There's a British term I'm not familiar with?

I'm pretty sure you mean 'playing the pools'. The pools is an old-fashioned football (soccer) betting game (it still exists but is only played by people's grandparents). It started in 1923 and was extremely popular from the 1950s through to the mid 1990s. It is much less popular now, having gone out of fashion with young people due to the expansion of the gambling industry and the wide range of other bets to do their plums on.

It involves picking which football (soccer) matches you think will end in a draw. Each weekend there are about 100 matches from England and Scotland on the list (I think 92 is the exact number??), and you choose 13 (maybe 14?) from that list. If every game that you pick ends in a draw then you win loads of money (this is very rare, the odds are similar to a lottery). If more than a certain number are a draw, then you win something, this threshold depends on the number of other people who win. For instance on a normal weekend you might need 9 draws out of your 13 picks in order to win something, but if one weekend there are lots of draws, and hence lots of winners, they might say you need 10 draws to win some money. The amount won is not a lot unless you pick ALL draws (or 12/13, cos most weeks nobody gets 13/13).

The highest prize ever awarded on the pools was just under £3million (about $4.5 million) in 1994. A few other prizes of more than £1 million have been awarded, along with many in the hundreds of thousands.

These days people can enter the pools online or in betting shops on the street. In the 1960s the pools would have been administered by local agents for the Pools company who visit the houses of the people living nearby who enter it, collect their entries and their money, and then pass it on to the company.

It was/is not meant to be something for football experts, since it is notoriously difficult to predict which matches would end in a draw, and lots of people would treat it the same why they treat the lottery now, ie. by just having their own numbers that they use every week (each game was numbered on the pools coupon so you didnt have to say Plymouth V. Burnley, you could just say match no. 34), and leave it down to luck. This meant that its popularity spread a lot wider than just people who were interested in football (especially as Lotteries were illegal in the UK until the National Lottery started in 1994).

For more information, see the wikipedia article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pools

I'm from the UK and I'd say it sounds as if he won the money from playing billiards or it could possibly be that he put money into a "pool" and won. This would be where everyone puts money in and one person wins it all. I think that billiards would sound more accurate though, especially for a book written during the 60s.

The sentence can represent two things, in and of itself Playing the pool can also mean having won some money playing billiards, lottery, or a legal pool , which is when a group of people pool their money and after certain period of timeone participant receives the money collected. Each week or month every participant receives the total in the pool

shoot some pool? isnt that the term? yes it's billiards