Billiards club

At the end of the 1990's the former meeting hall of the Jan Hus Congregational Church, later the Brno Civil Engineering Labour Union Club, became home to TJ Billiard Brno, a club with a long tradition. On the first pages of the club chronicle we learn that in 1932 the idea of founding a billiards club originated among the Brno billiards players, who usually met in the Passage Club in the Slovan hotel. On 13 November 1933, after several interventions, the statutes were agreed by the Land Bureau and the first constitutive meeting of AKK Brno (The Brno Amateur Billiards Club) took place on 4 December 1933.

A long time has passed since the founding of the club, during which it had to change its name. Many players have been members – good, mediocre, average, as well as stars competing at a European level – such as Zoltan Kovac, a multiple champion of Czechoslovakia. Also current representatives, Marek Faus and Vlastimil Tauterman, as well as the best club player, Martin Bohac, started training here. Today's hectic world seems too fast for games of patience and elegance, nevertheless billiards will always attract its fans. On 4 December 2008 the club celebrated its 75th anniversary and it returned to its original name – AKK Brno. The club currently rents master billiards tables in the official Czech and Moravian Billiards Association games room where championship qualifications regularly take place. At the same time the club offers regular tables for the general public.

The very first world championship was played in New York in 1873, and won by a Frenchman called Garrnier. The game became widely popular around the world – at the beginning of the 20th century there were over 20,000 playing tables in Paris alone. The rise was spontaneous at the beginning but it soon became clear that some sort of control would benefit the whole movement. And so the first associations began to appear. The first was founded in 1895 in the USA, followed by France (1903), Belgium (1906) and Holland (1911).

The Czechs and Slovaks were a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918, so billiards clubs were German at that time. There is plenty of proof that billiards was played – for example the great Mr. J. Pohl from Olomouc (Czech) was an Austrian championship winner. Another fact is that Zabokrtsky, Prague manufactured cues and different sizes of pool tables and exported them to Germany, Russia and England. After Czechoslovaki­a's independen­ce in 1918 the first billiards clubs were founded and championships played. Efforts to establish a billiards association were rewarded in 1935. In that year some of the club representatives met in Pardubice and formed the association preparatory committee. The constitutive meeting took place in Prague, 8 November 1936. (source: CMBS magazine)