Pool glossary
Foul
Any illegal stroke.
What it means
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.
Where the word comes from
Generic sporting usage, in cue sports since the game had rules at all.
How it sounds at a table
"That's a foul, you never hit a rail."
What it means in a three-strikes night
In a one-shot-per-turn game, the practical effect of most fouls is simply that your turn ended without a ball going down, which was already a strike. The only foul that usually carries an extra penalty is the scratch. That simplicity is a feature: there is no referee in a bar, and a ruleset with one real penalty survives a noisy room better than one with six.
The mistake people make
Calling fouls strictly in a bar night without having announced that you would. If nobody mentioned the "ball must hit a rail" rule before the first break, enforcing it in rack four is a new rule, not a call.
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.
- 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.
- Ball in hand
- Permission to place the cue ball anywhere on the table. After a foul, the incoming player picks the cue ball up and puts it wherever they like.
- 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.
- Safety
- A shot played to leave your opponent with nothing. A safety is a deliberate defensive stroke: rather than trying to pocket a ball, you aim to leave the cue ball somewhere your opponent cannot do anything useful from.
Where it comes up
Foul 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.