 | |
| Industry | Sporting goods |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1878 [1] |
| Founders | Edward James Riley [1] |
| Headquarters | Caldicot, Wales [2] |
Key people | Stuart Lacey (Director) [2] |
| Parent | BCE Distributors [2] |
| Website | riley-snooker-international.com |
E.J. Riley, later Riley Leisure and just Riley, is a British sporting goods brand founded in 1878 by Edward John Riley, [1] an Irish expatriate living in Manchester, England. [3]
E.J. Riley started as a local chain of sports retail stores, before branching out into manufacturing in the 1880s. [1] The company first gained fame as a cricket equipment maker, [4] and has been described as the world's largest manufacturer of cricket bats at the time. [5]
From the 1890s, the brand expanded its range to a variety of sports and indoor games, including golf, tennis, lawn bowls, and billiards, [5] the latter becoming its main calling card around 1910. [1] It acquired rights to use Crystalate plastic in its early products, [6] and later marketed a proprietary compound called "Ri-leene". [1]
As its manufacturing business outgrew its retail division by a wide margin, E.J. Riley sold its shops in the early 1920s to focus on its Accrington factory. [1] Founder Riley died in 1926, [1] but the company kept expanding through various acquisitions, and eventually went public in 1977 amidst the British snooker boom of the era. [7]
In the 1990s, Riley's fortunes began to change and, despite exporting its products to 67 countries throughout the world, [8] the factory—by then based in Hapton—closed its doors in 2002. [9] Rights to the brand were acquired by competitor BCE (originally Bristol Coin Equipment, later rebranded as Billiard Cues of England), who continues to use the Riley name for one of their product lines. [7] [2]
The Billiards Company, a Dublin-based company owned by former players John Benton and Darren Lennox, used to trade as E.J. Riley Ireland. It was formed in 1994 as a subsidiary of Riley, before going independent in 2002. [10]
As an outlet for its products, the company started a chain of pool halls called Rileys, [1] which is no longer part of the same group. [12]
Cue sports are a wide variety of games of skill played with a cue, which is used to strike billiard balls and thereby cause them to move around a cloth-covered table bounded by elastic bumpers known as cushions. Cue sports are also collectively referred to as billiards, though this term has more specific connotations in some varieties of English.
Snooker is a cue sport played on a rectangular billiards table covered with a green cloth called baize, with six pockets: one at each corner and one in the middle of each long side. First played by British Army officers stationed in India in the second half of the 19th century, the game is played with 22 balls, comprising a white cue ball, 15 red balls and 6 other balls—a yellow, green, brown, blue, pink and black—collectively called 'the colours'. Using a snooker cue, the individual players or teams take turns to strike the cue ball to pot other balls in a predefined sequence, accumulating points for each successful pot and for each foul committed by the opposing player or team. An individual frame of snooker is won by the player who has scored the most points, and a snooker match ends when a player wins a predetermined number of frames.
English billiards, called simply billiards in the United Kingdom and in many former British colonies, is a cue sport that combines the aspects of carom billiards and pool. Two cue balls and a red object ball are used. Each player or team uses a different cue ball. It is played on a billiards table with the same dimensions as one used for snooker and points are scored for cannons and pocketing the balls.
A billiard ball is a small, hard ball used in cue sports, such as carom billiards, pool, and snooker. The number, type, diameter, color, and pattern of the balls differ depending upon the specific game being played. Various particular ball properties such as hardness, friction coefficient, and resilience are important to accuracy.
A billiard table or billiards table is a bounded table on which cue sports are played. In the modern era, all billiards tables provide a flat surface usually made of quarried slate, that is covered with cloth, and surrounded by vulcanized rubber cushions, with the whole thing elevated above the floor. More specific terms are used for specific sports, such as snooker table and pool table, and different-sized billiard balls are used on these table types. An obsolete term is billiard board, used in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Pool is the name given to a series of cue sports played on a billiard table. The table has six pockets along the rails, into which balls are shot. Of the many different pool games, the most popular include: eight-ball, blackball, nine-ball, ten-ball, seven-ball, straight pool, one-pocket, and bank pool. Eight-ball is the most frequently played discipline of pool, and it is often thought of as synonymous with "pool".
