Hi guys,
I am trying to find the world record for the most balls sunk off a break in 8-ball pool. I have tried Google, but to no avail.
Please note, I am looking for the most balls sunk off the opening shot of the break, not the subsequent shots.
Thanks to anyone who can help.
Not a cite or anything, but I have seen 6 balls sunk a few times. If there actually is a record for this feat, it would be in the Billiards Records Book.
Yeah, I am aware of that book.
I’d prefer not having to purchase it just to know this one record, though…
Have I stumped The Straight Dope?
Beyond Belief w/ Jonothan Frakes had a story on “The Golden Cue” in which a player sunk all the balls off the break.
It turned out to be “fiction”. I wanted to believe it. The fact that the shooter was also blind could have been the tipping point.
[Edit per poster req --G]
I know I’ve sunk five several times. I don’t recall ever getting six, but it would seem feasible, maybe even seven. It’s hard to imagine more than that.
In this case, I would say no, since posters have told you where to find the information you seek. Buy the book or get it from a library.
Surely someone has sunk all of the balls on a break? Unsure if it’s on record or not.
It was suggested that the book might contain the answer, clearly none of us know if it does, otherwise they would simply inform us what the record is.
So I’d say I’ve still stumped The Straight Dope.
First of all, you have to give a thread some time to live before you claim the board stumped. Second, its very possible no such record exists, therefore, not getting an answer is not necessarily stumping the board.
Yeah. Not to mention you’re making an idiotic and pointless distinction with some terribly misconstrued assumption that asking a question that the board can’t answer is some kind of accomplishment.
How many versions of “Slow Down Gandhi” are on the white label 12"?
OOOH I STUMPED THE BOARD!!!
Ok, I took the trouble of investigating the issue. All balls were sunk off a break in 8-ball pool, but only once in history. This was by Colonel David “Coppy” Wessington at the Peshawar Polo club on 2 March 1911. Unfortunately he was alone at a time, and died in an altercation with a drunken lascar immediately upon exiting the club, so his feat has not been widely advertised. The only record we have of this event is a graffito from the club’s paneling, re-discovered in 1932 when the painting of Lord Mannering was removed from the west wall for re-framing.
Oddly enough, I have seen seven balls go down on the break once. 3’ x 6’ table, though.
There are trick shots you can set up to sink 15 balls in one shot, but I’ve never heard of anyone coming close to that on a break. The odds would be astronomical: On a typical 8-ball break there’s maybe a 75% chance that a ball will go down. Maybe a 50% chance that two will go down. After that, the odds go way down. The problem is energy - the way the balls are racked, some balls just don’t move a lot because the force on them is relatively balanced. The only way they will move much is if balls carom off of cushions and move them. But then, if balls are going into pockets there are fewer balls left to mix up the rest. So you get serious diminishing returns. Sinking four balls is a rarity. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen someone sink more than five or six, and I’ve been playing pool for 20 years. It could well be that the odds against sinking 15 balls on a break are so great that it’s likely it will never happen, even if it’s possible.
9-ball is a better example of how rare this is. In 9-ball, far more energy gets transfered to each individual ball, and the break is extremely hard. Even so, it’s rare to see more than 3 or 4 balls go down on the break. I think the most I’ve ever seen is six, and that was an event so amazing that the whole club talked about it for a long time.
Hmm, I don’t think there’s any need to get like that, vinniepaz…
Indeed, these types of feats are quite amazing, which is why I too, am amazed, that there is no easy way to find out the highest verifiable number of balls sunk off a break in 8-ball 
The problem is that it would have had to happen in a sanctioned event so a record could be recorded, and I don’t know of any 8-ball tournaments that record the number of balls sunk on the break. So there will be no official records of this, which means we have to rely on hearsay. And that’s just totally unreliable.
Slight hijack: are “box scores” kept during pool tournaments? Could one look at transcripts of individual games, and see how many balls fell on the break?
In a way, baseball games and chess matches can live on forever, because both baseball and chess have detailed notation available to record what happens in any given game/match. Does pool have something similar?
On the U.S. 9-ball tour, there is a company called ‘accu-stats’ which records the matches and collects huge numbers of stats, including balls made on the break. But nothing like it exists for 8-ball that I know of.
It’s all just apocryphal, but 6-7 balls seems to be the real world max observed by more than one person.