I watched the first hour last night live, fairly intently. Then fell asleep, and scrolled to the ending this morning. My observations and opinions:
The game play and shots are in-between snooker and American 9 ball, but much closer to American 9 ball. Shots near the rails are attempted in this game, whereas in snooker they are almost universally ignored. The patterns and position routes are very close to American 9 ball, and very far from snooker. I attribute this to the pockets on this table must be significantly easier than snooker tables. They both have pocket rounds, but I'm assuming the Chinese 8 ball table is cut differently and therefore plays a lot easier, especially with balls near the rails. I'd say a top American style 9 ball player would have an advantage in this game over a top snooker player, if both were coming to this game for the first time.
Its WAY more watchable than chinese 8 ball, or American 8 ball, or any 8 ball.
Nothing is called, and even the 9 on the break counts as a win. This led to some aggressive kicks and a fluke on the 9 that I saw. I'm personally a huge fan of that.
Wu shit in the 9 in the first hour, and the audience clapped hard. I would have expected a reaction, but more of a "wow/laugh" not "clap" reaction. I'm not complaining, just surprised.
It's winner break. 9 is on the spot (I think, hard to tell). Break box.
3 point rule (to the headstring). If the 3 points is not made, the opponent can request a re-rack and it's now his break. This happened back to back in the first hour. Wu broke, no 3 points. Chu broke, no 3 points. Wu broke again, finally got it. They were both breaking HARD.
They were using a cut break going for the 1 in the side.
The table has zero diamonds on it. Yet they both kicked great. Feel for the win
There is no push shot after the break. Chu broke and the CB was frozen to a ball. He went for a tough kick, missed, and gave Wu BIH. Wu then made a 1-9 combo to win the game.
There was one rack in the first hour Chu had a stop shot on the 7 to shoot the 8 in the far corner, and then stop on the 8 to be perfect on the 9. The 8 was about 2 balls from the rail. Instead, he drew back on the 7 to bank the 8 in the side. That was an example of the corner rounds significantly altering the pattern. That did surprise me, because they were not shying away from balls close to the rails. Maybe because this would have been a 7' long shot.
The match is brutally long! Over 5 hours on YouTube! I can't imagine american style pool being that long per match. I'd probably quit pool. There was a shot clock each shot, the ref had a stopwatch in his hand he'd restart every shot. The match was conceded with 4 min left of the 240 min to start with. IDK if the clock runs during racking and/or any player breaks. The clock does continue to run when the balls are cleaned. (you can hear the beep of the ref's stopwatch when he presses the buttons).
The balls were cleaned more times in the hour that I watched than I've seen in the whole year of pool combined. IDK what is up with that? They are all thinking it's going to skid I guess.
There is a hot ring girl that comes out between racks. She holds a 10 score card for a break and run, and a 7 for a runout after opponent's break, and blows a kiss to the camera. She might have come out for rack number some racks as well, I'm not certain.
The balls are the high end Dynaspheres set, with the traditional American pool colors.
The venue and audience seemed like a nice setup. All surrounding one table. It looked like a much smaller crowd than for the Mosconi cup, but not certain.
Overall I liked it. I probably wouldn't watch much of it, just with Wu I wanted to watch it to see him play again. Maybe I'd watch if Siming is playing too, or if a top American style pool player is on a deep round.
