid pocket/carom games such as English billiards. The term "" is sometimes used to refer to all of the cue sports, to a specific
Billiard table increase difficulty. The amount of (trimmed underside of the rubber cushion's protruding at the pocket opening), if any, has a strong effect on how easily a ball is accepted by the pocket (the ""). On snooker and English billiards tables, the pocket entries are rounded, while pool tables have sharp "". This affects how accurate shots need to be to get into a pocket, and how fast they can be when not dead-on, including shots that run along and against a cushion, making snooker more difficult to play than pool. According to the WPBSA official rule book, "the pocket openings