Pool Parlors: "Golden Opportunity" 1963 Brunswick Corp; Willie Mosconi (Patreon)

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Originally a public domain film, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billiard_hall

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

A billiard/billiards, pool or snooker hall (or parlour/parlor, room or club; sometimes compounded as poolhall, poolroom, etc.) is a place where people get together for playing cue sports such as pool, snooker or carom billiards. Such establishments commonly serve alcohol and often have arcade games, card games, darts, foosball and other games on the side. Some billiard halls may be combined or integrated with a bowling alley....

Pool and billiards developed as in indoor option for games such as croquet which were played on lawns. Dedicated venues began to appear in the 19th century, and by the early 20th century, billiard and pool halls were common in many countries; in 1915 there were 830 in Chicago alone.

In North America in the 1950s and 1960s especially, pool halls in particular were perceived as a social ill by many, and laws were passed in many jurisdictions to set age limits at pool halls and restrict gambling and the sale of alcohol. The song "Trouble" in the 1957 hit musical The Music Man lampooned this prejudice (even contrasting carom billiards, requiring "judgement, brains, and maturity", versus pool, said to be a gateway to laziness, gambling, smoking and philandering). Public perception had become less critical by the 1990s.

By the 2010s, with competition from a growing number of competing entertainment venues, as well as the availability of online gambling, revenue from the operation of billiard halls in the United States had declined significantly. In Korea, on the other hand, the pool halls are becoming more popular after years of decline...

In popular culture

Pool halls necessarily feature prominently in the novel and film The Hustler, and their sequel book and movie, The Color of Money, as well as other pool films such as Poolhall Junkies and Shooting Gallery. The historic depth of American pool halls and their subculture was touched on in The Color of Money in various ways, including dialogue extolling the virtues of particular landmark venues, the disappointment at discovering one such hall's closure, a comment that regulars at a well-known hall "never leave the street" it is on, and the return of a pool hall janitor in The Hustler as a hall owner decades later in the sequel...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pool_(cue_sports)

Pool is a classification of cue sports played on a table with six pockets along the rails, into which balls are deposited. Each specific pool game has its own name; some of the better-known include eight-ball, eightball pool and its variant blackball, nine-ball, ten-ball, seven-ball, straight pool, one-pocket, and bank pool.

The generic term pocket billiards is sometimes also used, and favored by some pool-industry bodies, but is technically a broader classification, including games such as snooker, Russian pyramid, and kaisa, which are not referred to as pool games.

There are also hybrid games combining aspects of both pool and carom billiards, such as American four-ball billiards, bottle pool, cowboy pool, and English billiards...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Mosconi

William Joseph Mosconi (/mɒˈskoʊni/; June 27, 1913 – September 17, 1993) was an American professional pool (pocket billiards) player from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Between the years of 1941 and 1957, he won the World Straight Pool Championship an unmatched fifteen times. For most of the 20th century, his name was essentially synonymous with pool in North America – he was nicknamed "Mr. Pocket Billiards" – and he was among the first Billiard Congress of America Hall of Fame inductees. Mosconi pioneered and regularly employed numerous trick shots, set many records, and helped to popularize pool as a national recreation activity.

During the 1940s and 1950s, the pocket billiards game most often played in competition was called straight pool, or 14.1 continuous, a form of pool considered by most top players to be more difficult than today's fast tournament game nine-ball. Mosconi still holds the officially recognized straight pool high run world record of 526 consecutive balls...