Pool glossary
Slop
A ball that goes in by accident.
What it means
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. Whether it counts is the single most house-specific rule in pool.
Where the word comes from
From sloppy. Rarely said with admiration.
How it sounds at a table
"Does slop count?" "In here it does."
What it means in a three-strikes night
It counts, and it should. Three strikes is not a call-shot game in any common version, and that is deliberate: in a format where a miss costs you a life, taking lucky pots away makes the game meaner and slower without making it more skilful. The lucky roll that saves somebody on two strikes is one of the better moments of the night.
The mistake people make
Announcing "no slop" to look serious and then having to adjudicate every ambiguous pot for the rest of the night, in a bar, with no referee.
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.
- Call shot
- Naming the ball and the pocket before you shoot. In a call-shot game you must state which ball is going into which 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.
- 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
Slop 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.