Pool glossary
Call shot
Naming the ball and the pocket before you shoot.
What it means
In a call-shot game you must state which ball is going into which pocket. Anything else that drops is spotted back up and your turn ends. Ten-ball, straight pool and bank pool are call-shot; most bar eight-ball is not.
Where the word comes from
Formalised in American tournament rules to remove luck from the game.
How it sounds at a table
"Eight, corner." "Which corner?" "That one. Pointing counts."
What it means in a three-strikes night
Almost never used, and for good reason. Calling shots in a twenty-player rotation adds a verbal step to four hundred shots and creates an adjudication question on a good proportion of them. If your crowd is very strong and the night is ending too quickly, calling shots is one way to make a single turn harder — but it will slow the night down noticeably.
The mistake people make
Half-calling. Either every shot is called or none is; "you only have to call it if it is not obvious" guarantees an argument about what was obvious.
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.
- Slop
- A ball that goes in by accident. Slop is any pot you did not intend — a ball that rattles in off two cushions, a combination you did not see, the wrong ball dropping while you were aiming at another.
- Bank
- An object ball played off a cushion before it drops. A bank shot sends the object ball into one or more cushions on its way to the pocket.
- Strike
- A missed turn. Three of them and you are out. In three-strikes pool, a strike is what you collect when your turn ends without a ball going in a pocket.
Where it comes up
Call shot 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.