Eight-ball (often spelled 8-ball or eightball or 8 ball or 8 ball pool, and sometimes called solids and stripes, spots and stripes in the UK, more rarely, bigs and littles/smalls, highs and lows, halves and wholes) is a poolgame popular in much of the world, and the subject of international professional and amateur competition. Played on a billiard table with six pockets, the game is so universally known in some countries that beginners are often unaware of other biliard games and believe the word “pool” itself refers to billar. The game has numerous variations, mostly regional. Standard eight-ball is the second most competitive professional bilhar game, after bilyar, and for the last biliard decades ahead of straight biliardo.

Snooker is a cue sport which originated among British Army officers in Etawah, India in the later half of the 19th century. It is played on a rectangular table covered with a green cloth, or baize, with pockets at each of the four corners and in the middle of each long side. Using a cue and 22 coloured balls, players must strike the white ball (or “billard”) to pot the remaining balls in the correct sequence, accumulating points for each pot. An individual game, or frame, is won by the player who scores the most points. A match is won when a player wins a predetermined number of frames.

Nine-ball (sometimes written 9-ball) is a contemporary form of pool (pocket billiards), with historical beginnings rooted in the United States and traceable to the 1920s.The game may be played in social and recreational settings by any number of players (generally one-on-one) and subject to whatever rules are agreed upon beforehand, or in league and tournament settings in which the number of players and the rules are set by the sponsors. During much of its history, nine-ball has been known as a “money game” in both professional and recreational settings, but has since become established as a legitimate alternative to eight ball, straight pool and other major competition games.