AD INFINITUM

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 42, 12 May 1927, Page 9

AD INFINITUM

BUT NOT FOR LONG? BILLIARDS MADE EASY Billiards have been made easy—but not too easy. In fact, to the small fry they remain quite as hard as ever, but the champions have developed a patch of scoring that has been as sensational as it is likely to be short-lived. This has been by means of the shot described as the pendulum-cannon. Know it? It consists of persuading the balls, by a series of nursery-can-nons into a certain position in the corner of the table. That is the hard part—in fact, the two New Zealand players capable of doing it more or less frequently are McConachie and M. Donohue, the latter being the Auckland expert, usually located at Broadway.

The art of preparing for easy times and long scores consists of getting the balls well into the corner, almost as near as the balls were in the old anchor cannon shot. This being accomplished the player sets out to just tap them, using the cushion constantly to bring them back to position, his cue ball going back and forward across the corner indefinitely'. The trouble is that the cue-ball wears a track in the cloth after a few hundred times. Present ruling provides for an indirect cannon after each 25 nursery cannons, but whether the new cannon comes under this definition it is difficult to say. Any alteration will possibly be in the direction of making the nursery cannon rules apply and varying the definition of indirect cannon, so that it will be played ball-cushion-ball instead of cushion-ball-ball as at present.