This article was co-authored by wikiHow staff writer, Eric McClure. Eric McClure is an editing fellow at wikiHow where he has been editing, researching, and creating content since 2019. A former educator and poet, his work has appeared in Carcinogenic Poetry, Shot Glass Journal, Prairie Margins, and The Rusty Nail. His digital chapbook, The Internet, was also published in TL;DR Magazine. He was the winner of the Paul Carroll award for outstanding achievement in creative writing in 2014, and he was a featured reader at the Poetry Foundation’s Open Door Reading Series in 2015. Eric holds a BA in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an MEd in secondary education from DePaul University.
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In billiards, a scratch refers to a game foul involving the cue ball. Usually, scratches occur when a player accidentally pockets the cue ball or hits an illegal ball, but there are other lesser-known scratches out there. There are also a lot of misconceptions out there about scratches, probably because there are so many different formats of pool and every regulatory organization has its own ruleset (although each ruleset is mostly identical). In this article, we’ll cover all of this and more.