Pool glossary
Ball in hand
Permission to place the cue ball anywhere on the table.
What it means
After a foul, the incoming player picks the cue ball up and puts it wherever they like. It is the standard penalty in league eight-ball, nine-ball and ten-ball, and it is a severe one — a strong player with ball in hand will often run out from there.
Where the word comes from
Describes itself: the ball is literally in your hand.
How it sounds at a table
"Foul." "Ball in hand?" "Anywhere you like."
What it means in a three-strikes night
Mostly irrelevant, and that is worth saying. Three strikes is a one-shot game, so handing a player ball in hand would make their turn nearly automatic and remove the point of the penalty. Most houses simply do not use it: a foul costs a strike and the table passes on with the cue ball where it lies.
The mistake people make
Importing league rules wholesale into a bar rotation game. Ball in hand makes sense when a player can run the table; in a one-shot-each format it just rewards the person who fouled last.
Terms that come up alongside it
Written out rather than linked only, because looking up one term usually means you are standing at a table and do not want four more taps.
- Foul
- Any illegal stroke. A foul is a stroke that breaks a rule: scratching, failing to hit the correct ball first, no ball reaching a cushion after contact, touching a ball with anything but the cue tip, or shooting out of turn..
- Scratch
- Pocketing the cue ball, or knocking it off the table. A scratch is the cue ball going down a pocket or leaving the table entirely.
- Head string
- The line across the table you break from behind. An imaginary line across the width of the table through the second diamond from the head rail.
Where it comes up
Ball in hand matters most in three-strikes pool, where a single turn is one shot and the cost of getting something wrong is a life rather than a visit to the table. If you are learning the game, the guide to running a night puts most of this vocabulary in context, and the format pages show which games the term applies to and which it does not.