Loose Pool Table Felt (Cloth)

Being in the Mid-Atlantic region, having lots of homes on the water, and humid conditions make for sometimes bad conditions for pool table cloth. Time and time again we are contacted about loose cloth on customers tables. Sometimes a potential customer will worry about loose cloth, or a pool table's cloth of just a few year may start to get loose.

True story, on a humid day in a friends basement 5 years ago we put brand new beautiful Championship 3030 tour edition blue cloth on a AMF pool table. The cloth looked great, was stretched as much as it possibly could , and played perfect for 5 days. On day 5 the air conditioning broke in the basement, the temperature reached 85 degrees in the home, and it was quite humid in the basement. The broken a/c stayed like that for 4 days, during that four days the felt loosened up. The excess humidity relaxed the cloth in certain spots, made the table play slow, and made the cloth loose. Now I really started scratching my head, this was my friends table, I took several hours perfecting the cloth work on this table, I KNEW, that it couldn't have been my work, it was flawless. Then I realized that the cloth had relaxed because of the humidity, so a simple restretch and we were good to go.

Moral of the story is, humidity can loosen your cloth. If you even think, for a second, that your room may be a bit too humid for your cloth grab yourself a dehumidifier, it will extend the life of your cloth and make you not think your shooting pool in the mud. If you are too late, and need to have your cloth restrected give us a call and we will give you a great price on our "humidity restretch special".

Below we have included a little information on billiard cloth. Very helpful in painting a picture of what pool felt really is....

There are two basic grades of cloth for a pool table. The pool table ‘felt’ is not felt at all, but rather a woven fabric.

Some cloths are available with a wool / nylon blend, with speed cloths normally developed in this way. These cloths would tyopically comprise of about 80% wool and 20% nylon content.

100% English wool cloth is also available and is fitted to all new pool tables as standard. This cloth would also be used on snooker tables.

The higher grade cloth has a higher thread density, allows the ball to move about 8% faster and provides greater durability. The color of cloth is cosmetic. The only color concern has to do with color blindness. It may be difficult to differentiate the ball colors against certain colors of cloth if one is color blind.