Mosconi Cup
The Mosconi Cup is an annual nine-ball pool tournament contested between teams representing Europe and the United States since 1994. The trophy is named after American player Willie Mosconi, has been compared to the Ryder Cup in golf. Team USA beat Team Europe 11–9 on 7 December 2018. Both Europe and USA have won the tournament each 12 times, they tied once. By winning in 2018 Team USA won the tournament for the first time since they last prevailed in 2009. In its earliest days, the Mosconi Cup was created by Sky Sports and Matchroom Sport as an exhibition event to increase public awareness of pool in the United Kingdom. In the first year of competition some of the WPBA's top players played alongside the men in their respective teams; these included Franziska Stark from Germany, Allison Fisher from England, Jeanette Lee and Vivian Villarreal from the United States. As time progressed, the event evolved from its exhibition nature into a much more serious and professional tournament, earning a place in the event has acquired a great deal of prestige.
In early runnings of the event, many famous snooker players participated, but only Steve Davis continued into the event's more serious era, bowing out when the event began to clash with snooker's UK Championship. After Davis' withdrawal, all players had to earn an invitation through their performances at other events, meaning that no more snooker players appeared until 2007, when Tony Drago earned a place by virtue of his performance on the European Pool Tour, won the tournament's Most Valuable Player award for his unbeaten run in the singles matches; the players to have appeared in the Mosconi Cup: Players from sixteen nations have represented Europe. Sorted by number of different people, alphabetically, these are: Players from twenty-two states have represented the United States is twenty-two. Order as above, these are There have been rule changes and format changes throughout the tournament's brief history; these include, but are not limited to: "Non-playing captain" roles were introduced in the 2003 event.
In 2004 the doubles matches. In 2005, a 30-second shot clock was introduced, caused controversy due to timing malfunctions; the 2006 tournament started with a team-versus-team match followed by two trebles matches. That year saw the reintroduction of the non-playing captain role; the 2009 tournament included several new features: No pairing in the doubles matches could be repeated. The event included four blocks of consecutive matches, organized so that five slots were available for each side, in which every player was required to play once. In two singles matches, each player was selected by the opposing team captain. List of sports competitions between teams representing continents Official website
Earl Strickland
Earl "the Pearl" Strickland is an American professional pool player, considered one of the best nine-ball players of all time. He has won numerous championship titles and, in 2006, was inducted into the Billiard Congress of America's Hall of Fame, he is known as one of the sport's most controversial players for his outspoken views and his sometimes volatile behavior at tournaments. Strickland started playing pool at the age of 9. After intensive practice, he entered his first professional tournament aged 16. Strickland rose to national prominence in 1983 with a victory in Lake Tahoe; this was followed in 1984 by the Caesars Palace Pro Billiard Classic in Las Vegas. According to sources, Strickland played "like a polished gem." He was beginning to be a dominant force on the tournament trail and recognized as a future world champion. He had the "skill, patience and tenacity of which champions are made." Because of his dominance, Strickland was named The National Billiard News Player of the Year in 1984.
He won the 1988 World Open championship, after a momentous final confrontation between himself and Mike'Captain Hook' Sigel". A 45-second shot clock was used to monitor each shot because the tournament was being recorded for broadcast for a seven-week series. At the conclusion, Sigel commented. Strickland, on the other hand, said they "could have made it only 30 seconds between shots, it wouldn't have mattered."At the 2004 Derby City Classic, a week-long multiple tournament event held every January in Louisville, Strickland was one of six competitors in a nine-ball ring game. Veteran Grady Mathews, when introducing Strickland, says that when Strickland is in the house, "A hush ensues, there is an expectation" due to his brilliant shot-making capabilities and unpredictable behaviour. Strickland is a multiple winner of the prestigious Player of the Year Award, his career highlights include five wins at the United States Open Nine-ball Championships, the WPA World Nine-ball Championships. Strickland is the only WPA World Nine-ball Champion to win the event in consecutive years.
He was an ever-present player for the American team in the annual Mosconi Cup tournament, from its inauguration in 1994, up until 2009. Strickland once ran 11 consecutive racks against Nick Mannino during the first PCA tournament in 1996 where there was a stipulation that anyone who could break and run 10 racks would win US$1,000,000. Jimmy Mataya, present at the event, witnessed Strickland's last shot, a tough nine-ball combination in which Earl showed no fear and "fired it in with authority" to win the prize. Up to that time, no one had run 10 racks of 9-ball in a row during a professionally sanctioned event; the feat has never been duplicated in a tournament since. This Million dollar Challenge event was a kickoff for the new tour of which Earl Strickland, C. J. Wiley, others helped to build. No one expected it to be won on the first day of the event and the start of the brand new tour association; the insurance company backing the event refused to pay and lawsuits were filed. Two and one half years the insurers were forced to pay up.
