A wonderful original Sams bar billiards table, fully restored and sold with its original slate and timer clock.

Bar Billiards, a traditional English pub sport, is a cue game played by potting balls into holes with varying points values. The player with the most points at the end of the game is the winner.

All shots are taken from one end of the table making the game ideal for small locations.

It's called Bar Billiards, not because of it's association with bars, but because a wooden bar drops after a timed limit preventing anymore balls becoming available for use. When this happens the balls remaining on the table and in the tray are potted and the game is over.

The game is played with seven white balls, and one red ball which counts as double points.

It isn't known how Bar Billiards originated but in the early 1930's an Englishman called David Gill observed a game called Russian Billiards (Billard Russe) being played in Belgium. He convinced the English manufacturer Jelkes to make a version of the game which he called Bar Billiards. Pubs seemed keen to buy Bar Billiards tables and other manufacturers soon got in on the act, including Sams Brothers, Burroughes & Watts and Riley.

The first pub Bar Billiards league was created in Oxford in 1936 and shortly afterwards leagues sprang up in Reading, Canterbury and High Wycombe. Eventually, a governing body was formed called the All-England Bar Billiards Association which supervises the game across 18 counties, mainly in the South of England. In the Channel Islands they have their own governing bodies with slightly different rules and slightly different size tables.

The game was first introduced to Jersey in 1933 when George Jeune, the landlord of the Caeserea, imported four tables and by 1964 there were over fifty tables with competitions being organised by two associations, the National Bar Billiards League and the Jersey License Victuallers League. In the seventies the game started to lose popularity with players lured away by the emergence of American nine ball pool. The two leagues amalgamated in 1980 and the league now consists of some two-hundred registered players.

In Jersey the league rules allow a game to last between fifteen and seventeen minutes, in England games are allowed to last up to nineteen minutes. It is possible for the starting player to play for the entirety of the time available (if he's good enough) , not allowing his opponent to get a shot. This is called running the clock out and can result in some large breaks.

These tables are increasingly rarely found in such good condition and with their original working timer clocks.

Please contact our showroom now for more information or to arrange a viewing