A simultaneously simple yet extraordinarily complex design, the Billiard is the quintessential pipe shape, and probably the most popular shape worldwide. It's been around for 150 years because it's attractive and because it works. The Billiard is an efficient smoking machine with the most straightforward internal and external engineering, but as simple as it appears to be, it manifests a surprising scope of variations.

Part of the problem, as often happens, is that we have no definition we can all agree upon. There are very specific definitions for those who want them — like myself — but that has to do with my history with the shape. In 1999, when I worked for Pipes and tobaccos magazine, we ran a pipe carving contest for which a straight Billiard was required, so I researched it pretty thoroughly to provide parameters, and that's how I think of a Billiard today.

That was also the year J.T. Cooke made the P&T pipe of the year — a Billiard — and we discussed the shape at length over many conversations. Cooke had years of experience restoring classic pipes and had grown to respect the traditional approach to the shape, and that rubbed off on me. So I'm pretty unforgiving when I think of a classic Billiard, even though in casual conversation I'll call a pipe a Billiard that doesn't manifest all the shape's subtleties. "That's a Billiard," I might say, "but not a classic Billiard."

I now use qualifying language for those Billiards that deviate from the strict definition: saddle Billiards, pencil-shanked Billiards, panel Billiards, rounded-rim Billiards, bamboo-shanked Billiards, Brandy-ish-bowled Billiards, long-stemmed Billiards, and as many more divergences as there is imagination.

A Billiard, without employing additional stipulations, is a straight pipe. If it's bent, it's a bent Billiard and requires that qualification. In my mind (your mileage may vary), everything aside from a classic straight Billiard with its exacting angles and proportions is a modification of the original, archetypal shape.

What is a Classic Billiard?

A Billiard is a straight pipe with the Billiard bowl we're all familiar with: slightly curved but not too curved, with a good chin at the heel but not too much. It has a round shank approximately as long as the bowl is high and very slightly tapered from the bowl to the stem rather than perfectly cylindrical. The rim is flat, the stem is tapered, and the bowl is slightly canted: from 3°-5° forward. Here's a diagram:

Greg Pease of G.L. Pease Tobacco has studied the Billiard. He and pipe maker Adam Davidson and pipe restorer George Dibos were the judges in 2014 for the North American Pipe Carving Contest: The Battle of the Billiards. Hosted by the Greater Kansas City Pipe Club, the contest winners numbered seven and their pipes were put into a seven-day set, which was raffled.

It took hours for Greg, George, and Adam to decide the winners even after setting aside those pipes that clearly were not classic Billiards, which made up a large portion of the entries. Aside from the fact that making a Billiard is hard, many carvers made modifications to give their entries more personality, despite wavering from the required design constraints. The winners were Rad Davis, Premel Chheda, Tyler Beard, Colin Rigsby, Ryan Alden, Nate King, and Jesse Jones. Greg Pease remembered the judging difficulty in a write-up in P&T magazine: "Some beautiful pipes were eliminated only because they didn't meet the Billiard criteria." (Fall, 2014, pg. 34)

The rim is flat, the stem is tapered, and the bowl is slightly canted: from 3°-5° forward

"When you get into classics," says George, "even something like a Dublin has some leeway. You could have a Dublin Churchwarden, for example, large or small or with any amount of tilt to the bowl. The Dublin field is fairly broad, but a Billiard is one thing and one thing only, and man, is it a beast. We decided, by the way, that only four pipes out of the approximately 60 that were entered that year were actually the definition of Billiard in terms of proportions and so forth. Only four. We didn't even have a seven-day set. We had to fudge a little on grading the other three." It demonstrates just how challenging it is to make a Billiard according to the classic definition.

More recently, Greg put together a spreadsheet to check the ratios, angles, and proportions of pipes accepted as classic Billiards and found that the shank diameter is typically about a third of the height of the bowl. "It goes between 0.39 and 0.29."

He figured that by putting together a good number of measurements, he might find some useful metrics. "They are relatively consistent in terms of classic Billiard proportions. The bowl height is about 1.25 times as high as its diameter. The stem is about 1.4 to 1.5 times the shank length. The overall length is a little over three times the bowl height. Those are the classic Billiard proportions."

The bowl's angle is important as well. If it were a perfect 90 degrees from the shank's centerline, it wouldn't be a Billiard. "A 90 degree angle looks wrong," says Greg. "It makes it look like the bowl is falling over backwards."

It demonstrates just how challenging it is to make a Billiard

"It's easier," says Adam, "to say what a Billiard is not than what a Billiard is. If someone drew what they thought was a Billiard, another person might say, 'I think that's a Brandy," then they might draw their idea of a Billiard and the other person will say, 'That's a Dublin and you're an idiot.' And by the time they stop punching each other, the drawings will be lost. A Billiard is one of those things that we think we know exactly, but the best we can get is an idea because you can have a Billiard bowl with a saddle stem, you can have a Billiard bowl with a long stem, and you can have a Billiard bowl with a small shank. I think a lot of the norms, the height/length ratio, for example, started with books or articles arbitrarily identifying perfect examples and telling the world how it should be. It's almost like the religion of the Billiards. People are adamant about what a Billiard should be, and others say, 'You have no idea what you're talking about.' At the end of the day, no one can prove anything."

