Russian Billiards: Table difficulty

What is the difficulty of a billiard table with pockets? Russian Billiards theorist A.Leman was the first man who talked about this. And it was in the 19th century. However, the problem for some reason left on background, and till recently was not raised. Only at the end of 2013 an American scientist and popularizer of billiards Dr. Dave posted on the Web his research on this subject. Interest in understanding of the difficulty of billiard table revived in Russia too.
So, discussions began on the Russian billiard forums. Well it or bad, but the common opinion was not formed till now. In the presented article (consisting of two parts) Sergey Tikhonov examines different approaches to estimate the difficulty of billiard tables and presents his point of view. In addition, he presented the results of numerical calculations that would reveal the relative difficulty of tables for Russian Billiards, Snooker and Pool. According by his results turns out that table for Russian Billiards is stricter than Snooker table only about 15 percent; Russian Billiards table difficulty exceeds Pool table difficulty by about 60 percent. Such estimates are significantly at variance with an existing stereotypical opinion.

RussianBilliardsTableDifficulty.pdf (PDF, 2.73MB)