Billiard Congress of America

Billiard Congress of America (BCA) is a governing body for cue sports in North America (here defined as the United States and Canada exclusively), 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 a rule book that includes rules merged with the WPA World Standardized Rules for games such as nine-ball, eight-ball, and straight pool, as well as rules for other games that are not presently the subject of international competition, such as 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.

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 champion Willie Hoppe, the NBAA reformed in 1941 as the Billiard Association of America (BAA or BA of A). Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, and calling itself "the Governing Body of Billiards", the BAA produced a concise, portable, inexpensive rulebook of carom and pocket billiards games, that was to serve as the model for future BCA releases. The BAA in turn became the BCA, 1947–1948. 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 still did not appear in the 1963 rulebook, despite being one of the pool gambling games of choice by that era, but did appear in the 1967 and all subsequent editions.) The BCA rulebooks have remained in near-annual continuous publication to the present day.

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