Adam is right that everyone has different views, but there's something about the classic Billiard that resonates in its simplicity. "I've always thought of it," says George, "as a distillation type of situation in design terms. If you've got a bunch of ingredients in a pot in your kitchen, and you boil it and boil it until it's dry, there's always going to be something left in the bottom of the pot, right? In the same way, if you start boiling a pipe, conceptually, you put it in a pot, and you turn up the heat and boil the thing until there's nothing superfluous left. You boil away all of the frivolities and all of the visual gimmickry, and you're left with something that is the perfect balance of form and function. If you optimize the mission of functionality and pleasant visual design, you end up at the Billiard."

The Billiard as a Litmus Test

The Billiard may seem a simple design, but many pipe makers over the years have been challenged by it. At pipe shows 25 years ago I would often, right or wrong, judge the skill level of a newer carver by whether or not they could make a good Billiard. Often they thought they could but could not, and that indicated that they had more to learn. Beautiful Freehands can be impressive, according to this line of thinking, but without the skills necessary to make a classic Billiard, some fundamental knowledge is absent, as with a musician who can't read music.

"It's almost like the religion of the Billiards. People are adamant about what a Billiard should be"

Simple shapes are sometimes the most difficult. Before he became a pipe carver, Randy Wiley apprenticed under renowned woodcarver Ray "Pappy" Holt, whose animal carvings were prominently featured in Florida museums. Ray insisted that Randy start with what seemed a simple task: carve a perfect sphere. It's certainly a basic shape but turned out to be very difficult to replicate by hand. Sometimes simple shapes are counterintuitively complex. Like the Billiard.

"The Billiard litmus test," says Greg, "still exists in a sense. I was having a conversation with George Dibos once — we had shared a video of someone making a violin by hand, and it was amazing to watch the skill and the precision with which this man worked. We were awed. And my comment to George was, 'Yeah, but can he make a Billiard?'"

The Archetypal Pipe Shape

That the Billiard really is the original briar pipe shape is unlikely, but because of its minimalism and adherence to basic functionalism, it merits the respect of origination. The very first Billiard could have been a bent pipe for all anyone really knows. The first Billiard was a supremely important event but its details are lost to history.

The earliest briar pipes, made in the 1850s, likely followed design principles of the clay pipes that preceded them. Adam theorizes that the Cutty shape so predominant in clay pipe manufacturing probably carried over to briar when that medium was young. "Clay pipes were often Cutty shapes. So when they started making pipes out of briar, I'm assuming that they most likely made things that looked like a Cutty, because you don't jump ahead with technology unless you're wanting to develop the Cybertruck because everyone's going to think that it's ugly, which is exactly how we feel about the Cybertruck. So I think when it came down to whenever somebody started making shapes, they were probably carving chunks of briar by hand with knives and chisels and making them look like Cuttys."

"Yeah, but can he make a Billiard?"

But how did we get from briar Cuttys to Billiards? Adam has a theory about that as well. Trained in industrial design, he attributes at least some of the Billiard's shaping conventions to the manufacturing process. It may have been easier when cutting the shank to have a canted bowl, so that it was out of the way while shaping the shank. Additionally, a slightly tapered shank may have made it easier for machine cutting blades approaching from the end of the shank. The conventions of Billiard design may have been initiated as a manufacturing convenience and then become appreciated and admired as the shape became widespread.

Why Is It Called a Billiard?

No one knows for sure where the Billiard's name originated, but Bill Burney has an article on pipedia.org in which he speculates about the circumstance. "The best explanation I have heard so far," he writes, "was that at the time the shape was named, the game was very popular, so whoever came up with the name for the pipe shape named it after the popular game of the day. Maybe. Good thing the popular game wasn't craps."

Burney may be right. The game of billiards dates to the 15th century, but it found widespread popularity with the publication of Michael Phelan's modern rulebook in 1859, which is the same time frame as the first briar pipes.

... a slightly tapered shank may have made it easier for machine cutting blades approaching from the end of the shank

"It's possible that associating a pipe with a game of gentlemanly leisure," says Adam, "was an early marketing strategy. The Poker shape may have come from the popularity of the card game poker and the pipe's ability to sit by itself while playing, and it would make sense that the popularity of the game of billiards was likewise capitalized on."

Popularity

Another question remains: is there something inherently manifest in Billiards that make them so likable, or did we learn to love Billiards because we see so many of them? It's probably a combination. Manufacturers provide what the public wants, and the public has wanted Billiards for generations. While pipe smokers may have learned their preferences from seeing so many classic pipes, the fact remains that we see so many Billiards because manufacturers make what the public wants.

"Remember," says George, "that pipe smoking today is an infinitesimal slice of what it used to be. It's a half percent of what it was 100 years ago. Once upon a time, pipes were sold in the tens of millions every year, year after year, to millions and millions of people who smoked pipes. You can build a collective consciousness that responds to a little tweak here and a little tweak there in design. There's a manifestation of preference responding to minimalism seen over billions of bowls smoked. And much of it has converged on the Billiard."

... is there something inherently manifest in Billiards that make them so likable, or did we learn to love Billiards because we see so many of them?

Whether the Billiard possesses some magical combination of ratio and proportion that is attractive at a fundamental level of our artistic appreciation or whether its efficient smoking characteristics have shaped our affection makes little difference. In the end, it's a design that resonates with a majority of pipe smokers. There's something about a well-rendered Billiard that promotes happiness just to look at it. It's a shape with almost mystical status, and when it's done right, it's a remarkable artistic object.