Due to expenses of the legal battle, Earl received less than $1,000,000 and the resulting negative publicity around it led to a premature demise of the new PCA tour. Earl was gracious about the money, but sorely disappointed that the new tour got off to a bad start; the scandal and a feud with the existing feud with the Professional Billiards Association fearing lost revenues and television contracts spelled doom and led to a quick demise of the new tour. For 2007, he was ranked # 6 in Billiard Magazine's "Fans' Top 20 Favorite Players" poll. Strickland has engaged in exchanges with fans, players and tournament officials, his 2003 World Pool Championship match with snooker star Steve Davis was notorious. Before the match, Strickland had given a charged interview with a Sky Sports reporter, in which he complained that fans had been disrespectful to him, that the event "revolves around Davis", he appeared upset that Sky Sports had shown numerous replays during the buildup to the match of Davis beating him in the previous year's Mosconi Cup, the match which settled the event in favour of Team Europe.
During the match, Strickland entered the arena visibly downbeat, after beginning the match in a quiet mood, Strickland soon began to engage in heated verbal arguments with fans and referee Michaela Tabb. TV microphones caught him using foul language to one member of the crowd telling Tabb to "shut up" when she reprimanded him. In response, Davis made use of his entitlement to take a break in the match. During the gap, Strickland put his fingers in his ears to block out the crowd's support for Davis, to the derision of the crowd, who mocked the gesture, cheered loudly for Davis whenever Strickland took his fingers out. Late in the match, he responded to Davis' missing of an easy shot by leaping out of his chair, fists aloft, shouting to the crowd "Yeah! He dogged it!" When Davis took a second break, Strickland loudly complained that players were only entitled to a single break, telling the crowd "He's Steve Davis, he can do what he likes," another reference to his belief that Davis's stat
2011 Mosconi Cup
The 2011 Mosconi Cup, the 18th edition of the annual nine-ball pool competition between teams representing Europe and the United States, took place 8–11 December 2011 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. Team Europe won the Mosconi Cup by defeating Team USA 11–7. 1 Born outside the United States. Official homepage
Pool (cue sports)
Pool is a classification of cue sports played on a table with six pockets along the rails, into which balls are deposited. Each specific pool game has its own name; the generic term pocket billiards is sometimes used, favored by some pool-industry bodies, but is technically a broader classification, including games such as snooker, Russian pyramid, kaisa, which are not referred to as pool games. There are hybrid games combining aspects of both pool and carom billiards, such as American four-ball billiards, bottle pool, cowboy pool, English billiards; the etymology of "pool" is uncertain. The Oxford English Dictionary speculates that "pool" and other games with collective stakes is derived from the French poule, in which the poule is the collected prize; the oldest use of the word "pool" to describe a billiards-like game was made in 1797 in a Virginia newspaper. The OED defines it as "any of various types of billiards for two or more players" but goes on to note that the first specific meaning of "a game in which each player uses a cue ball of a distinctive colour to pocket the balls of the other player in a certain order, the winner taking all the stakes submitted at the start of the contest" is now obsolete, its other specific definitions are all for games that originate in the United States.
In the United States, although the original "pool" game, skittle pool, was played on a pocketless carom billiards table, the term stuck to all new games of pocket billiards as the sport gained in popularity, so outside the cue sports industry, which has long favored the more formal term pocket billiards, the common name for the sport has remained pool. The OxfordDictionaries.com definition no longer provides the obsolete meaning found in the print edition, refers only to the typical game "using two sets of seven coloured and numbered balls... with one black ball and a white cue ball" on a table with pockets. With the exception of one-pocket, games called "pool" today are descended from two English games imported to the United States at the beginning of the 19th century; the first was English billiards which became American four-ball billiards the same game but with an extra red object ball to increase scoring opportunities. It was the most popular billiards game in the mid-19th century until dethroned by the carom game straight rail.
American four-ball tournaments tried switching to carom tables in the 1870s but this did not save it from being doomed to obscurity, the last professional tournament was held in 1876. Cowboy pool is a surviving member of this group of games; the second and more influential game was pyramid pool. In the late 1830s, a variant called. Both games were supplanted by the immediate forerunner of straight pool. New games introduced at the turn of the 20th century include Kelly eight-ball; the distinctive appearance of pool balls with their many colors and division between solid and striped balls came about by 1889. Prior to this, object balls differentiated only by numbers. English pyramid pool and life pool players were the first to adopt balls with different colors; the stripes were the last addition. Pool is played on a six pocket table. Modern pool tables range in size from 3.5 feet by 7 feet, to 4.5 feet by 9 feet. The balls range from 2.25 inches in diameter to 2.375 inches in diameter. Under the WPA/BCA equipment specifications, the weight may be from 5.5 to 6 oz. with a diameter of 2.25 in.
