A Cool 3C game variation

I've been watching a YouTube video with Fred Caudron and Eddy Leppens that they call Break Shot. Each set consists of both player playing from the break position. If one player scores more points they win the set. If they tie, they redo the set. The match I watched was best of 11 sets (i.e., race to 6).

The kicker is that the break set-up is not the normal one. For each set the break position is determined in some random manner.

This game, along with Survivor, make nice changes of pace. And actually, 2 people could play Break Shot at 2 separate locations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwyDDGQxkAU&t=496s

Bob Jewett said:

I believe that at one time the collegiate carom championships were decided in a similar way with "key shots". There was no face-to-face competition so there were no travel costs. I'm not sure if they continued after a successful first shot. Paul Frankel ran a similar promotion for a few years to get pool players interested in carom.

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I've been watching a little more of this Breakshot game. One thing I'd love to see is expanding the starting positions. The way they were doing it insured that there was a natural available on the break shot (although it seemed that if the three balls lined up they had to play a rail first shot). And the cue ball was never between the 2 object balls.

I'd like to see it where the diamonds form a 5 x 9 Cartesian grid, and a dual random number generator spits out 3 ordered pairs of random natural numbers with the first number between 1 and 5 inclusive, and the second number between 1 9, inclusive for each inning. These "points" on the coordinate become the break position for that inning. That allows for 45^3 opening positions, compared to the 27 opening positions in their game.

It would also be an interesting variation if the scores accumulate, rather than a series of w/l innings. Maybe with a bonus point for each billiard after the first three to reward runs.