Philip Capelle

2019 photo of Philip Capelle autographing his instructional book on pool for a fan.

Philip Bryson Capelle (born November 1947) is an American pocket billiards author, instructor, and columnist. He has been active in pocket billiards media as a journalist providing 300-plus monthly articles for Pool & Billiard Magazine from 1996 to 2021. His instruction and tournament coverage has also appeared in Professor Q-Ball, The Grind, AzBilliards,and most prominently on his Facebook page. He has been covering major pool events for nearly a decade online and in print media and is considered by pool's fourth estate as "pool's number one instructional author." His books have all earned rave reviews from a wide range of pool industry experts.

Early Days

Philip Capelle was born in Needham, Massachusetts, in November 1947. His family moved to San Diego, California, when he was two. He attended school in San Diego and graduated from La Jolla High School in 1965. While there, he played on the golf team and in San Diego's excellent junior golf program from age 13 to 17.

Capelle took up pool while a student at University of California, Berkeley at age 21, and he has played and participated in the sport ever since. He graduated from Berkeley in 1970 with a B.S. in Business Administration.

After college, he practiced and competed at pool full-time for the next five years. He got married in 1976 but continued to be active in pool. He founded an investment advisory letter in 1978 and was its editor through 1980. In 1981, he became a stock broker with Paine Webber in Long Beach, California, all the while he continued to compete in tournaments, leagues, and for money.

Professional Career

In July 1989, he started writing a weekly column for the Orange County Business Journal. In his first full-length feature, he predicted the 1990s bull market. Other features included lengthy interviews with leading corporate executives in Orange County. He moved on to A.G Edwards, then to Cruttenden and Company, and Danzi Capital, before concluding his career in finance at L.H. Friend & Weinress, Frankson, and Presson in late 1994. While at Cruttenden, he authored Investing in Growth: Finding the Next Winners on Wall Street. The book was featured in Business Week and was endorsed by legendary fund manager John Templeton.

2019 photo of Philip Capelle shooting 9-ball in corner pocket on a professional 9-foot Brunswick Gold Crown.

While at home nursing a dislocated shoulder in the latter half of 1994, Capelle began to seriously consider making a career change. His idea was to turn his passion for pool into a business writing and publishing books on pool. He acquired a team of backers and began work on his first book in January 1995. In December 1995, "Play Your Best Pool," a 480-page tome on all facets of playing pool, was published. The book received rave reviews from each of the leading pool publications, including Pool & Billiard Magazine, Billiards Digest, and The National Billiard News. He then spent the next few years building up his network of retailers in preparation for the books that would follow.

In April of 1996, he got a call from Tom Shaw of Pool & Billiard Magazine asking if he would like to write a guest column. Two hours later his first column on the Spectrum of Speeds was being faxed to the magazine, thus beginning a run that has lasted for 25 years and 300 consecutive issues. Capelle continued to write a book a year during a productive run of new titles that stretched from 1999-2006.

He then took a break from writing pool books to author "Woods vs. Nicklaus: Golf’s Greatest Rivalry." His next book on pool, "Break Shot Patterns," was published in 2011, and two more have followed, bringing his total of billiard books to 11.

Books

• Play Your Best Pool (1995, 2005)
• A Mind For Pool (1999)
• Play Your Best Straight Pool (2000, 2015)
• Play Your Best 9 & 10-Ball (2001) 
• Capelle On 9-Ball (2002) 
• Mike Massey’s World (2003)  
• Play Your Best Eight Ball (2004)  
• Capelle’s Practicing Pool (2006) 
• Break Shot Patterns (2011)  
• Six Words to Pool Greatness (2016)
• Capelle’s Columns (2017)