Cue sports (sometimes written cuesports), also known as billiard sports,
are a wide variety of games of skill generally played with a cue stick, which is used to strike billiard balls and thereby cause them to move around a cloth-covered billiards table bounded by elastic bumpers known as cushions.
Historically, the umbrella term was billiards. While that familiar name is still employed by some as a generic label for all such games, the word's usage has splintered into more exclusive competing meanings in various parts of the world. For example, in British and Australian English, billiards usually refers exclusively to the game of English billiards, while in American and Canadian English it is sometimes used to refer to a particular game or class of games, or to all cue games in general, depending upon dialect and context. In colloquial usage, the term billiards may be used to refer to games such as pool, snooker, or Russian pyramid.
There are three major subdivisions of games within cue sports:
Carom billiards, referring to games played on tables without pockets, typically 10 feet in length, including straight rail, balkline, one-cushion carom, three-cushion billiards, artistic billiards and four-ball
Pool, covering numerous pocket billiards games generally played on six-pocket tables of 7-, 8-, 9-, or 10-foot length, including among others eight-ball (the world's most widely played cue sport), nine-ball (the dominant professional game), ten-ball, straight pool (the formerly dominant pro game), one-pocket, and bank pool
Snooker, English billiards and Russian pyramid, games played on a billiards table with six pockets called a snooker table (which has dimensions just under 12 ft by 6 ft), all of which are classified entirely separately from pool based on a separate historical development, as well as a separate culture and terminology that characterize their play.There are other variants that make use of obstacles and targets, and table-top games played with disks instead of balls.
Billiards has a long and rich history stretching from its inception in the 15th century, to the wrapping of the body of Mary, Queen of Scots, in her billiard table cover in 1586, through its many mentions in the works of Shakespeare, including the famous line "let's to billiards" in Antony and Cleopatra (1606–07), and through the many famous enthusiasts of the sport such as: Mozart, Louis XIV of France, Marie Antoinette, Immanuel Kant, Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, George Washington, French president Jules Grévy, Charles Dickens, George Armstrong Custer, Theodore Roosevelt, Lewis Carroll, W.C. Fields, Babe Ruth, Bob Hope, and Jackie Gleason.