Clive Harold Everton was an English-born Welsh sports commentator, journalist, author and professional snooker and English billiards player. He founded Snooker Scene magazine, which was first published in 1971, and continued as editor until September 2022. He authored over twenty books about cue sports from 1972 onwards.
The 1970 World Snooker Championship was a professional snooker tournament that took place from 15 October 1969 to 11 April 1970, as an edition of the World Snooker Championship. The final was held at Victoria Hall in London from 6 to 11 April 1970. The championship was sponsored by Player's No.6 for the second and last time.
Allison Fisher is an English American professional pool and former professional snooker player. She is considered one of the greatest female snooker players & widely regarded as the greatest female pool player of all time.
The World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA) is the governing body of professional snooker and English billiards. It is headquartered in Bristol, England. Founded as the Professional Billiard Players Association (PBPA) in 1946, with Joe Davis as chairman, it was revived in 1968 after some years of inactivity and renamed the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association in 1970. Its current chairman is Jason Ferguson.
Brunswick Bowling & Billiards was the business segment of Brunswick Corporation that historically encompassed three divisions. Billiards, which was the company's original product line, expanded to include other table games such as table tennis, air hockey, and foosball. Brunswick began manufacturing Bowling equipment and products in the 1880s. The bowling equipment line was sold to BlueArc Capital Management in 2015, which continues to use the Brunswick name among other brands. Brunswick began to directly operate Bowling centers in the mid 1960s. In 2014, the bowling centers were sold to Bowlero Corporation, which phased out the Brunswick name by 2020. The billiard operations were placed in the fitness equipment division, which was spun-off into Life Fitness in 2019. In 2022, the Brunswick Billiards line was sold to Escalade Sports.
Carom billiards and pool are two types of cue sports or billiards-family games, which as a general class are played with a stick called a cue which is used to strike billiard balls, moving them around a cloth-covered billiard table bounded by rubber cushions attached to the confining rails of the table.
The 1951 World Snooker Championship was a professional snooker tournament. The final was held at the Tower Circus in Blackpool, England.
American snooker is a cue sport played almost exclusively in the United States, and strictly on a recreational, amateur basis. Diverging from the original game of snooker, rules for American snooker date back to at least 1925, and have been promulgated by the Billiard Congress of America (BCA) since the mid-20th century. The game is in decline, as the standardized international rules have largely supplanted it.
A cue stick is an item of sporting equipment essential to the games of pool, snooker and carom billiards. It is used to strike a ball, usually the cue ball. Cues are tapered sticks, typically about 57–59 inches long and usually between 16 and 21 ounces (450–600 g), with professionals gravitating toward a 19-ounce (540 g) average. Cues for carom tend toward the shorter range, though cue length is primarily a factor of player height and arm length. Most cues are made of wood, but occasionally the wood is covered or bonded with other materials including graphite, carbon fiber or fiberglass. An obsolete term for a cue, used from the 16th to early 19th centuries, is billiard stick.
The ACBS Asian Snooker Championship is the premier non-professional snooker tournament in Asia. The event series is sanctioned by the Asian Confederation of Billiard Sports and started from 1984. Mostly, the winner of the tournament qualifies for the next season of the Professional Snooker Tour.
Robby Foldvari is an Australian player of snooker, English billiards, and pool. He is a multi-year World Billiards Champion, and a national-level champion in both snooker and nine-ball pool (2012), as well as a World Games competitor (2013). Outside of competition, he is a coach and television commentator. Foldvari won the Australian Open 8 Ball Pool Championship (2015), completing the royal flush of national titles in every cuesports discipline. In June 2016 he won the Australian Open 10 ball Pool Championship
The World Women's Billiards Championship is an English billiards tournament, first held in 1931 when organised by the cue sports company Burroughes and Watts then run from 1932 by the Women's Billiards Association (WBA). It is currently run under the auspices of World Billiards Ltd (WBL), a subsidiary company of the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association.
Slosh is a cue sport played on a snooker table. The game features seven balls, coloured white, yellow, green, brown, blue, pink and black, with points being scored for pocketing or playing caroms and cannons off object balls. The game is played to a score of 100 points, or a length of 30 minutes. First played in the early 1900s, not much is known about the game's origins.
E.J.Riley of Accrington advertised the 'George Hirst Autograph bat' ('Every bat personally selected by Geo H Hirst').
