Billiards in Cagayan de Oro
When I first came to Cagayan de Oro back in 2004 I began going to Ralf’s Sports Bar, where there are five full-sized pool tables. To shoot some pool and to meet some people. I like some things about Ralfs, but there’s a lot of stuff I don’t like. The bathrooms are seriously yuk! The only thing I’ve ever said good about them was “at least no one has thrown up in there, yet”.
The other day I was in Ralfs playing pool with another American ex-pat and I saw a roach crawl out of one of the table pockets. A few minutes later I saw a roach crawl across the bar, and several times I saw a roach under the pool table. I do not know if it was one roach or several. I suspect it was more than just one though.
One thing nice about Ralfs is that a lot of people go there. If you want a glimpse of Cagayan de Oro night life, Ralfs, and the sister disco (downstairs) Mojo’s should definitely be checked out.
However, if you are serious about playing pool, and don’t like playing on ratty tables, then just one block away is a place called “Racks”. It’s on the third floor, above Bo’s Cafe, on Velez Street, near the corner of Hayes Street. This place used to be called “Time Out”, but with the new owners have come some remodeling and new tables. Actually the tables are reconditioned Brunswick tables. These tables have really fast carpet, and when I was there the other night I actually saw an employee brushing the carpets clean with an authentic billiard table carpet brush.
They also had some very good chicken lollipops at Racks. (Chicken Lollipop is when you take the either a chicken leg, or the part of the wing that looks like a mini-chicken leg, and you cut the tendons at the lower end of the bone so that the meat puffs up like a mushroom around the other end of the bone. I don’t know why KFC never tried this. This makes the bone more like a useful handle rather than a tooth-scraper.) They had decent Kinilaw also, not the best I’ve had, but very fresh. I bet the fish it came from hadn’t even stopped breathing by the time I finished woofing it down.
There’s also 13 tons of air conditioning at Racks and they are not shy about using it (two 5-ton units and one 3-ton unit). My nipples actually got hard while playing pool there, a rare occurrance in the Philippines outside my own bedroom, where the air conditioner only gets shut down when there’s a power failure. At Ralfs, the air conditioners are only turned on if you ask them, and you have to ask them to turn on each one individually. There’s 15 tons of air conditioning available at Ralfs (five 3-ton units), but I have never even gotten a goose bump in Ralfs.
I have an American ex-pat friend, Jon Clawson, who I met at Ralfs back in August 2003, who used to play pool there every Friday and Saturday night, but left after some gang fight broke out there and he had to jump over the bar to get out of the mishmash. Jon now plays at a place called “Moorish”, across from Lexis Bar, and next door to Lexis Grill. Moorish has no music, so Jon keeps a boombox behind the bar and plays his own CDs. One of Jon’s major complaints about Ralfs was always the music, not only being so loud, but the lyrics, the lick my crack, suck my… type stuff.
Moorish has two pool tables. The best one is closest to the bar. However, this table is not level. So out of level that if you have trouble with a shot, just bank the ball towards the low corner at a slow speed, and if you are anywhere close to lining up the pocket the ball will sink.
I will try to get Jon to try Racks. Other than the stair climb to the 3rd floor, there’s no other negative I can mention about Racks. The bathrooms are clean, the food is good, the tables the best in CdO.
Tables are P150 per hour on Fridays and Saturdays, P100 per hour on Sundays, and P120 per hour Monday through Thursday.