Pool glossary
Dry break
A break that pockets nothing.
What it means
A dry break is a legal break shot that fails to pocket a single ball. The rack is open, the table is spread, and you have nothing to show for it.
Where the word comes from
Common across cue sports. "Dry" in the sense of empty — the same sense as a dry hole in drilling.
How it sounds at a table
"Dry." "Does that cost him?" "No, break's free."
What it means in a three-strikes night
This is the rule the owner of this site plays and the one we default to: the break is free. You break, and then you take your shot. A dry break costs nothing, because the breaker is doing work for the player after them — opening a tight rack so somebody else can pocket from it. Wikipedia lists exactly this as a common Killer variant: "failure to pocket a ball on the break shot does not cost a life, in which case the shooter shoots again".
The mistake people make
Playing the break as a free shot but forgetting that the shot after it is not. The breaker gets two strokes and one chance; they still take a strike if the second one misses.
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.
- Break
- The opening shot that scatters the rack. The break is the first shot on a fresh rack.
- 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.
- Rack
- Both the triangle and the balls arranged in it. A rack is the frame used to set the balls up, and also the arrangement itself — "a new rack" means a fresh set of fifteen.
- Three strikes
- The format: one shot a turn, three misses and you are out. A multi-player elimination format in which players take one shot each in a fixed rotation, lose a life for failing to pocket, and are eliminated at three.
Where it comes up
Dry break 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.