Talk:One-pocket

Rule changes
2006 Rule changes at, they will be in effect until 2008. 70.111.251.203 03:14, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Copyright violation?
After I wikified this article I realized it looked almost like a cut and paste. I can find very similar content here but it's not exactly the same. -- Heptite (T)   (C)   (@)  14:36, 16 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Clearly no longer the case. Marking this "Resolved". &mdash;  SMcCandlish &#91;talk&#93; &#91;contrib&#93; ツ 12:23, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Please review: Consensus and consistency needed on spelling to prevent ambiguity &amp; confusion
Especially for nine-ball but also for eight-ball, one-pocket, and even snooker, etc., I firmly think we need to come to, and as editors enforce in article texts, a consensus on spelling conventions and implement it consistently throughout all of the cue sports Wikepedia articles. I advocate (and herein attempt to justify) a system of standardized spellings, based on 1) general grammar rules; 2) basic logic; and 3) disambiguation.

This is a draft submission to the active editor community of billiards-related articles on Wikipedia. It is intended to ultimately end up being something like " Wikipedia:[something:]Billiards/Spelling guidelines", or part of an official Wikipedia cue sports article-shepherding Project, likely it's first documentation output.

Anyway, please help me think this through. The point is not for me to become world famous&trade; for having finally codified billiards terms and united the entire English-speaking world in using them (hurrah). I simply want the articles here on pool and related games to be very consistent in application of some new consensus Wikipedia editing standards about spelling/phrasing of easily confusable billards terms that may be ambiguous to many readers in the absence of that standard.

Compare: That's the super-simple "use case" I make for this proposed nomenclature. If you think that the differentiation didn't cut it please TELL ME, and say how you would improve it.
 * 1) "While 9-ball is a 9-ball game, the 9-ball is the real target; pocket it in a 9-ball run if you have to, but earlier is better." (Huh?)
 * 2) "While nine-ball is a nine ball game, the 9 ball is the real target; pocket it in a nine ball run if you have to, but earlier is better." (Oh, right!)

So, here's the article draft so far (please do not edit it directly! Post on its Discussion page instead; thanks.): User:SMcCandlish/Pool_terms

(PS: This intro text is repeated at the top of it.) &mdash; SMcCandlish &#91;talk&#93; &#91;contrib&#93; ツ 05:33, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Correcting spelling
The original article mostly (though not entirely consistently) used the spelling "One Pocket", which is doubly wrong. It is not a proper (i.e. capitalized) noun - cf. "chess", "football", etc., which we do not call "Chess" or "Football". And it is a compound noun, requiring a hyphen. "One pocket" means "a single pocket of some sort, somewhere", while "one-pocket" indicates "something, such as a game, called 'one-pocket'". Moving article and adjusting redirects to comply (esp. since the "One Pocket" article title actually violates WP article case conventions, too. &mdash; SMcCandlish &#91;talk&#93; &#91;contrib&#93; ツ 13:23, 15 November 2006 (UTC)


 * I submit that given usage, the game is called One Pocket with no hyphen. This is consistent with:
 * All the Accustats match videos
 * All the Accustats instructional videos (except Bill Incardona and he is a functional illiterate)
 * Eddie Robin's books -- which are accepted as THE definte works on the subject
 * —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.131.20.16 (talk • contribs)


 * Random books and videos about pool are not authoritative sources for how/why to hyphenate in English (though they may or may not be authoritative, on a case-by-case basis, about pool). Speaking of "functionally illiterate", here's a hilarious example: Pocket Billiards Position Play for Hi-Runs, Johnny Holiday, Golden Touch, Florida, 1973".  What the fudgecicle is a "Hi-Run"? >;-)  Your beloved Eddie Robin couldn't even agree with himself about how to spell billiards game names.  His first book on carom games, Position Play in Three Cushion Billiards (1983), spells the number out and doesn't hyphenate.  His second does just the opposite of both: 500 Essential Shots of 3-Cushion Billiards (2000).  Hardly a consistent source to cite!  :-)  And it absolutely should not be capitalized as "One Pocket" as you've done above, regardless of the hyphenation issue.  We simply do not do this with game/sport names in English.  When was the last time you played Volley Ball or went Water Skiing?  All that said, common variants like "one pocket" and "1-pocket" should be mentioned in the article intro sentence as colloquial variants (see nine-ball for an example).


 * Anyway, please see the draft guideline mentioned in the larger thread immediately above. The goals of normalizing the spelling on Wikipedia are article consistency, non-ambiguity and parseability (we don't really care at all whether the rest of the world adopts Wikipedia spelling guidelines, because their purpose isn't to influence language evolution, but to make Wikipedia easier to use.)  It is really of no consequence at all that a video company and an author prefer "one pocket" over "one-pocket"; "one-pocket" is more grammatically correct, is less confusing and will be consistent with other article titles in this articlespace (eight-ball, three-cushion billiards, etc.)  Likewise, it is of no consequence that some events are "Nine Ball Tournament"s while others are a "9-ball Tournament" or "9-Ball Tournament" or "Nine-ball Championship", etc., etc.  The industry and sport itself do not consistently use (or not use) hyphenation or spelling-out, and even where they may lean toward "9-ball" this has more to do with advertising (the "9" is parsed by the brain faster than the word "nine" on a 15-sec. TV spot or in an ad in a pool magazine someone is flipping through), and presents significant problems when used as a game name in a Wikipedia article (it is confusable with "the 9 ball", and one cannot grammatically begin a sentence with "9-ball" (or "1-pocket", "3-cushion", etc.) because it can't be capitalized; and so forth.


 * PS: I would challenge the notion that Eddie Robin's books are necessarily authoritative on the game of one-pocket (all questions of spelling aside). His books were all self-published in a very small quantity and are now very out-of-print collectors' items (which he did not write, but edited from the contributions of others).  Meanwhile Phil Capelle's book on the topic is published by a reputable publisher and remains in print and very well-reviewed by the industry press.  I haven't read Robin's three one-pocket works (I don't have the $1000+ it will cost me to obtain them...) so I can't say they aren't authoritative on the game, but if they were that good, why haven't they been reprinted?  If they cannot be checked as sources by anyone who isn't filthy rich, I'm not sure they have much value as sources to cite on Wikipedia (and they are dangerously close to being primary sources, which present other problems).
 * &mdash; SMcCandlish &#91;talk&#93; &#91;contrib&#93; ツ 00:44, 24 November 2006 (UTC)