Plus or minus 0.005 in.. Modern coin-operated pool tables use one of three methods to distinguish and return the cue ball to the front of the table while the numbered balls return to an inaccessible receptacle until paid for again: the cue ball is larger and heavier than the other balls, or denser and heavier, or has a magnetic core. Modern cue sticks are 58.5 inches long for pool while cues prior to 1980 were designed for straight pool and had an average length of 57.5 inches. By comparison, carom billiards cues are shorter with larger tips, snooker cues longer with smaller tips. In the United States, the most played game is eight-ball; the goal of eight-ball, played with a full rack of fifteen balls and the cue ball, is to claim a suit, pocket all of them legally pocket the 8 ball, while denying one's opponent opportunities to do the same with their suit, without sinking the 8 ball early by accident. In the United Kingdom the game is played in pubs, it is competitively played in leagues on both sides of the Atlantic.
The most prestigious tournaments including the World Open are sponsored and sanctioned by the International Pool Tour. Rules vary from place to place. Pool halls in North America are settling upon the World Pool-Billiard Association International Standardized Rules, but tavern eight-ball played on smaller, coin-operated tables and in a "winner keeps the table" manner, can differ even between two venues in the same city. The growth of local and national amateur leagues may alleviate this confusi
2013 Mosconi Cup
The 2013 PartyPoker.net Mosconi Cup, the 20th edition of the annual nine-ball pool competition between teams representing Europe and the United States, took place 2–4 December 2013 at The Mirage in Las Vegas, Nevada. Team Europe won the Mosconi Cup by defeating Team USA 11–2. Official homepage
Johnny Archer
Johnny Archer is an American professional pool player. He is nicknamed "the Scorpion". On June 8, 2009, Johnny Archer was nominated to be inducted into the Billiard Congress of America Hall of Fame. Archer grew up with his two brothers and two sisters in Twin City and began playing pool at the age of 12, he is one of the most successful nine-ball players of the past two decades, having won the majority of the game's major tournaments at least once, culminating in his being named Billiards Digest Player of the Decade at the end of the 1990s. Archer is a two-time WPA World Nine-ball Champion, winning in both 1992 when he defeated Bobby Hunter, again in 1997 after beating Lee Kun-fang of Chinese Taipei, he was a runner-up the following year, losing in the final to Takahashi Kunihiko of Japan. He was the 1999 US Open champion, has won over 60 professional tournaments throughout his career, he has been a regular on the US Mosconi Cup team, having joined them a record seventeen times, winning on nine of those occasions.
In 2003, one of Archer's most successful years, he won tournaments such as Sudden Death Seven-ball and the first World Summit of Pool. Archer won the 2006 US$50,000 winner-take-all International Challenge of Champions by defeating Thorsten Hohmann in the finals. In 2007, he won. While in the 2005 event the entire purse was awarded to the winner, in the 2007 event the purse was split; the Ripley's Believe It or Not! television show, on September 3, 2003, pitted Archer and Jeremy Jones against each other in a challenge match in speed pool. The show had them timed against each other, to try to beat the record, which at that time stood at 1 minute 30 seconds to break a full rack of balls and pocket all fifteen balls, move to another table and do it again. Archer was the victor; the event was recorded in a warehouse in Los Angeles where other challenge matches were taking place to beat records. Archer has rejoined the staff of Inside Pool Magazine, where he writes a monthly instruction column. For 2007, he was ranked # 3 in Billiard Magazine's "Fans' Top 20 Favorite Players" poll.
