Tom Reece

Tom Reece (12 August 1873 – 26 October 1953) was a Welsh professional player of English billiards. Reece competed for the World Professional Billiards Championship six times (1912–1914, 1921, 1924, and 1925) but each time finished as runner-up.

In 1907, he scored a record break of 499,135 points over a period of five weeks, without a miss, using an anchor or cradle cannon nurse system. His opponent was Joe Chapman, and the match (which was played to 500,000 points with the express intention of trying to better the recently set record for highest break) was played in Soho, London, England. Under the current rules, which forbid such repetitive nurse shots, it is unlikely that this score will even remotely be approached (the modern-rules world record is a 1276 break by Geet Sethi).^[1] His robotic play went a long way to developing new rules to stop such high breaks based on monotonous, duplicate shots: Immediately after his record was set, rules were implemented such that no more than 25 consecutive cannons could be used; other, more stringent restrictions followed in later years.

References