The Billiard Congress of America (BCA) is the governing body for cue sports in the United States and Canada, and the regional member organization of the World Pool-Billiard Association (WPA). It was established under this name in 1948 as a non-profit trade organization in order to promote the sport and organize its players via tournaments at various levels. The BCA is headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado. The voting members of the organization are mostly equipment manufacturers.
The BCA publishes an annual rule and record book that incorporates the WPA world standardized rules for games such as nine-ball, eight-ball, ten-ball and straight pool, as well as rules for other games that are not presently the subject of international competition, such as one pocket, bank pool, cowboy pool, rotation, American snooker, and Chicago among many others. The BCA holds an annual trade show, the International Billiards & Home Recreation Expo. Also annually, it inducts great players, and those who have made great contributions to the sport, into the BCA Hall of Fame.
History
The origins of the BCA began with the National Billiard Association of America (NBAA), founded July 25, 1921. The organization rapidly became the de facto governing body of the sport in the United States, with 35,000 members by 1928, and was closely tied to the Brunswick-Balke-Collender company, a major equipment manufacturer. After a decline in influence in the late 1930s, in part owing to a dispute with world carom billiards champion Willie Hoppe, the NBAA reformed in 1941 as the Billiard Association of America (BAA). Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, and calling itself "the Governing Body of Billiards", the BAA produced a concise, portable, inexpensive rulebook of carom and pool games that was to serve as the model for future BCA releases. The BAA in turn became the BCA in 1947. The BCA formed with, and for several years shared offices with, the promotional trade association National Billiard Council (NBC), now defunct. Early BCA rulebooks were essentially identical to the 1946 BAA edition, including the cover art and the absence of the increasingly popular game nine-ball from the ruleset. (Nine-ball did not appear until the 1967 edition.) The BCA rulebooks have remained in near-annual continuous publication to the present day.
In 2000, the BCA made the major move of adopting the World Pool-Billiard Association's standardized rules for eight-ball, nine-ball, and other games subject to international professional competition. The BCA had by this time become the national affiliate of the WPA. In the new edition of the rules, the organization expressed a commitment to seeing pool and carom billiards become Olympic sports (and in fact selected Colorado Springs for its new headquarters for proximity to the US Olympic Committee). The rules changes have not been without controversy, as some of them upset US player expectations; various leagues have ignored the new rules and continued with traditional US rules (e.g., in the game of eight-ball, legally pocketing the 8 ball on the has commonly been treated as an instant win).
BCA Hall of Fame
International Billiard & Home Recreation Expo
The BCA's annual Billiard Expo (as it is known for short, or simply the Expo, within the industry) is the largest mostly-cue-sports trade convention in the world, and despite its broad name is primarily focused on pool (pocket billiards). It has been held in various locations, most frequently Las Vegas, Nevada, since its founding in 1984. The Expo is exclusively sponsored by the BCA (and its members), and is managed by William T. Glasgow, Inc. of Orland Park, Illinois. The expressed purpose of the event is to "provide industry manufacturers, distributors, retailers, dealers and poolroom operators an annual venue for new business opportunities, including education, new products and networking." Vendor attendance in 2006 was nearly 300 companies filling between 1,300 and 1,400 booth spaces. The June 25–27, 2009 event at the Sands Expo and Convention Center in Las Vegas saw 116 exhibitor in 412 booth spaces, with 1,120 buy attendees. The next event will be held June 14 (Wednesday) through 16 (Friday), 2010, at the Las Vegas Convention Center, with registration for attendees opening February 15. These were not the original dates, and some debate surrounded the matter, with the dates being finalized only as late as September 2009, and chosen to ensure maximum attendance by billiard entrepreneurs, most of whom have business peaks on weekends. By the end of the 2009 Expo, 65 companies had already contracted for 326 booth spaces at the 2010 Expo.