There is no good billiard without a good cloth

It is the billiard’s field, what will mark the tempo. If it is artificial, the ball won’t roll smoothly and won’t rebound naturally; if it is overly watered, it will run too fast; if it has been cut very high and it dry, it will slow down. As in a football field, one of the fundamental parts of a pool table is its cloth. So today we analyze the necessary measures that cloths must have for every modality and each table dimension, in addition to other keys on this material that will serve you if you are about to upholster your table.

The game zone determines the amount of cloth needed. In the following table we see those dimensions for each type of table:

Manufacturers and distributors provide the cloth with a fixed width (marked with an asterisk in the table: normally 165 cm for 7 feet and 8 feet tables, and 198 cm for carm and snooker tables, but can also be 160, 180, 190 or 195 cm). The length varies, depending on customer needs and, above all, the size of cloth needed to cover the playing area and the cushions of the table.

From the cloth portion acquired, the cover for the rectangle of the table and the six cushions (pool or snooker) or four cushions (carom) must be obtained. Although logically a billiard has four cushions (two long and two short), when upholstering tables with pockets, cushions are counted as six because central pockets split the two long cushions into four parts. The following chart from Simonis, the Belgian cloth brand that has become a benchmark, serves as a guide when cutting the cloth.

Most cloths are made from wool and a percentage of nylon or polyester, so that they can be stretched and be durable. The way the fabric is woven, the wool quality and the manufacturing process determine how good or bad the cloth will be. That is, if it will be more or less heavy and if it will make the balls run more or less. Depending on the material handling, there are two types of clothes: those made of wool (woolen cloth) and those made of combed wool (worsted wool). The former, thicker, heavier and slower, are what we usually see in recreational tables, while the latter, thinner, faster and also more expensive, are the ones used in competition. In this second type of cloth, it is crucial that the interlaced or braided of the fabric is perfect so that eventually no knots altering the direction of the balls are created.

In the cloth market there are many brands and different grades, depending on whether it is needed to upholster a competition table, a club table or a bar table. The price range goes usually from 20€ up to 300€ per meter of fabric. Simonis is the leading brand in the most important tournaments of Pool with worsted wool cloths, Strachan dominates the world Snooker circuit and the Catalan brand Gorina dominates carom competitions. But there are many other manufacturers of “billiard’s grass”, as HRD, Andy’s Buffalo, Proform, Velocity Pro, Championship or West of England.

Write a comment about your experiences when upholstering a billiard table and how often do you change the cloths.