Billiards

The three best amateur 18.2 balkline billiard players live in Europe. Like billiard balls, two are light, one dark. The dark one, Edmond Soussa, 33, is the youngest. A full-blooded Egyptian, he was born in Cairo, now makes his living in Paris as an interior decorator. He plays a careless, temperamental game. Says he: "I hate billiards and play it only for my country."

Both of the others are government officials. Gustave Van Belle, Commissioner of Roads & Bridges in Flanders, is a slim, diffident man with thin legs and a reddish face. He has been world champion three times, won many an international tournament with his artful sidearm stroke. Long-nosed Albert Poensgen, a onetime jurist and now a well-paid employe in Berlin's Ministry of Finance, is considered by his confreres to be the luckiest player in the world as well as one of the best. At 51 he has been playing in international tournaments for 21 years, won the world championship nine times. Last week the three best players in the world, and six others who thought they might be, went to Manhattan to play each other for the world championship. Soussa was the first of the three to lose. With 395 points (only five more to go) he missed a spread masse and then watched his opponent, Albert Corty, a Marseilles manufacturer of jute bags, nurse the gleaming balls across the lines for a run of 50 and the match.* When Van Belle and Poensgen played their match, in the red-plush and gilt-scroll lodgeroom of the Elks' Club, they were the only undefeated players left in the tournament. Van Belle was nervous. Sitting in a stiff armchair, he puckered up his lips, blinked gloomily at the ivory joint of his cue while Poensgen had the table. He was only once able to get control of his game, for a brilliant run of 69, before Poensgen had the match 400 to 206. Poensgen was still undefeated when he played Soussa. The Egyptian, by losing another match to Van Belle, had lost his chance for the championship and was therefore not playing under a strain. It was an important match for Poensgen ; by losing, he would place himself in a tie with Van Belle for first place. Soussa, who had already made the high run -- 181 -- of the tournament, played the best billiards of the week. He gathered the balls at the rail for a run of 163, then carelessly missed the first ball in an easy carom. It was Poensgen's turn to be nervous. He sniffed at a glass of ice-water, stared warily at the ceiling, plucked at the sleeves of his tight black silk jacket. His longest runs were 50 and 12. Soussa won, 400 to 101.

If they are not as fussy as Willie Hoppe, who used to carry his own balls of Zanzibar ivory, or Walter Lindrum, an Australian professional who arrived in the U. S. last month bringing his own baize tablecloth for a series of exhibition matches, most foreign players at least carry their own chalk and several favorite cues. Poensgen brought something else as well: a grave, austere confidence which Van Belle lacked. It was this lack rather than the fact that Van Belle was playing in the U. S. for the first time, or the fact that he had often played Poensgen before and usually lost, that gave Poensgen an advantage in the playoff.

After six innings, Poensgen was more than 100 points ahead. Van Belle waggled his head, listened to Referee Albert Cutler calling Poensgen's score in the deep silence of the crowded room, through two runs of 34, another of 80. When Poensgen gathered the balls at one end of the table and nursed them down the rails so carefully that he had almost no hard shots in a run of 119, the match was practically over. Hopelessly behind, Van Belle failed to make a carom in the last four innings, lost match and championship to Poensgen, 400 to 180.

*The table is ruled off into eight "balk" panels by lines 18 in. from the cushions. At both ends of each line are "anchor boxes" (squares). Play in 18.2 is complicated by rules requiring that if the two object balls should be in a balk space or anchor box one shot is allowable while they are in. On the second shot at least one object ball must be driven out.

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