iPhone · iPhone Duo · iPad · Apple TV
Pool Position
A scorebook for two rivals who play real pool, week after week.
Score every set at the table, keep the all-time record, remember the halls and play your own music. Next to it, an early look at a 3D pool game that keeps score in the same book, with your phone as the cue.
Tap who won the rack. That's it.
Built to be used with a cue in one hand. The whole set fits on one screen, with nothing to scroll.
- Who breaks is shown big until the first rack is won, so there's no arguing over it.
- Solids or stripes for each player, and the wild moments: 8 on the break, ran the table, scratched on the 8, golden break.
- Undo the last rack or scrap the set, kept well away from the winner buttons.
- The score sits on the Lock Screen as a Live Activity, with "won the rack" buttons, and both phones update at once.
The rivalry, all time
Every set goes in the book, so the record settles the arguments.
- Sets and racks won, split by 8-ball and 9-ball.
- Your record on solids versus stripes, and how often each wild moment happened to whom.
- Trends: the race over time, by month and by hall.
- History of every set: the score and where it was played.
Your hall, your playlist
The places you play are part of the rivalry, so the book keeps them.
- Halls with photos, notes and a map, and the record at each one.
- The nearest hall is picked for you when a set starts.
- A jukebox bar on every page: an Apple Music playlist for the book that plays on both phones.
- The look comes from real photos of a pool hall: a table seen from the near rail, lit by a lamp that shifts as you tilt the phone. Pick the cloth color.
Made for the foldable first
Pool Position was designed on the iPhone Duo and fits every way it folds.
- Folded: the whole app on the cover screen, tabs in the side strip.
- Half open like a laptop during a set: the score up top, the buttons below, nothing on the fold.
- Open flat: a tablet layout with room for the record, the history and the map side by side.
- Just as much at home on a regular iPhone and on iPad.
Then there's the game.
There are plenty of pool games. Most are built around coins and cue upgrades, or swipe to shoot. This one is tied to the pool you actually play: the same rival, the same book, the same playlist. And the stroke itself is the skill.
Pull back, push through straight
You don't swipe a power meter. You pull back on the stroke pad and push through, like a real cue, and the game reads how straight you were and whether you followed through. After every shot it tells you.
3.0 m/s · medium. Straight, followed through.
Walk around the table to line up, set the cue's angle, put spin on with the tip, and chalk the cue. Watch any shot again from the overhead view.
Real rules, and it counts in the book
- Pass and play 8-ball under APA rules, or 9-ball with a proper legal break.
- Play a set for the book: each rack is recorded once both players OK it, marked with a controller in Record.
- Solids and stripes and the wild moments come from the game itself, the same way you'd tag them at a real table.
- Practice with the table to yourself: no rules, ball in hand whenever you want it.
- Rematch with the winner breaking, and a stats card when the game ends.
Couch pool. Your phone is the cue.
Open Pool Position on the Apple TV and the table fills the big screen. Everyone's iPhone joins with a four-digit code, then you aim and stroke on the phone in your hand. Pass the phone when it's the other player's turn. No game controllers needed.
How the game works
Physics you can check
Pool players are picky, so the game doesn't fake it. The simulation is written in plain Swift and follows published models of how pool balls really behave, ported from the open-source pooltool project and tested against its reference shots. It runs on a fixed 1 millisecond step, so the same shot always plays out the same way, and the 3D view only draws what the physics decides.
It has to hold 60 frames a second on every device it runs on.
About this project. Pool Position is a personal project, built for one real rivalry and shared freely. The scorebook is free; the game is an early preview, still in testing and changing every week. There's more about the app, plus privacy and support, at pool.joshramey.com.
Screenshots are real: recent builds running in Apple's iPhone, iPhone Duo, iPad and Apple TV simulators, with a sample book. Jordan and Casey are made-up players.