Right on cue: Billiards Expo at Valley Forge

Dylan Ross lay faceup on the pool table between two end pockets, a red ball resting above his lips on a cue chalk the 10-year-old clenched in his teeth.

The crowd of onlookers, among several thousand gathered at the Valley Forge Convention Center on Saturday for the 19th annual Super Billiards Expo, fidgeted a bit as trick-shot expert Steve Lillis placed a cue ball on a chalk and rested both on the table's rail.

Lillis' intention, he announced, was to shoot the cue ball with enough force to make it jump and move the one balanced above Dylan's mouth without "making him need braces afterward."

But wait! Suddenly, young Dylan reached into his pocket to answer his phone.

"We'll pause a moment for this word," quipped Lillis, as Dylan got off the table to take a call from his father.

After a brief chat, the Manhattan boy got back into position, and Lillis pulled off the shot.

"I barely felt it," a seemingly unfazed Dylan said.

Lillis, who founded Gospel Trick Shot Ministries and calls himself "God's Pool Player," was just one of scores of professionals demonstrating the finer points of the game during the four-day event, which ends Sunday.

Promoter Allen Hopkins, whom Inside Pool magazine calls "Billiards Renaissance Man," is the organizer of what publisher J.R. Calvert says is the game's largest trade show, with more than 150 exhibitors.

Hopkins said 3,000 men, women, and children, ranging in age and skill, had signed up to compete. With so many players, Richard Phillippi Jr. of Pasadena, Md., who makes custom cues, spent every minute of every show at his lathe repairing and cleaning sticks.

"I've been doing this for the last 22 years, joining my father in his work," said Phillippi, adding that most of his customers are amateur players: "The professionals are usually signed up with big companies."

Scott Mellor and son Dillon, 17, of Langhorne, were warming up at a table about a half-hour before the teenager was to compete.

A pool player since he turned 7, the younger Mellor began competing at the Valley Forge expo at 13. He appeared relaxed Saturday as competition time drew near.

"I only get nervous when I play older people," he said.

It might just be the opposite for his father. Scott Mellor competed against a younger player Friday night - and lost.

"He had driven all the way from Canada," the older Mellor said, clearly in awe of his competitor's effort. "It was an 11-hour ride."

In competition, Mellor and his son typically play nine-ball, long the most popular tournament game. The balls are racked as a diamond shape, with the nine ball in the middle.

On Saturday, the tournament game was 10-ball, racked just about the same way but with the 10-ball in the middle.

"We are in a transition to 10-ball among the pros," said Calvert, the Inside Pool publisher. Many in the game thought nine-ball was too easy, "so 10-ball was settled on as more challenging," he said.

Another feature of the tournament was a "three-cushion billiards round robin," explained by Calvert this way:

"The table has no pockets, and most of the players are wearing three-piece suits. It is a very difficult game."

The game has grown phenomenally in the last 20 years, with women increasingly "bringing something to the party, giving the game character," said Calvert, whose magazine has a circulation of 25,000, with an additional 400,000 followers online and 12 million viewers of his YouTube videos. "It has really become a family sport."

The game is not without its stand-up comics, who blend rapid-fire jokes with trick shots and instruction.

Tom Rossman, known as Dr. Cue, is one of the classics.

"I've spent 50-something years missing balls," he told the audience as he set up a shot. "It is always a shock when they go in."

Whether by design or otherwise, the shot did not make the pocket.

"You know," Rossman told his audience wistfully, "I've done this shot on the radio for I-can't-count-how-many years, and I never missed it."