How to make a small fortune sharking tourists at the pool table

My last article was about dice and this one is a about a game a little closer to my heart, pool. While I appreciate everyone that came in to challenge me in a game of Liars dice last month, it just isn’t feasible to play everyone in pool. Bartenders are usually too busy to play during their shift and the game is often interrupted by work.
Some of my old school readers will remember the pool table at the old Steiner’s before 1999 in what is now occupied by the fantastic restaurant the Harvest Moon. The billiards room, as it was affectionately called, was a misnomer. Located behind a bottleneck in the back of the bar, it was about the size of a small closet and barely contained a bar-sized pool table and certainly not a billiards table (billiards tables have no pockets). The room required the shooter to use a short cue on three walls. Bystanders clung to the wall or sat in a corner to avoid getting poked by a mishandled cue stick.
Since the room was offset from the actual bar and the eyes of the bartender, illegal gambling and smoking often took place back there. One night in 1998 I was doing both since I had finally gotten good at playing pool with only the short cue. This granted me a huge advantage in drunken money games. On top of that, I was on a six-night-a-week mission to earn a little side cash off unsuspecting tourists.
All bar tables are not created equal. Each table has its own set of dings, dead rails, torn or overly smooth felt, grooves, or mismatched balls. It takes a lot of practice on one table to know when a ball, hit too slowly, will drift off the rail right before it drops or that a rail has long since lost any bounce. Here’s some unsolicited good advice: never play someone in pool for money on their own table unless you enjoy giving money away. If that is the case, I have access to a table and would love to play a few games.
So here I am drinking and smoking and generally misspending my youth, when in walks a really good shooter we’ll call Bob. Bob always brought his own cue stick and favored a jacket loudly proclaiming in fancy stitching that he had earned the jacket in a pool tournament. I had played Bob a few times, trading games back and forth, with neither of us losing too much money to the other. He was here for the same reason I was and there were no tourists in sight.
We struck up a small-time game, playing for drinks using league rules over house rules. This means ball in hand on a scratch, call pocket (not shot), and no bank the eight. Loser buys the next round. After a few games, two tourists from Washington moseyed in and grabbed a couple of seats in the corner.
Both tourists were too drunk to play pool but they both wanted to gamble. Each took out of their pockets a fistful of hundred dollar bills and proceeded to loudly bet on each shot of our game. Money I should’ve been sharking was changing hands at a blistering pace but none of it was going to me. I hatched a plan.
I told the tourist that seemed to be betting on me the most that I would be his champion for the night against Bob for a stake in the take. He could call my shots but the harder the shot, the higher the stakes. I promised to play every shot with the short cue. After talking it over with his friend, he agreed.
In the next two hours I witnessed a few thousand dollars change hands, mostly in my benefactor’s favor. When it was all said and done and the tourists had had enough, my boss for the night secretly handed me $500. I waited ‘til after they had left, handed Bob a crisp hundred and the bartender a fifty (10 percent to the bartender being the price of doing business), and walked away with a cool $350 having never put up a dime. Good times.