Pool glossary
Life
The British name for a strike. Same thing, counted upward.
What it means
A life is one of the chances you start a Killer game with — normally three. Lose them all and you are out. Functionally identical to a strike, counted from the other direction: Americans count strikes up to three, British and Irish players count lives down from three.
Where the word comes from
Pub game vocabulary, shared with darts and arcade machines. Wikipedia describes Killer as a game in which "each player is assigned a set number of lives and takes one shot per inning to attempt to pot a ball, or else lose a life".
How it sounds at a table
"How many lives has she got left?" "One. She's shooting for her life here."
What it means in a three-strikes night
Worth knowing because the variant rules are almost always written in terms of lives rather than strikes — "pot the black, gain a life" is the standard phrasing, and it means subtract one from your strike count. If you are reading rules from a UK source, translate as you go.
The mistake people make
Mixing the two counts on the same scoresheet. If half the board shows strikes taken and half shows lives left, somebody will be eliminated an entire turn early and nobody will be able to prove it.
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.
- 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.
- Killer
- The British and Irish name for three-strikes pool. A pub pool game in which each player has a set number of lives, takes one shot per turn, and loses a life for failing to pot.
- 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
Life 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.