Affiliate disclosure

What that means in practice

When you click a product link here and buy something, Amazon pays us a small percentage of the sale. You pay the same price you would have paid arriving there any other way. There is no markup, no code to enter, and nothing about your purchase changes.

This is the entire business model. There is no paid placement on this site, no sponsored post, no advertorial and no brand has ever paid to be included in or moved up a roundup. If that ever changes it will be labelled on the page itself, in the copy, and not only here.

The conflict of interest, stated plainly

A site that earns a percentage of what you spend has an obvious incentive to tell you to spend more. Pretending that incentive does not exist would be worse than naming it, so here is how it is handled.

• Fit comes before product on every page. The most common expensive mistake in this hobby is buying a table that does not fit the room, and the advice that prevents it earns nothing. It is still the first thing on the page, and several pages here talk readers out of a bigger table.
• The cheapest tier is a real recommendation, not a strawman. The starter buildout is built to be genuinely good at its price rather than to make the expensive one look better, and it says plainly which parts of the expensive room are not worth the money for most people.
• We say when not to buy. A conversion top instead of a dedicated table, a 52 in cue instead of a bigger room, a bristle board instead of an electronic one, a used table instead of a new one. Those recommendations reduce what we earn and they are all over the site.
• Nothing is included because it pays better. Commission rates in this category are broadly similar and none of them are high enough to be worth the credibility.

Why some buttons say "find comparable tables"

This deserves its own explanation, because it is unusual and a reader could reasonably be confused by it.

A significant part of the best equipment in this hobby does not sell through retailers at all. Brunswick, Olhausen, Diamond and Connelly pool tables, Champion shuffleboards, Valley-Dynamo commercial tables and Jersey Jack pinball are all sold through their own dealer networks, and you buy them from a dealer with a quote, not from a listing with a price.

We still name those machines where they are genuinely the right answer, because leaving them out would make the advice worse. When we do, two things happen. The page says plainly that the machine is a dealer purchase. And the button next to it runs a search for comparable equipment in that category that you can actually order today, rather than a search for that brand, because searching a retailer for a brand it does not stock lands on nothing useful.

So a button next to a dealer-only table is not claiming to sell you that table. It is offering the closest thing available in that category, and the note beside it says so. If you want that specific machine, the right move is to find its dealer, and we will not pretend otherwise to keep a click on the page.

What we do not do with links

• We do not hide affiliate links. Every outbound product link carries rel="nofollow sponsored", which is the machine-readable version of this page.
• We do not use cloaked or redirecting domains to disguise where a link goes. Hover any button and you will see it goes to Amazon.
• We do not run pop-up offers, exit-intent overlays or countdown timers. No price on this site is ever presented as expiring.
• We do not display live prices. Prices here are the figure at the time the page was compiled and they go stale, which is why every page says to confirm before ordering. A build total on this site is a planning figure.

Analytics

We record which product links get clicked, in aggregate, so we can tell which recommendations people find useful. That data is not personally identifiable to us and is not sold or shared. What we can see is that a given page produced a number of clicks on a given product, and nothing about who you are. The privacy policy covers this in full.

Questions

If something on this site reads as though it were placed rather than recommended, that is worth telling us about. Write to [email protected] through the contact page. The related pages are the disclaimer, which covers the safety and accuracy side, and the about page, which explains how the research is done.