Day 3 Philippine Open Pool report:
by Bob Guerrero
Just a few years ago, you could say that if a Pool player from Country X played any player from Country Y then for sure the Country X player would win. As Billiards advances, that is no longer true.
Nguyen Phuc Long from Vietnam has dumped Jeff De Luna from the Philippines out of the 2011 Philippine Open 9-6. Nguyen hardly put a foot wrong throughout the match, displaying great shot making, solid positional play and great safety. Perhaps Nguyen had the Azkals victory over the Vietnemese Football team last December on his mind and was angling for some revenge?
Nguyen's steady play meant he lead most of the match. De Luna had a chance to draw level at 7-all but jawed a seven ball in rack fourteen. Nguyen nailed a 4-10 combo in the next rack to wrap up the upset.
Filipinos are proud of their Pool. And justifiably so. It's an article of faith for many that our players are the best in world. After all, we've produced some of the greatest players in the history of the game. But the world doesn't sit still.
Any country can produce a great Pool player. A top Pool player doesn't need to be tall. Neither does he need to have big muscles. He doesn't even need to be a he. You don't need an expensive stuff like Football fields or parallel bars or velodromes. You just need decent Pool tables and a system that creates the intense competition that results in champions. Germany and Taiwan do it with organized leagues and formal instruction. The Philippines has a system based on a gambling culture that pits players against each other virtually every night.
That's why Vietnam can produce a player like Nguyen Phuc Long. It's the same country that Luong Chi Duong, another very talented player, comes from.
In the last 10 years the rest of the world has narrowed the gap between established powers like the U.S., Germany, Taiwan, and the Philippines. The surfeit of new tournaments means more and more players are playing for bigger purses, jacking up the competition and raising the standard.
European Pool has improved by leaps and bounds. That six-stop tour is well organized and features 200 players in every event. Asia has nothing close to that since the demise of the Guinness 9 Ball Tour. The results are impressive. Europeans have won several world championships in recent years, with Niels Feijen, Daryl Peach, Darren Appleton, Karl Boyes, and Ralf Souquet. The annual Ryder Cup-style USA-Europe clash, the Mosconi Cup, has also been a barometer of European resurgence. The Americans won ten of the first twelve runnings from 1994 to 2004. Since 2006, the Yanks have only won once.
China is a player in every sport, and it appears that Pool will be no exception. They've already won the World Cup of Pool with Fu Jian Bo and Li He Wen twice (they also reached the semifinals on two other occasions) and in Women's Pool they are churning out champions like Xiao Fang Fu.
The Philippines is still a force in Pool. We own the 9 Ball title (Bustamante) and the 8 Ball crown (Orcullo.) But remember how we slowly but surely slipped from world power to midpack in the world Basketball rankings? It can happen in Pool too. Lets hope not too soon.
Racking in Pool used to be a bit of a pain. You would try and set that triangle and get it perfect, with all the balls touching each other, and it just wouldn't set. There would always be a gap somewhere. You'd also try and spin the triangle around so you could find the tightest corner and put it on the front of the rack. More often than not, at least one or two corners would be coming loose, giving a messy rack.
But at least for pro tournaments, including this week's Philippine Open, those issues are a thing of the past. This little Christmas Tree-shaped piece of acetate, the Magic Ball Rack racking template, is consigning the wooden triangle to history.
It works like this: you lay it down with the bit where the star of the Christmas tree would be on the foot spot. Then you simply roll balls in. Those diamond-shaped holes hold them in place. You instantly have a nice, tight rack. Then you break the balls and remove the template right away, unless there are still balls there, in which case you can leave the template on the cloth. It's incredibly thin (.14mm) and will hardly affect the roll of balls. As you can probably figure out, the rack works fine for both 9 Ball and 10 ball.
But things aren't quite so simple, apparently.
“Only two out of every ten referees in this event knows how to use it properly.” groused one of the top players in the world. (I'll keep his identity a secret.) “I wish I could give them a quick lesson.”
It seems that some of the refs are pounding the balls into the template, which is superfluous. They only need to be gently rolled in.
There are also some pitfalls with such a perfect rack. The Japanese, being so inventive, have gone one step further and made a billiard cloth with the racking template integrated into it.
“We played in a 9 Ball tournament in Japan with that set up, winner's break, rack-your-own, and it got a bit silly.” said Thorsten Hohmann. He admits to thrashing one opponent 11-1, while in another match, a player made up a huge deficit by running Nine and Out (9 racks in a row) for victory.
When your rack is this perfect, then it becomes a bit too consistent. And if you figure out how a table breaks early on, then things could get ridiculous. If its winner-breaks, your opponent might be destined to spend quite a long time rooted in his chair while you run rack after rack with the help of a perfectly repeating spread of balls on the break.
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Which really brings us to another point; has winner-breaks become obsolete? I think it certainly has in 9 Ball and 8 Ball. The standard has just become higher than ever, meaning more and more pros are reaching the level where they can run rack after rack. That shuts out opponents and in my opinion, is just no fun. How can you have a contest with only one protagonist shooting and another sitting?
In the recently concluded 8 Ball world Championship, won by Dennis Orcullo, there were numerous reports of obscenely long runs. Perhaps even in 10 Ball, Winner's break deserves to go the way of the Dodo Bird. Ralf Souquet put Dennis Orcullo in the deep freeze on Saturday, unspooling 5 racks in a row in sending him to the Loser's Side. Which brings me to yet another point...
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The tournament is being held in Megatrade Hall 1 in SM Megamall. The Ozine Fest 2011, a Cosplay event, is going on in Megatrade Hall 3 just a few meters away, hence the hundreds of wackily dressed youngsters milling around the fifth floor of Megamall all weekend.
But these days it seems that Ralf Souquet has assumed the persona of Superman. Before going to the AFL I watched him come from 6-8 down to pip Darren Appleton, 9-8 and remain the winner's side. He bloodlessly broke and ran out the last two racks with not a trace of nerves. The native of Manching, Bavaria then went on to smother his countryman and roommate Hohmann 9-2 to book his semifinal berth. Souquet collides with the only remaining Filipino, Antonio Lining, on Monday at 12 noon.
Hohmann topped Carlo Biado 9-8 to reach the semis via the B-side of the bracket. In the deciding game it came down to an excruciatingly tense 25-minute safety battle that Hohmann eventually claimed. His semifinals opponent will be Liu Hai Tao of China, a good player who breezed through a remarkably tame part of the bracket, with wins over unheralded opponents like Nguyen Phuc Long, Renemar David, and Takhti Zarekani before edging Lining 9-8 to join Souquet as unbeaten semifinalists.
The Ladies are down to two players: Chen Siming of China versus Kelly Fisher. There is a very real chance that we could see Chinese champs in both Mens and Women's divisions.
Catch the action on IBC 13 starting either at noon or 2pm today, Monday.
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