2014 Music City Open runner up 2007 Pool & Billiard Magazine Fans' Top 20 Favorite Players, #3 2007 Joss Northeast Nine-ball Tour Classic VIII at Turning Stone Resort and Casino 2006 International Challenge of Champions winner 2007 Texas Hold'Em Billiards Champion 2006 SML Open winner 2003 World Summit of Pool winner 2003 Brunswick Pro Players Champion 2003 Sudden Death Seven-ball winner 2003 On Cue. He's an avid golfer, ascribes his strong pool break to playing a lot of golf, noting similarities in having the timing right and using one's whole body in the stroke. Archer co-owned the now defunct Marietta Billiard Club in Georgia. Archer's official website
Francisco Bustamante
Francisco Bustamante is a Filipino professional pocket billiards player from Tarlac, Central Luzon and the 2010 World Nine-ball Champion, nicknamed "Django", after the lead character of the film of the same name, sometimes called "Bustie" in the United States. Bustamante is the youngest of eight siblings. People in his vicinity nicknamed him "Django" because of his scrappy nature and the way he appeared with a cigarette in his mouth reminded them of the movie character of that name; the character was portrayed by an Italian actor. Their father made a living through building toilets and planting rice, Bustamante engaged himself in the activities also, his life in pool began when he worked in his sister's pool hall and spotting balls on the tables. When the patrons left and the place closed for the night, the young Bustamante would grab a stick and practice alone, he never has been concentrating in pocket billiards from 10 years of age. He quoted: "Magaling ako noon pa at 1975 pa halos hindi na natatalo sa aming lugar kaya naglibot ako, una sa buong Luzon tapos sa buong bansa na para lamang kumita ng pera."
After some success in the Philippines, Bustamante moved to Germany where he stayed for more than a decade, competing in a number of tournaments in Europe. Bustamante has been playing since the age of ten, has won titles such as the Munich Masters, the German Nine-ball Championship, the Japan Nine-ball Championship, making him one of billiards' greatest international stars. With his win in Tulsa, Bustamante locked up the 1998 Camel Pro Billiards Series year-long point fund's top spot, he finished the season in record-breaking style, winning the Columbus 10-Ball Open and becoming the first player to win three Camel titles in one season. His Columbus 10-Ball title completed the first Camel trifecta, with titles in each of the three games contested on the Camel Pro Billiards Series: eight-ball, nine-ball and ten-ball. Known for his style at the table and behind-the-back shots, Bustamante is one of the best Filipino players of the game along with fellow Kapampangan Efren Reyes, Marlon Manalo and Ronato Alcano.
He holds the world record for having the most powerful break shot. In 1999, Bustamante finished 3rd place in the WPA World Nine-ball Championship after losing to Efren Reyes, who won it. Months he won the International Challenge of Champions, he won that tournament again three years later. The next year, Bustamante won the Motolite 9-ball Tournament, an event held in the Philippines, at the expense of Antonio Lining; the victory earned him $30K, the largest first prize offered in a Philippine-held tournament at that time. The year 2002 was the darkest year for Bustamante considering his experience at the World Pool Championships. While the tournament was still going on, Bustamante was most shocked when he received a phone call from his wife informing him that his daughter, less than a year old, had died. Devastated by this, Bustamante considered forfeiting his contention at the tournament to return to the Philippines, but some people around convinced him to go on. On his way to the final, Bustamante bested Antonio Lining in the last 16, Efren Reyes in the quarter finals, Ching Shun Yang in the semis.
In the final, he met the 2-time winner of the tournament. Bustamante could have won the title. At one point, he missed. Strickland returned to the table and won three racks in a row to win the match 17-15, his loss in the finals of the World Championship was most a big blow to him because his lack of focus on the match cost him the tournament. On, Bustamante regained momentum and began winning more tournaments. Bustamante won the Peninsula Nine-ball Open, Gabriel's Las Vegas International Nine-ball tournament, the IBC Tokyo Nine-ball International, the All Japan Nine-ball Championship, he won the Sudden Death Seven-ball tournament and dedicated the victory to his daughter, whom he had tragically lost. With such a string of victories, he became the AZBilliards 2002 Player of the Year. Bustamante won the tournament called the World Pool League in 2004 where he defeated the world nine-ball champion Alex Pagulayan, he was bested by Steve Knight of Great Britain. In 2007, he was undefeated in the United States Pro Tour Championship held at the Normandie Casino in Los Angeles, California.
For 2007, he was ranked # 7 in Billiard Magazine's "Fans' Top 20 Favorite Players" poll. He competed in the 2008 World Straight Pool Championship as the Philippines' only entry; this was his first-ever participation in straight pool event. In the end, he finished at 2nd place behind the tournament winner. In 2010, Bustamante again reached the finals of the World Nine-ball Championship. Unlike his first final eight years ago, fate did not deny him. Bustamante won the match and the title against Taiwan's Kuo Po-cheng, a second-placer in the 2005 event. On July 27, 2010, Francisco Bustamante, along with Terry Bell and Larry Hubbart who are founders of the American Pool Players Association, were elected to the Billiard Congress of America's Hall of Fame. In this, Bustamante would become the second player from the Philippines after Efren Reyes to be added; the three were inducted on October 21, 2010. On June 15, 2008, Efren Reyes, Francisco "Dj
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