The real problem isn't the price tag
Every quarter, I get a call from a shop owner who starts the conversation the same way: 'Simonis is too expensive.' They point at a generic roll of cloth, quote a number that's roughly half of what I'm asking, and wait for me to defend the difference.
I get it. I sit on the budget. For the last seven years, I've managed purchasing for a mid-size billiard supply company. The annual spend on cloth alone is around $80,000—maybe $75,000 in a slow year, I'd have to check the ledger. I've negotiated with fourteen or fifteen suppliers, and I've logged every order in our cost tracking system. When someone asks for 'pool table felt Simonis,' the default answer is 860 Tournament Blue. That wasn't my decision at first. It became mine after I did the math.
The surface problem: price per roll
Here's the thing: price per roll is the easiest number to compare. It's printed right on the invoice. Generic cloth costs less. Simonis 860 Tournament Blue costs more. And the difference looks like pure margin. But it isn't.
The 'cloth is cloth' thinking comes from an era when there were maybe two mills making worsted wool, and they all used similar equipment. That's changed. Modern cloth is engineered differently—weave density, surface finish, static resistance, and color consistency vary from mill to mill. Two rolls can look identical in the warehouse and play completely different on the table.
I think about cloth the same way I think about barbell bars. Two bars can both say '45 lb' on the sleeve. One feels solid under a heavy squat. The other whips. The spec sheet doesn't show you that. You only find out under load.
The deeper problem: What you're actually buying
You're not buying cloth. You're buying a playing surface. And that surface is what your customer touches from the moment the table is delivered. For a dealer or a repair service, the cloth is the part of the job you have to live with.
Let's start with installation labor. If a cloth stretches unevenly, or the nap doesn't settle, or the color shifts under lighting, you're back on site. One callback will wipe out the difference between a budget roll and a Simonis 860 Tournament Blue roll on two or three installations. I've seen it happen to us. More than once, if I'm honest.
Then there's color consistency. Tournament Blue isn't just a name. It's a target. Pantone's color matching guidelines use Delta E to measure tolerance: a Delta E below 2 is generally considered acceptable for brand-critical colors; above 4, the difference is visible to almost anyone. If a supplier can't tell you their color tolerance, you're guessing. Simonis has a spec. That matters when a customer orders two tables six months apart and expects them to match.
And then there's speed. People ask me, 'Is 860 faster than 760?' My answer is always 'depends.' The relationship between cloth and ball speed is a lot like treadmill speed to pace: the number on the display is meaningless without context. Incline, calibration, body weight—all of it changes the result. On a table, the same variables include cloth weight, weave, the slate, and the balls. A number alone doesn't tell you how it plays.
What ignoring this costs you
I started tracking total cost of ownership after getting burned on hidden costs twice. Twice? Three times by now. The formula is simple: base price + shipping + installation labor + callbacks + customer goodwill. I audited our 2023 orders and found that almost a quarter of our budget-cloth installations required a redo or a partial refund. That's not a saving. That's a liability.
Never expected the cheap option to be the expensive one. The surprise wasn't the price difference. It was how much hidden value came with the 'expensive' cloth—consistent color, predictable stretch, fewer callbacks. That doesn't show up on the invoice. It shows up on the profit-and-loss statement at the end of the year.
There's also the snooker vs pool table size question. A pool table is usually 7, 8, or 9 feet; a snooker table is typically 12 by 6 feet. The size changes how much cloth you need, how much tension the cloth has to hold, and how fast it wears. The ideal cloth for a 9-foot pool table might feel wrong on a snooker table. That's why we don't buy 'one cloth to rule them all.' We spec per job.
And when the cloth is wrong, the customer doesn't blame the mill. They blame the company whose name is on the delivery sticker. That's the quality-perception problem. A $50 difference per table either buys you a customer who sends referrals or costs you a customer who posts reviews. I know which one I prefer.
After the 2023 audit, we changed our procurement policy: no cloth purchase without a spec sheet, and no first-time purchase without a test install. It slowed down the buying process. It also cut our callback rate to almost zero. That's a trade I'll make every time.
The short version of the fix
I'm not going to stretch this into a sales pitch. The solution is straightforward:
- For pool tables, Simonis 860 Tournament Blue is the safest procurement decision I know. It's the tournament standard, it installs predictably, and the color consistency holds.
- For customers who want a faster feel—or for snooker tables—Simonis 760 is the cloth I spec. Match the cloth to the game, not to the cheapest roll on the shelf.
- Use Simonis X1 Cleaner. It costs little, it protects the surface, and it tells your customer you care about the part they'll touch for years. I don't have a lab report on how many years it extends a cloth's life, and I won't make one up. What I can say is we have fewer stained tables on the used market.
That's it. No magic. No 'guaranteed to last forever.' Just a cost line I can defend at the end of the quarter.
Simonis 860 Tournament Blue isn't the cheapest cloth you can buy. It's the least expensive cloth I've found when I count every hour, every callback, and every customer who walked in because the table felt right. That's the only math that matters.