Sure, the Chandlers deserve better in this deal, and I hope they find a new spot - Jim Chandler says they’re looking for leads right now - because you want the folks who are also behind mainstays like Sportsman’s Grille and Gerst Haus to succeed. It’s a point of contention for Jim Chandler, who told me Fulcher had promised it to them for years. Chandler is mad enough to use words like "hijack" in describing how they lost the space they’ve occupied for 47 years. If you want to be pissed, be pissed at Fulcher and Parkes, but ultimately they’re the ones who bought that land, sank millions into it and kept it from becoming a grocery store or a Starbucks or any of the half-dozen bad proposals that were floated in the past 20 years. "We want to create a bar that preserves the history and the spirit of Melrose Billiards," Ray says. Whether or not they win the US Open title and the champion’s paycheck of $40,000, the Filipino pair will make history.

When the new place opens by the end of the year, there will be a new ventilation system and flood control to keep it dry when it rains hard (which is good, because even when you paint those walls, it keeps the smell down only for a few days). If you’ve stepped into a billiards showroom or even done some online browsing for pool tables, you’ve probably noticed that there are an overwhelming number of felt colors to choose from. Even though he grew up here and is as Old Nashville as you can find - his mom, Gayle Ray, was sheriff in the ’90s - he’s apparently the reason the city is going straight to hell right now. That means along with all the good things - great high-end dining, a booming craft-beer scene, a huge variety of eating and drinking options - there are going to be some casualties along the way. Cheap beer, a good jukebox and decent entertainment - that’s how a dive bar that’s closing gets romanticized as a proxy fight between Old Nashville and New Nashville.

It often gets ignored. Getting the brightness of the light right will help you create the right ambiance for your room while reducing glare and shadows on the felt during a game. We had a letter from a billiard saloon proprietor in Colorado, mentioning this fact and saying he did not care so much about it, but that instantly every man in the room pulled his gun. "It would be a travesty to change too much when you’re dealing with a 70-year-old bar. Blackball was chosen because it is less ambiguous ("eight-ball pool" is too easily confused with the international standardized "eight-ball"), and blackball is globally standardized by an International Olympic Committee-recognized governing body, the World Pool-Billiard Association (WPA); meanwhile, its ancestor, eight-ball pool, is largely a folk game, like North American bar pool, and to the extent that its rules have been codified, they have been done so by competing authorities with different rulesets. I have no idea, but I believe Austin Ray, who will run the Melrose Billiards successor, when he says the new place is not turning it into some tiki bar.

On the other hand, what is billiards you don’t want to hang your lights too high because you run the risk of your players being blinded whenever they look up slightly to check their shot. Ask the regulars and the staff, who are loyal and don’t want to see the place screwed up, and they understand what’s going on here. But some feared (perhaps erroneously) that ivory’s popularity was going to lead to a shortage of the material, as elephants would be hunted to near extinction. This material, patented as Celluloid and later used for artificial dental plates, was the first mass-market synthetic plastic, launching what became known as the Age of Plastics. When you played billiards during the early days of plastic, you took your life into your hands. Additionally, practicing basic shots and learning the fundamentals of ball control will set a strong foundation for your billiards journey. It explodes so rapidly that it doesn’t typically set anything on fire, but it can burst into flame and make a loud bang.