Great event but there are definitely some big turnoffs for the fans. Here are a few examples:
1) Player timeouts in the middle of rack. This, to me, is absolutely ridiculous. A competitive, tense, exciting rack can be interrupted by this as was the case when Sanchez-Ruiz took a mid-rack break in the semifinal against Kaci during a safety battle. Timeouts are mostly for team games and are used chiefly for strategy discussions and clock management, neither of which apply to pool. Bathroom breaks should be permitted, as they are in tennis, but never in the middle of a game. The play is the thing and mid-rack breaks stink for fans. In pool, most breaks are taken for gamesmanship/momentum/psychology reasons anyway, and commentator Mark Wilson often takes note of it, once remarking "I think that's a good time for him to take his break, as the match seems to be getting away from him."
2) The match schedule is rarely adhered to, and I don't mean matches that start late because other matches hold them up. The first match of the evening session, which is never held up by another match, seemed to always start well after the announced time. In one case this week, you could watch the players warming up for over half an hour after the scheduled start time, so the match wasn't held up by the absence of the players. There is also too much time between matches. The result of all this is that a lot of matches go into the wee hours of the morning, and whether I'm there, or watching on the stream, it often means that I miss these matches, which seem to be played played in front of zero fans.
3) Commentators, some good and some awful, are always unprepared, knowing little about player accomplishments, little about the head-to-head history between the competitors, and even less about the lives of the players. Mark Wilson spent a lot of time talking about the jet-lag issue during a Ko Pin-Yi match, often trying to explain away some mistakes, but the truth is that Ko Pin-Yi, who had played in the event at Gotham in Brooklyn, NY, the week before, had already been in the USA for at least two weeks. This is all a shame for both stream-buyers and the attendees, who generally buy the headsets so they can listen to the commentary, which is badly uninformed. Either get commentators who closely follow the pro pool tournament scene or arm commentators with fact sheets that enable them to offer insights about the players, their accomplishments, etc.
. Still healthy, but definitely noticing a difference.
