About the Intercounty Events

The Intercounty season runs from January through to December and is usually played on the second Sunday of every month.

Each County plays all other Counties in their Region twice. Once at home and once away. Each County fields a Men's A, Men's B, Ladies, Senior's, Under 23's and Junior's teams. Men's, Ladies and Senior squad requires a minimum of eleven players for any match. Junior's need nine players and Under 23's have teams of at least five.

The main aim for the counties competing is to win their respective section and become the regional champions. Each County squad that wins a section qualifies for the National Intercounty Championships each year.

Unsurprisingly, the winning team in each section becomes the National County Champions. Most county squads are made up of local league players who are invited to participate in county trials in January of each year. Usually, they will be recommended by their league officials.

Some counties hold open trials where any affiliated league player is entitled to trial, in this case the selectors pick the players they feel will make the grade and then invite these players back to do battle with existing County players to see how they fare, other Counties use a recommendation style approach. i.e. a player's parent league recommends players to the County Association, the County Association then invites the player to trial for them.

From these invitation trials a number of players will picked by the County selectors to join the players the selectors decided to retain from the previous season to make up this season's County squad. The next task for the electors is to place their chosen players in to either the A or B team. There is plenty of room for players to move up to the A or down to the B according to how well they are performing.

The terms up and down are relative since the players involved are pretty much the best players in their respective County. Each county player has their results recorded for every County match they play. The system currently employed is that a player receives three points if they win a frame for their A team. Players receive two points if they win a frame in their B team. Ladies get three points for a frame win in their section.

The points a player gains throughout the season by winning their frames are called ranking points and these ranking points are the means by which all players are separated at any time in the season. When the Intercounty playing season has ended the top eight players in each region gain the right to trial for a place in the England Team for the following season.

Players may see how they are faring nationally by viewing the current National Intercounty Rankings. In any Intercounty match a player can play a maximum of four frames in any section.

For the male section there is an added complication, once selected to play in a A, B or Junior team all their frames for that match must be played in that team.

For example, if a player is selected for the junior team they cannot play in either the A or B team in that match. If a junior player was promoted from the junior section to either the A or B section they would not be allowed to return to the junior section for the remainder of that match. the same rules apply to the A and B sections as well.

Some cross-section plays are allowed. For example, Senior's can also play in Men's or Ladies, and Junior's can also play in Under 23's, and Under 23's can also play in Men's or Ladies. Only the Men's and Ladies are single gender, all other sections can be mixed.

It is mandatory that all County Associations field their strongest possible A side at all times, this is to prevent tactical movement of players doing well in the A down to the B squad near the end of the season to get some easy ranking points If any movement of players is required it must wait until the following match, when all the players become free again.

About the Interleague Events

Interleague pool events are played between the affiliated leagues in each county and are divided into both a league event and a knock out cup event.

EPA Interleague is the term or name we use to describe an event or competition that our counties run which leads to national finals.

Within those two lines lies a massive structure that starts in local leagues, travels through our counties, through our regions and finally end up at our national finals. So how does your local league get to be the National Interleague champions.

The process starts with your local league, usually, either the league itself deciding they wish to enter a representative team or a group of players in a local league requesting the league enter them as their league representatives.

Once the EPA county affiliated league decides they would like to enter a team, they contact the relevant county association and enter their teams. The entire local league rosta is available for selection in any of their teams but as you may imagine its usually the best players the league has to offer.

Once registered as a local interleague team – the county organises an interleague structure with a set of usually home and away fixtures, from those fixtures a league table is produced and the teams at the top get to be invited to the national finals.

At the national finals 96 of the very best teams go head-to-head to be crowned national interleague champions.

The teams are initially drawn into groups of four teams, with the top two progressing to the last 32 and the event moves to a straight knockout.

The group winners play the runners up from a different group, the event than continues to reduce to a final.

You can find data for all the available national finals by selecting a year from the dropdown list below.

About the Champion of Champions Event

The Champion of Champions event is usually played in the November of each year and aims to find the top Men's Singles Player, the top Ladies Singles Player and the top Local League Team from all of the local pool leagues in the country.

Unlike some other EPA events, this is a non-cardholder event, meaning that it is not necessary to hold a current EPA membership card to be eligible to take part.

The event is open to the winners and runners up from each league that is affiliated to a county in England in each of the three categories of team, men's and ladies. The decision on how to select the candidates lies with the local leagues but they must be able to demonstrate to the entry scrutineers that their places in the event are valid.

It is common for leagues to run two leagues a year as a winter and a summer league. They do this because it means that each year they can send the winners and runners up from both leagues to the main event national finals. While the ladies and men's events are usually very clearly defined, the decision making process for the teams can be taken from the final league table or the league cup results, but however a league decides to do this, there are only two places available per league per year.

The team event is played in matches of 14 frames in two sets of 7, which means that each team needs to have at least 7 players.

Entry into the event is made via the EPA website and comes at a single moderate fee that covers the entry into all of the three events, although it is only mandatory to enter a team. Entries need to be made by the end of June each year for the finals the following November and the link to the online entry form will be available during the time running up to the end of June and can be found near the bottom of the main homepage here in the Comp Entry Forms section.

About the National Amateurs Events

The National Amateurs event is an EPA cardholder event that is competed each year and finds the top amateur players in each of the five main categories - Men's, Ladies, Senior's, Under 23's and Junior's.

The events are not all played at the same time and are spread out over the course of a year, often tagged onto one of the main EPA event weekends or sometimes at local Pool Clubs around the country. More information on when and where these events take part is always available on the EPA Calendar here.

  Click here to see the recent results for the National Amateur events.

About Ladies KO Cup

The Ladies Knock Out Cup is usually played at the same event in November of the Champion of Champions in the days leading up to the main tournament.

Match format is the same 7-person style as used in the Champion of Champions team event.