This is how people plays billiard in the world

Billiard has no frontiers. It is played anywhere, in very different ways. Every culture has adapted this universal game to their liking. Americans brought solids and stripes, French brought caroms, English brought Blackball or Snooker, Spanish brought chapolin or Russians the tangle of white balls. Any billiard player may already know these modalities because these are the most practiced. So today we will not speak of them, but the humble and simple billiard practiced in other corners of the planet, more humble and simple. That is also billiards.

Picture of Sankara at Shan: http://www.beontheroad.com/2013/04/burmese-billiards.html

About 10,000 kilometers of Spain, in Myanmar, Burma, people play without cue or balls. The table is a wooden board, regardless of size, with pockets at each corner. Instead of balls, they play with colored chips. A red chip (or sometimes a green one) serves as a “cue ball”, and their fingers are their particular cue. They play with their hands as in Spain we would play marbles. Although it is difficult to know the details of the regulation, the goal of the game is obvious: pocket the colored balls, usually blue and yellow, in the pockets. In the following video you can see how to play Burmese billiards.

But in Burma, people not only play billiards with chips. There is at least another equally or more curious modality that mixes traditional pool with a deck of Poker. It is not easy to find information about this game on the internet, but this magnificent photo gallery from the photographer Ruben Salgado takes us to Yangon, where this mode is practiced. Billiards, poker, tobacco and money: the merger is explosive.

As explosive is the quality of the Philippines billiard players, the best pool players in the world. As we relate in The Billartist, his humble and hardworking nature, the fact of playing from childhood to pay for their food or have so great legends so close, has allowed them to reach the top of this sport. In the archipelago of the 7,000 islands, people play very well American Pool and the keep playing Pinoy (Philippine adjective) billiards.

The game is very similar to Burmese. One of the few differences is that Philippines do play with a cue. With it they have to get the chips that Burmese get with their hands. Before becoming national heroeas, Efren Reyes or Francisco Bustamante also began to play Pinoy pool as these children do. Here is a video showing how to play this type of pool.

This journey around the world of billiard deserves ending up in the cradle of humanity, Africa. African children also enjoy this game even if they have to made the tables, cues and balls by themselve.

Sometimes they prepare a wooden board with holes and sometimes they play directly on the floor, drawing the rectangle and making holes for the pockets in the ground. A tree branch is the cue using marbles as balls. They play and enjoy as much or more than we do. And without Aramith balls or Predator shafts. Long life Billiards. Also this one.

Picture of Miranda Krueger at Uganda: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/161074124142952460/