Pool glossary
Three strikes
The format: one shot a turn, three misses and you are out.
What it means
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. The last player standing wins the pot.
Where the word comes from
The American bar name. The same game is called Killer in British and Irish pubs, where it is documented as a folk variant of straight pool.
How it sounds at a table
"What are we playing?" "Three strikes, five dollars, we start at eight."
What it means in a three-strikes night
It is the best bar tournament format there is for one specific reason: it scales. A bracket with twenty-four people needs five rounds and knocks half the room out in the first twenty minutes. Three strikes keeps every one of those twenty-four people in the room, with a turn coming round every few minutes, for an hour or more.
The mistake people make
Allowing late entries. It feels generous and it is structurally unfair — a player joining at rack four starts on zero strikes against people carrying two.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Life
- The British name for a strike. Same thing, counted upward. A life is one of the chances you start a Killer game with — normally three.
- Rotation
- Two meanings: the order of play, and a rule that you hit the lowest ball first. In a multi-player game, the rotation is the running order — who shoots after whom, and how it wraps round.
Where it comes up
Three strikes 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.