"Are you a league player?" is a question I often hear asked around pool tables.
Some people hate league players. Some people enjoy playing leagues. Some want to know so they can use "real" rules instead of "bar" rules, to play the game at a higher level without 20 questions! Just like any other league, you make a team, signup for a league and go play for a couple of months (or more than a couple) and see what the results end up like. You get to see what you have against the other players and teams in your league. It's a great form of casual (and not so casual) competition.
Don't be worried about "sucking" the first time you go out to play league. You might "suck" compared to the competition, but that won't last long if you are interested in improving your game! Even the players on a team that finish last in a league can start becoming runout players when faced with other opponents.
There are many different organizations and levels of pool leagues to be found. Many local pool leagues follow the conventions of larger leagues, just for player uniformity. Other local pool leagues do not, and create their own atmosphere, traditions, and styles of play. One big thing to be aware of as a player interested in playing in larger leagues or in tournaments is that if a local league is not using national standards you may develop habits that are innappropriate for higher level play.
Heck, I have that problem and I play in two different nationally certified leagues! I play Bullseye Leagues, which use a simplified version of BCA and VNEA rules. WAMO uses a more strict version of VNEA rules, but not full VNEA. Then when I play Tournament, oops, need to switch gears to strictly BCA rules, or WAMO rules, or VNEA rules. And every once in a while I forget -- usually to my detriment, since the national rules are both less and more forgiving in some matters. Also, even BCA is more than one set of rules, the Real BCA and the BCA Leagues rules, which differ from each other. I also play BCA leagues on 9-foot tables ... but it isn't hard to switch gears there, I think it goes automatically with the table size!
That being said, Don't get me wrong -- many local leagues offer a superb level of play and have great traditions and excellent players to compete against.
You may run across the word Sanctioned in reference to leagues. Players from a sanctioned league are automatically acredited by their local league to the national level of league. That means that by competing in your local league, you are actually sanctioned by the national organization as a legitimate competitor in most any tournament or event played under the auspices of that national organization! For example, my local league is VNEA sanctioned, which means that I could go play in the Vegas VNEA Finals if I wanted to. A person from a non-VNEA league can't play in the VNEA Las Vegas Finals. Similarily, I need a BCA Sanction to play in the state-wide BCA Tournament.
Another thing to be aware of is that many league systems use a different game format. Picking two examples from the large nation-wide league systems:
The league format will give you an idea of the amount of time needed to play a match, how many games and opponents you will play.
If you don't like sitting around a lot between matches, you could look for a league that plays the race format. The race format can be more intense when trying to hold on to leads or recover from early losses. However, if there is a big mis-match in skill levels, it can also mean sitting around losing several games, which can really put a damper on your spirit.
If you want to see how you compete against all the other players in your league, and not just the random ones your are assigned to play, use a round-robin league to get a chance to play against everyone else. You'll meet more people and talk with them shooting round-robin. A well designed round-robin league often uses rounds to divide the play into and to give the match the concentration on winning you see in serious play. Your team is rooting for your win to keep them ahead!
Some leagues are handicapped, designed to put all players on a equal level. The purpose of the handicapping system is to get players of all levels to participate in a league system. Otherwise, strong players would dominate a league of weaker players and take all the winnings out of the system. Or, the weaker players wouldn't bother playing, since they are always going to lose. With a good handicapping system a weak player has a better chance of winning individual games or matches versus a strong player. You can tell a handicapping system is pretty fair when everybody hates it! Seriously, though, the better player is still favored to win because of their skill. What handicapping really does is to penalize the mistakes that the better player makes. If a player doesn't make mistakes often, the penalties of handicapping aren't a big deal.
I play on both handicapped and non-handicapped leagues and tournaments. The competition is excellent in both. Both weaker and strong players have a good time. In the normal leagues, the best players and teams float to the top ... but even then there can still be unexpected rankings due to persistence and skill by lower level players. In the handicapped leagues, I'd say the top spots are taken by intermediate to excellent players. The excellent players are no longer a shoe-in for the top spots. They can get there ... by playing excellently the entire season. Which can be hard to do consistently (for anyone) -- just a week of bad shooting can put you in a lower ranking.
There is even a league playing that uses a handicapped league format that I helped design. I often ask the players about it (they don't know I helped design it) and both the strong and the weak players like the format and have fun playing. There are many matches where it is a serious competition to win, the good players have to work hard, the starting players are working hard to win, it's fun!
