After dinner a core group came to our house and played pool. Never play pool with a puppeteer. Petr uses a pool cue like a marionette wand. We were playing a game that was Yuri's choice called Amerikanka. It was based on a game in Russia where all the balls are white. Basically you could hit any ball with any other ball and you get points for every ball you knock in including the one you hit with the stick. The only rule was that you had to hit at least one other ball. If you did not hit another ball that was a scratch and a ball had to come out. It was amazingly easy not having to hit the cue ball, there were always any number of shots on the table. Especially being able to sink the ball you hit with the cue stick. Oddly Yuri was not very good at this game and lost by large margins. I actually won two games, then Peter showed up and of course gave me competition with hands that are used to manipulating things with sticks. The games went really fast in the absence of almost all rules. They were apparently designed to be played for who bought the next drink. Unlike the hit the ball in the order of the number game that Sergio devised, which I liked a lot but can take up to two hours to play in a large group. Yuri also told us there were Russian Amerikanka championships on Russian TV. There was also a game called Americanichka that was played like tennis except using your hands and a volley ball. Letting the ball bounce and using a low net. It sounded like two square with a net. He said there was a point when they were not allowed to publicly refer to the game as Americanichka because relations were strained. The only game I could think of that we have that uses Russia in it's title was Russian Roulette, but I thought better of bringing it up.