A highly addictive online billiards simulation located at Yahoo! Games. The most popular Yahoo! Game by far, with anywhere from 15,000 to 40,000 players on at any one time. All players may choose from Social, Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced rooms, while paying Yahoo! All-Star members may access Ladder and League rooms. The standard is regular 8-ball, with All-Stars allowed to play 9-ball.
The rating system is similar to that of some other Yahoo! Games, with all players starting at 1200 and gaining/losing anywhere from around 3 to maybe 40 points depending on the ratings of the players involved - the greater disparity in ratings, the bigger the possible range of point exchange - i.e. if players with equal ratings play each other, 17 points will be exchanged, and if players with a 400 point difference play, if the lower rated player wins about 35 or so points will exchange hands, if the higher rated player wins, maybe 2 or 3 will be exchanged. For this reason, players usually will not play anyone rated about 100 points lower than them, for the risk outweighs the possible profit. The converse effect of this is that bastards with minuscule ratings will insult, berate and cajole higher rated players to bully or anger them into commencing a match - usually the result of this is that the aggressor gets promptly booted from the table by the host, and the host switches the status of the table from Public to either Protected (at which the uninvited may watch but not sit for a game) or Private (at which no uninviteds may be at all.)
There are many bums that hang around Yahoo! Pool who think the rating number actually means something besides a vague gauge of
skill - these players engage in an activity called "boosting," by which one raises one's rating exorbitantly, beyond the range attainable by actual hard work and skill - for some reason these people think a rating of 10,000 while you can't compete with regularly rated 1400 players is special and commendable. These boosters usually hang out in the bastardized "Champions Zone." I myself have no idea how to actually boost, and I don't care to know.
Tournaments abound; they're run by players through sites such as www.laddermonkey.net. One must join a league run by such a site to participate in tourneys, also one can climb and fall along the ladder with simple league matches.
There's a staggering amount of profanity, rudeness and idiotic remarks in the Pool rooms, though that may be standard of game rooms in general, I'm not sure...but I would bet it gets rougher in the Pool rooms than in, say, the Go Fish or Solitaire rooms, or even the Chess rooms...but generally people are tolerable.
The balls are divided into solids and stripes, as in regular pool, but in Yahoo! Pool, the colors are red, orange, yellow, light green, sky blue, purple, and magenta.
Players may set timers for shots, anywhere from 1 second (pointless) to 99 seconds (also slightly pointless, as after 180 seconds on inactivity the other player is given the ability to Force Forfeit). Usually players have around a 30 second timer just to keep the game moving, and a 5-10 second timer for a speed challenge.
A common occurence during Yahoo! Pool games is "getting yahooed" - i.e. when a computer glitch caused by the Yahoo! servers or programming causes a screwy event, which many times is unfair to one player. Such events are the cue getting stuck so a player runs out of time, a ball moving through another ball, english inexplicably not doing what it should, et cetera.
It's worth noting that, once players acquire a certain amount of skill, Yahoo! Pool is nothing like your standard bar or pool hall fare - it's more like championship billiards on LSD and crack. Ball speed is intense, players bank shots off of three rails, hit six balls off of each other to get one in (all of this facilitated by beautiful yellow aiming lines) and use an extreme amount of english impossible in real life to make perfect leaves and escape certain scratches. It's not all easy, as the balls are not much smaller than the pockets, and so it takes a lot of practice to get good, but it's really entertaining once you do.
Common Yahoo! Pool acronyms -
gg - good game
vgg - very good game
ns - nice shot
gs - good shot
nt - nice try
gl - good luck
blnt - better luck next time
There are many more, I just can't think of them at the moment.