The format most often handicapped is the race format, since it allows adjusting the race count as a handicap. For example, say the standard for players of equal handicaps is a race to 5. With a handicap difference level of 2, the better player races to 6 and the weaker player races to 4
It is more difficult to handicap 8 ball, because wins are really important in the game. Anyone can pocket balls, but dropping all 8 is harder, since you need to get around the table more or be a great shot-maker if you can't. It's not really fair to let a lower-handicap person win a match without winning any games in the match -- they never won a game and they win the match? It also does not encourage the development of a good game, which is important to becoming a stronger pool player.
Depends on the league format, and also the type of game being played. Scoring in a league can be done in several ways, and often a league will use more than one way of measuring players.
9-Ball leagues usually go by the winner of the race, but they also look at the difference in the number of games won to judge the win by. A match won 5-0 is a larger victory than a match won 5-4.
8-Ball Leagues often use combination of wins and points to determine outcomes. A typical point system used in 8 ball is to assign 1 point for every ball pocketed, and the 8-ball is worth 3 points. The winner of a match receives 10 points (7 balls + 3 for the 8), and the loser receives however many of their balls were pocketed. The point system lets you judge the quality of the win -- was it a 1-sided 10-0 game, or a hard-fought 10-7 win?
A game like 8-ball can have secondary scoring potential, to record the feats a player may have performed during the match & season. For example:
For example, it is possible to get a 10-0 that isn't an runout (more than one inning on the table, but opponent didn't pocket a ball), and a runout that isn't a 10-0 (pocketed one each of solid and stripe on the break).
Well, certainly, pride of your playing and your achievments on the table are the real winnings you take home However, most league systems have monetary payout based on the weekly league fees you payed to the league.
Typically the first place team gets the most, and the last place team gets the least. There are two common methods of making that happen, and it is worth mentioning so you know about it, and also when they are not appropriate to competition. Those formats are flat and top-heavy payouts.
The best combinations of winnings and league formats are that:
The WORST format I have ever seen is a top-heavy payout in a non-handicapped league. That is basically a donation for any player and team who doesn't end up in the top 3. Not so surprisingly, that league has a huge problem keeping players, because the good teams don't want to advance into a higher-level league where they will get nothing.... The lower ranked teams in the upper levels want to drop down into the lower levels so they get a payout. And basically no new players enter the league for more than a season after seeing what happens, that only the "star" teams and players receive any money. Basically the league operator attracts new teams to donate money to the "star" teams.
It depends on the game and the format. I have my own rough estimate on how long a game takes to play out. You multiply that by the game count in the match, and you can get a good idea of how long a match lasts, and how long will need to be at league each evening.
A race format has a variable game count: the least number of games you will play is the race count. The most games you will play is (count*2)-1. For example, a race to 5 will have between 5 and 9 games to decide the outcome of the match.
For worst case game times, I'd approximate a minute per the number of balls used in the game. For 8-ball that's 15 balls, and for 9-ball it's obvious.
For example:
I use that 15 minutes a game estimate as a good rule for knowing when I can leave 8-ball league .. unless matches become really bogged down. Things can go faster with more skilled players, since there are often only 1 or 2 innings per player at the table. However, even with skilled players a bad rack or safety battles requiring many innings can eat into time and easily take a match up beyond the 15 minute average. It is possible for matches to take less time, but if things are playing that quickly, you'll start seeing pauses due to human things like bathroom & smoke breaks becoming a factor.
Just to be fair ... A local league operator disagrees with me totally on the 15 minutes for 8-ball. They are of the opinion should be over more quickly than that. Totally correct, too, it should be. The thing is, I'm using the 15 minute estimate as a worst case estimate so I can be realistic about my schedule. What's really bad is when a league match takes longer than that. That is one LONG night -- who wants to finish at 12:30AM?
With 9-ball, game times are also more variable. A 9-ball break wins the match in a stroke, as does an early combo of the 9 into a pocket. 9-Ball is usually faster playing than 8-ball; there are less balls on the table and you could guess a "9 minute average" by relating that to the "15 minutes" for the 15 balls that 8-ball uses. However safety play is far more common in 9-ball. A wicked 9-ball match can take just as long as a complicated 8-ball match to play out.
I've found that the longest games are often between two teams of lower level players, usually weak to intermediate. The lower level shooting means that it takes a lot of innings to complete a game, too many balls are missed, too many accidental safeties are generated and people are trying to figure out what to do. At the lower intermediate level, more balls are made, but people are thinking hard trying to win, and that takes up more time. Don't get me wrong though -- two high level players can take just as long as anyone else when they get into a safety battle or are competing for top slots in a league!
If you see that situation happening, you may want to move the match to a venue with more tables so you can start playing a match on two tables if things start to slow down. The big problem with that is it sometimes destroys the competitive feel of the match, which can affect the playing of your pool shooters.