Green has been the traditional color of billiard cloth for over four centuries. Blue has been the traditional color for billiard chalk for about 100 years. Today, chalk and cloth both come in literally dozens of colors, but green cloth and blue chalk remain the most popular choices.
In a recent interview with Yonhap News Agency, World No. 1 ranked Torbjorn Blomdahl declared South Korea as a 3-cushion billiards utopia. With five World Union of Billiards (UMB) World Championships, nine European titles and 43 World Cup wins, Blomdahl is regarded as one of the greatest carom billiards players of his generation. He now lives near Stuttgart, Germany, but the three-time UMB Player of the Year feels South Korea is his real home.
Every room has this guy, the player who habitually scores the inadvertent shot. Usually a banger, sometimes a beginner, this guy specializes in the kiss, the double kiss, the long back up, the wrong rail that somehow turns out right. He plays a shot one way that misses and scores coming back. He plays a two-way shot that misses both ways and someway scores a third way. At West End Arcade and Billiards in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a room that is now closed, that guy was Mike D’Martino. And after years of torment, the 3-C players named a lucky shot after him, a “Mikey D.,” they would say. As in, “We were hill-hill, and then he made a Mikey D.”