Croquet

Croquet is a game played both as a recreational pastime and as a competitive sport which involves hitting wooden or plastic balls with a mallet through hoops embedded into the grass playing arena. more...

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Competitive croquet

Croquet was an event at the 1900 Summer Olympics and Roque, a variation on croquet, an event at the 1904 Summer Olympics. One of the best known croquet clubs is the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, originally the All England Croquet Club, which hosts the annual Wimbledon tennis championships.

There are several variations of croquet currently played, differing in the scoring systems, order of shots, and layout (particularly in social games where play must be adapted to smaller-than-standard playing courts). Two forms of the game, Association Croquet and Golf Croquet, have rules that are agreed internationally and are played in many countries around the world. More unusual variations of the game include Mondo Croquet, eXtreme Croquet, and Bicycle Croquet.

As well as club-level games, there are regular world championships and international matches between croquet-playing countries. The sport has particularly strong followings in the UK, USA, New Zealand and Australia; every four years, these countries play the MacRobertson Shield tournament. Many other countries also play.

Croquet is popularly believed to be viciously competitive. This may derive from the fact that (unlike golf) players will often attempt to move their opponents' balls to unfavourable positions. However, purely negative play is rarely a winning strategy: successful players (in all versions other than Golf Croquet) will use all four balls to set up a break for themselves, rather than simply making life as difficult as possible for their opponents. At championship standard Association Croquet, players can often make all 26 points (13 for each ball) in two turns.

Unlike most sports, men and women compete and are ranked together.

Association croquet

Association Croquet is the proper name of the game of croquet that is most widely played throughout the world and at international level. In Association Croquet one player (or in doubles, one team) takes the black and blue balls, the other takes red and yellow. On each turn, the player can choose to play either of his balls, and must continue to play that ball for the rest of the turn. The turn continues provided he or she either a) hits the ball through the correct hoop ("runs" a hoop), or b) hits another ball (a "roquet"). Upon hitting another ball, the player must play their next shot with the two balls touching: this is the "croquet stroke" from which the game takes its name. After the croquet stroke, the player is allowed a further "continuation" stroke, during which the player must again attempt to make a roquet or run a hoop. Each of the other three balls may be roqueted at most once until a hoop is run, at which point they become available again. The winner is the player who, with both balls, completes a prescribed circuit of twelve hoops and then strikes the centre peg.

Read more at Wikipedia.org