Red River Billiards banks on a hit that includes good old Louisiana cooking at Looosiana Bistreaux

Chalk up your cue sticks and rack up those billiard balls, because pool is going to be trending again with the opening of Red River Billards, located at 2090 Brookshire Arena Road in Bossier City.

Not since the days when Guys and Dolls operated a pool hall in the basement of the Lane Building in downtown Shreveport in the 1970s has there been a venue for billiards players and would-be pool sharks. Red River Billiards owner Josh Morvant hopes to change that.

Red River Billiards features 28 pool tables as well as an in-house dining establishment, Looosiana Bistreaux, for hungry pool sharks and spectators. The pool hall is open Sunday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. and Fridays and Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 2 a.m.

“I grew up playing billiards,” Morvant said.

“As a matter of fact, I know my grandmother somewhere has a picture of me sleeping on a pool table. I was, like, 2 years old. So it’s in my blood. It’s in my family.”

So how did Red River Billiards come about?

Like most people, Morvant and his father had a lot of down time during the Covid pandemic and talked about operating a pool hall of their own. “We put it on paper, and I started to put numbers to it, and it started to make sense, so we went ahead and pushed forward with it. … This was my retirement gift from me to him,” Morvant said.

Different billiards leagues will play out of this new facility as well as the casual pool player, and anybody is welcome to join those leagues.

Morvant said he recalls when Guys and Dolls attracted local pool players. “We want to bring billiards back to the way it was in the ’80s and ’90s. After the 2000s to now, it’s just been buried in barrooms. You associate pool tables with a barroom, smoke-filled, dingy. We wanted to change it, and we wanted to make it more upscale.

“We’ve teamed up with a lot of folks, with other businesses that have big influences in billiards, and we’re kind of letting them tell the story.”

Why is pool so popular? What is the attraction in a sport in which a ball is knocked into a pocket alongside a felt-topped table? “It’s an interesting sport,” Morvant said. “To me, it’s the most challenging sport that there is to play, in my opinion. It’s the only sport that requires you to play with more than one object on the table. Tennis has one ball, ping-pong has one ball, bowling has one ball, soccer has one ball, football has one ball, golf has one ball. Billiards has 15, and you have to learn to navigate through those balls on the table. You have to learn how to navigate how the table is laid out.

“There’s a lot of physics and a lot of geometry that goes into the game of billiards — physics more than geometry.” That includes things like how a ball reacts off of another one or in what trajectory a struck ball moves. “You’re dealing with Newton’s Law,” he said. “It’s just an interesting sport. It really is.”

Red River Billiards held a ribbon-cutting on Tuesday, July 22, and officially opened for business the following Friday afternoon.

Although billiards seems to have all but vanished from the Shreveport-Bossier nightlife scene, having been driven into the barroom, “that’s not what we’re about,” said Morvant. Billiards might have moved away from the public eye, but it is still a thriving sport locally.

“Shreveport-Bossier has one of the largest league plays in the United States.” According to Morvant, there are 3,000 active players that play on a weekly basis in Shreveport and Bossier City, maybe more. “You just don’t see it. It kind of goes under the radar.

“I wanted to bring a new level to the game that no one around here has never experienced. And that’s why we built this facility.”