B Q E Cafe Billiard

This place is big, clean, and nice. Lots of room, nice facility. In new york, such a thing is hard to find in a billiards place. That being said, I won't come back here again.

They have signs saying if you're not playing, not to go into the game area. That seems a reasonable idea, but it's a ridiculous rule. I've been to tons of pool places around and I've never seen a rule like that. How are you supposed to enforce it? What if you aren't a pool player but your boyfriend is there with his buddies and you have to wait for him? What do you do, wait outside? Wait at the bar alone which is far away from the tables? There's all sorts of scenarios where you shouldn't or can't be a paying player but need to go onto the game floor. Even in tight-spaced NYC, I've never seen a rule like this. I've spent hours upon hours in fatcat, for example, never buying a drink and not playing or paying for a pool table. I pay my $3 entry fee and listen to jazz all night and chat with my friends. No trouble. But here at bqe there's this odd rule. Maybe on a weekend it gets crazy and that seems sort of a reasonable rule, but these people have a lot of space. It's like walking into a restaurant and saying hello to your friends but the waiter suddenly forces you to pay $5 for the privilege of walking inside. Maybe they are doing this to keep riff raff out or something, I don't know, but it's a dumb rule regardless. If this was a big issue, maybe they should do like fatcat and actually charge an entry fee.

It's especially idiotic to attempt to force this rule on a weeknight when the place is almost empty, which is the case I ran into. The cashier, who I assume is the owner, gave our party a hard time and eventually did not charge the people who did not play. However, the people in our party also claimed that they seemed to have been mysteriously overcharged a slight bit after we all left. The rude behavior and damage was done, they were being unreasonable and failing at common sense.

Let me tell the owner of this place one thing. I am a popular social events planner with several thousand potential customers at my call that I can move to places that I find in the city. When I first walked into this place I seriously considered bringing a lot of people into it, possibly more than once. I look for large places to entertain lots of people - good people, young professionals - not sketchy unruly kids. Especially on weeknights that aren't as busy. I now refuse to do this, and you, bqe billiards, have lost potentially a metric ton of money and business.

I only come here to play pool. At $5 dollars an hour per person, you get what you paid for. This isn't  a bad place if you just want to practice on your pool game. The tables are decent (some tables have small tears on the felt) and the house cues are just okay with the average wear and tear.

The music at this place is all over the place. Sometimes it's really loud, sometimes it's low, sometimes they play hit songs, sometimes they play weird ass songs. There's this one guy that has overcharged me a few times. He checks his monitor for the price and closes it real quick and then adds a dollar or fifty cents or whatever number he comes up with on top. So make sure you look at the monitor when you pay. Granted its only $5/hr, but it's just not right.

All in all, I return to this place because it's cheap and the tables are decent.

I love this place! Whenever I go to play pool it is my go-to spot. I believe it is 10$ an hour which is great because everywhere else is about 15$. Do not go here for food or drinks-it's not worth it. If you want to play a good game of pool or ping pong then this is the place!