I have long expressed my surprise that organisers of important pool events do not always seek the best looking, high quality tables for their events, especially when those events are to be televised.

Pool is an all-the-year-round sport but it is during the autumn and winter when, like other indoor games, it flourishes. So as a new season starts league and individual trophies will be polished in anticipation of worthy winners next spring. Promoters of competitions, both local and national, will be putting the final touches towards the organisation of such events

Master Billiard Supplies are pressing ahead with the arrangements to manufacture its range of Superleague tables in-house. But Eric Lewis said the company needed to be conscious of price and to get the balance right

Although it is too early to judge the effect on pool of the smoking ban which came into force on July 1, Excel Leisure’s Stan McKenna told Euroslot at the end of the first month that a number of operators who used his company’s tables had seen no discernable difference.

This year’s £50,000 Pub Pool Challenge, which was held for the first time last year and which closed with an exciting live TV coverage finals evening on Sky Sports, has had to be cancelled because of lack of support.

The BAPTO 2007 Finals, to be played from November 15 to 18 at Pontins Blackpool, will have a £13,300 prize fund, the largest in the association’s history. The money will be spread between a five-player team event featuring 128 teams plus 256 players men’s singles and 64 players ladies’ singles events.

I am glad I do not smoke. If I did I would assuredly be very confused about where I could do so since the smoking ban came into force in the UK at the beginning of this month.

I have found no support for the views of the pub manager I mentioned last month who said the ban would extend to places like open air beer gardens if they were on the same premises as the pub itself. The majority view is that if such beer gardens are, like the “ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples” that the poet Wordsworth viewed from Westminster Bridge, “open unto the fields and to the sky, all bright and glittering in the smokeless air”, then customers using them could still be permitted to smoke unless, of course, the owners of public houses enforced their own bans.

The UK ban on smoking in pubs and other indoor public places, which is due to come into operation on July 1, has brought a “we’ll have to wait and see” from most people connected with the pool table industry. From my knowledge of many pool players over the past 25 years I would imagine the enthusiasts who play in league or knockout competitions will continue to play their pool in licensed premises. In recent years, more and more facilities such as public transport and their waiting rooms, have borne ‘no smoking’ signs with no visible decline in their use by the public.

When I was a schoolboy I was intrigued by the name of a popular music hall comedian called Nosmo King. I wondered which country could have produced a man with a name like Nosmo but it was some time before I realised his name formed the words “No Smoking”. Nosmo King made people laugh during days when, for many, laughs were few. His name I learned, was inspired by a notice on the wall of a theatre in which he appeared.

UK 8-ball pool, or European Blackball pool as it has been renamed by the former European & UK 8-Ball Pool Federation, has been around for about 40 years.

Professional pool player Andy Appleton, from Pontefract, praised a Master Billiards Supplies (MBS) Superleague table on which he had given a much appreciated exhibition of trick shots to guests at the official launch of the EBA’s Ashford World & Masters Pool Championships 2007 at the Tickton Grange Hotel, near Beverley, East Yorkshire, on August 4.

Stan McKenna, managing director of Excel Leisure Products, is one of pool’s most respected individuals. He regards pool tables as a traditional product and thinks operators tend to buy mahogany-coloured tables fitted with green cloth because they are a safe purchase and can be relocated to alternative sites if required.

Simply Pool, an Oldham-based company now in its fourth year, announced a good first half to 2006, particularly in the home market.

Sam Leisure’s business-development manager, Liam Barrett, said about 60 per cent of the company’s table sales are with operators. He thought the number of owned rather than rented tables might be increasing in a fast-expanding home market.