Celebrities And Their Games Rooms

It is no great secret that the rich and famous like to pick up a pool cue and relax in order to get away from the grueling spectacle of celebrity.

Check out Celebrity Cribs and you’ll see a host of games rooms in mansions in Beverley Hills or the Hamptons. You’ll notice a pool table taking pride of place in them.

Naturally, with the mega millions rolling around the A List celebrities of this world, you are unlikely to find the dingy, beer stained, dead cushioned pool tables that you are going to see standing in the corner of your local bar.

Money will naturally lead to more expensive pool tables of quality and class. Dwight Eisenhower installed four tables in Camp David when he had the opportunity to do so, and you can’t picture anything but perfect nap and polished rails on the ones he put in there.

It is all about quality at the end of the day, and presidents such as Carter, Nixon and Bill Clinton apparently all enjoyed knocking around on the exclusive tables at Camp David as well. Whether or not quality of pool table makes for a better player or not, is totally up for debate, and you’re not going to meet Barack Obama in a bar, trying to hustle you out of $20 to find out.

Former British Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, along with former French Premier Charles de Galle apparently liked a game of pool as well. But unless you become the next Prime PM, President or Royalty of a country, you’re unlikely to know just how well the incumbent President plays on the highly crafted Camp David tables.

Iron Chef Bobby Flay likes nothing more than retiring to his game room to get in a few frames of pool. This is his big relaxation away from the pressures of the kitchen. Flay likes to play against himself in his game room sanctuary, as pool, for Presidents and Iron Chefs alike, offers a way to distress and to get some challenging fun into life.

Hollywood superstar Nicholas Cage is another of the glitterati who likes to close the doors and lock himself away in his games room. His illustrious house out in Beverley Hills boasts an expensive pool table, and it sort of carries on a tradition because Cage’s house used to be owned by crooner Dean Martin who also had a good eye for the game. Pool, it bridges generations and class alike. Actress Eva Longoria also had a big, luxurious game room in her California home as well, with the Desperate Housewife a little bit partial to handling a cue.

The list of famous celebrity pool players go on, from Julia Roberts, Gemma Atkinson, Neve Campbell, Christopher Walken, John Wayne and even Sean Connory liking to retire away and get some cueing action in. If a games room is cool enough for James Bond, then it’s definitely worth having. You can find pictures of these stars getting down at the table, which is something of a humbling sight.

Games rooms housing pool tables in the mansions of the rich and famous really are more common than you may think. Imagine the thousands of dollars being spent on some of the most high quality tables around, and naturally putting them in equally classy surroundings to adorn the room like a showcase centrepiece. It may be like saving up for a table and putting one in your Man Cave in the basement of your own house, but the attraction of the pool table really knows no bounds.

But while the celebrities can splash the cash and afford themselves high quality, you wonder how far they will go. Is nearly $200,000 dollars for a pool table a little too much? The Luxury Billiard table goes for around that, and comes with sights (triangles used for lining up shots) which are inlaid with a choice of gold or platinum. There is even an automatic drawer to house your cues and your balls for safe keeping, and the table features its own built in rack. Press a button and the rack pops up out of the table.

For nearly a couple of hundred grand, that is what money can buy you. Maybe the Obscura Cuelight goes even further, as it projects images on the surface of the table. So when you strike a ball, you can marvel at how it looks like water rippling underneath the moving balls. But it matters not the surface, the money spent on the table, the game, the passion for mastering the art is the same from your basement to the A List mansions and the White House.

This is a guest post written by Lee Jackson. Lee works for Liberty Games an online retailer, specializing in pool dining tables as well as other games room equipment.