Standard or Premium Cloth? Why the Upgrade Is the Easiest Decision You'll Make on Your New Pool Table

Standard cloth on all of the tables we sell is Championship's Invitational with Teflon — and to be clear, it's a genuinely good product. It's a 21-ounce wool/nylon blend (about 75% wool, 25% nylon) that's bathed in DuPont Teflon rather than sprayed, which gives it real spill and stain resistance. It's the best-selling cloth of its weight class in the country for a reason: it plays true, it holds up to regular use, and it comes in enough colors that almost anyone can find a match for their room.

Premium cloth — Brunswick's Centennial cloth, the upgrade option we offer — is a different animal. It's woven from worsted wool at 23 ounces per square yard, noticeably denser and more tightly finished than the standard weave, and that tighter weave gives the DuPont Teflon treatment more fiber to bond to as it's worked into the cloth — meaning a more thorough, more complete layer of protection than you get on the standard weave, not just the same coating on a looser fabric. The differences show up in three places: speed and roll consistency, resistance to wear (Brunswick's own numbers put Centennial at up to 60% longer service life), and appearance over time (it resists pilling and shedding, so it doesn't get that fuzzy, worn-in look standard cloth develops after a few seasons of regular play).

Put plainly: standard cloth is good. Premium cloth is what a serious player, or a serious piece of furniture, actually deserves.

Here's where the decision gets easy. The upgrade from standard to premium cloth typically runs $300 to $600. On a purchase that's already in the thousands of dollars, that's not a meaningful percentage of what you're spending — it's closer to what people spend on the delivery tip.

Think about it this way: you're already committing to the big number. The table, the cabinet, the finish, the slate, the shipping and installation — that's the real financial decision, and you've made it. The cloth upgrade is a rounding error sitting right next to a purchase you've already decided is worth it. If you can justify the table, you can justify the cloth. There's no version of this where someone regrets spending an extra few hundred dollars on the surface of a $4,000–$10,000+ centerpiece of their game room.

Here's the way we like to frame it for people who are on the fence: would you buy a Mercedes and put cloth seats in it?

Nobody does that. When you're already spending real money on something built to last and built to impress, you don't cut the corner on the part you touch every single time you use it. Leather seats in a luxury car aren't just nicer to look at — they wear better, they feel better, and they hold their value better. Premium cloth on a pool table is the exact same logic. You've already bought the "Mercedes" of your game room. Don't put the fabric seats in it.

A pool table is, by almost any measure, a luxury purchase. It's not a necessity — it's something people buy because they want a beautiful piece of furniture that also happens to be one of the best forms of entertainment a home can offer. If you're buying into that experience at all, buy into the version of it that actually holds up.

This is the number that should end the conversation for most buyers. With average, regular home play, premium worsted cloth like Centennial holds its playing quality and appearance for somewhere in the range of 8 to 10 years. Standard woolen cloth, even a good one like Invitational, typically needs replacing well before that — often in the 3-to-5-year range for a table that sees consistent use, sometimes sooner if the room gets a lot of traffic or direct sunlight.

Do that math against the $300–$600 upgrade cost. If standard cloth needs to be replaced twice in the time premium cloth is still going strong, you're not just paying more over the long run — you're paying for the labor to re-cloth the table, the downtime while it's out of commission, and the hassle of finding an installer, twice, versus doing it right the first time. The premium cloth pays for its own upgrade cost in avoided replacements before you're even halfway through its lifespan. Everything after that is pure upside: more years of a smoother roll, a cleaner-looking table, and a surface that never goes puffy, pilly, or fuzzy on you.

If you've ever played on an older table with worn cloth, you know the feeling — the surface gets a slightly raised, fuzzy texture where the ball travels most, the nap starts looking uneven, and the roll gets a little less true than it used to be. That's ordinary wool cloth doing exactly what ordinary wool cloth eventually does.

Worsted premium cloth is woven and finished specifically to resist that. The tighter weave means there's less loose fiber to begin with, so there's less material available to pill, shed, or fuzz up in the first place. Years in, a table with premium cloth still looks — and plays — close to the day it was installed. That's not a marketing line; it's the entire reason worsted cloth exists as a category, and it's why it's the standard on tournament and professional tables where consistency matters more than anywhere else.

You're already buying the luxury item. You've already committed to the number that matters. The cloth upgrade is a few hundred dollars sitting on top of a purchase in the thousands — money you'll functionally never notice again once the table's in your home, on a surface that will outlast standard cloth by years and never lose the tight, fast, true-rolling feel that made you want a nice table in the first place.

Standard cloth is a perfectly reasonable choice. But if you're the kind of buyer who's already decided a pool table is worth doing right, the premium cloth isn't really an upgrade — it's just doing right by the table you already bought.

Leather seats. Every time.