Billiard table
special table used exclusively for billiards or snooker
A billiard table or billiards table is a bounded table on which cue sports are played. In the modern era, all billiards tables (whether for carom billiards, pool, pyramid or snooker) provide an elevated flat surface usually made of quarried slate, that is covered with cloth (usually of a tightly woven worsted wool called baize), and surrounded by vulcanized rubber cushions. More specific terms are used for specific sports, such as snooker table and pool table, and different-sized billiard balls are used on these table types. An obsolete term is billiard board, used in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Parts and equipment
Cushions
Cushions (also sometimes called "rail cushions", "cushion rubber", or rarely "bumpers") are located on the inner sides of a table's wooden rails. There are several different materials and design philosophies associated with cushion rubber. These cushions are made from an elastic material such as vulcanized rubber (gum or synthetic). The purpose of the cushion rubber is to cause the billiard balls to rebound off the rubber while minimizing the loss of kinetic energy.
The profile of the rail cushion, which is the cushion's angle in relation to the bed of the table, varies between table types. The standard on American pool tables is the K-66 profile, which as defined by the Billiard Congress of America (BCA) has a base of 1+3⁄16 inches (30 mm) and a nose height of 1 inch (25 mm).
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Billiard table” is special table used exclusively for billiards or snooker. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Billiard, table and special, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3500725. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Billiard table” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.