Bottle Pool

 

Bottle Pool is a Pool variant played with three balls and a leather or plastic bottle.

The game is played similar to Cowboy Pool in that points are scored for pocketing the balls and also caroming the cue-ball off of the object balls.

Bottle Pool adds the bottle as a new scoring objective, which is scored whenever it is truck with the cue-ball with a carom shot.

To my mind, it feels a bit like a mix between Cowboy Pool and Skomar.

Materials & Setup

To play Bottle Pool you need

• A Pool Table
• 3 balls: the cue-ball, the yellow 1-ball, and the blue 2-ball.
• A plastic or leather (or any non-brittle material) shake bottle

To set up the game, place the bottle neck down on the centre spot (here represented with a magenta circle), the 1-ball against the foot-end cushion in front of the left diamond, and the 2-ball against the foot-end cushion in front of the right diamond.

Here's an image courtesy of Wikipedia to show the setup in perspective:

The Game

The aim of the game is to hit 31 points exactly.

Overshooting 31 sets your score to however many points you overshot by.
Think of it like a clock face, overshooting 12 gets you right back around.

Structure

The game, like most varieties of billiards, is played in innings. That is to say, the active player stays active as long as they make a legal scoring shot.

The Break

The cue-ball starts in the kitchen, the area behind the middle diamond at the head-end of the table. The aim is then to hit any of the two object balls

Scoring

• Pocket the 1-ball for 1 point
• Pocket the 2-ball for 2 points
• Hit both object balls with the cue ball for 1 point
• Carom the cue-ball off one or both object balls and into the bottle for 5 points
• Manage the flip the bottle upright after doing a carom shot for an automatic win

The most points you can earn in a single shot is 9 by hitting both object balls with the cue-ball, pocketing them both, and hitting the bottle.

After reaching 31 points exactly, the player must announce this out loud before the next player takes their shot or else the score is reset to 0.

After the bottle is knocked over, it is put upright as close to where it landed as possible. If it is not possible to turn the bottle upright, or if the bottle was knocked off the table, it is instead returned to the centre spot. If that spot is occupied, it instead goes to the head spot. If the head spot and centre spots are both occupied, it instead goes to the foot spot. If all three spots are occupied, the bottle remains off the table until a spot clears.

Similar to Snooker, English Billiards, and Danish Pin Billiards, any object ball potted is re-spotted to its original starting location.
In Bottle Pool however, the 1-ball is always re-spotted before the 2-ball. This matters in case any of the spots are blocked.

Fouls

Upon making a foul, the active player's inning immediately ends and they lose any and all points gained in that inning plus one.

All the things you'd expect to be a foul in standard pocket billiards is a foul here in addition to the following:

• The cue ball fails to touch an object ball.
• The cue ball touches the bottle before contacting an object ball.
• The bottle is knocked over by an object ball.
• An object ball is pocketed on the same stroke as an illegal shot.

However, it is not a foul to knock over the bottle with an object ball if an object ball was pocketed in the same shot. In that case the inning simply ends.