I don't care what anybody says. Team McCready appreciated Kevin Trudeau's attempts to make something happen positive in pool.
They had ALOT of the right ideas but they had some major errors.
The pros
1) I think they picked the right game, if this sport is EVER going to get huge it will be 8-ball that does it. I cannot believe we have been messing around with rotational pool for decades now completely wasting our time trying to make the sport into something with games that the general public have NEVER taken interest in. They like 8-ball people, the pros have been playing rotational pool since straight pool died and guess what, the general public STILL play 8-ball. That is the game they will watch if they watch any of them. We are wasting time, money, and opportunities with rotational pool. We are wasting entire careers of awesome players by playing a game that keeps the sport in nowhereville.
2) The layout. The presentation of the events was clearly the nuts. Those overhead TV's showing the table, the space between the tables, the dress code, they aimed to make pool look high class and they succeeded.
3) The money. Granted it was unsustainable, but the amount of money the IPT paid out was pretty much right where this sport needs to be in order to properly reward the professional ranks and allow a professional pool player to live a quality life and save for the future and retirement. If the sport were ever to explode in popularity the pros could certainly make more, but I think the IPT went to the level that is almost needed for professional pool to actually be legit as a profession where "pros" are not left coming to AZB to beg for sponsership or end up taking side jobs.
The Cons
1) The table NEEDED to have smaller pockets then they did. I shot on one of the actual IPT tables and the things pockets were WAY too big. I ran afew racks when playing for cash on the thing and I should simply not be able to do that on actual pro level equipment. It makes that video of Bustamente making that out ALOT less impressive knowing what he did it on.
2) The table for 8-ball should be a 10-foot with those above mentioned smaller pockets. The IPT did not really have the opportunity for 10-foots unless they had them custom built, we on the other hand are going to soon have 10-foot tables from Diamond as a reality and the opportunity those tables present to finally have a proper table for 8-ball to be played on should not be missed.
3) The format of the tournament in the IPT was a mess, the round robin scoring was a gong show. They should have followed the rule of KISS and made the tournament a double elimination event with race to 17 matches. The tournaments eventually needed to be seeded as well once enough tournaments were run that proper seeding could have been managed.
4) By far the biggest error the IPT made, they threw all that money, all that time, all that effort into the events and IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO WATCH THEM!!! FFS, I searched freaking everywhere to try and find a stream, a TV channel, anywhere I could watch the events live, it was impossible, I was relegated to looking at the friggin score tickers on the IPT website and reading updates on AZB. That is NOT how you promote pool, who the heck beyond a absolute pool junky is going to bother with what I did? The IPT at the end of the day was entirely invisible and entirely useless when it comes to actually promoting and broadening interest in this sport because noone could watch it and 99.999% of the general public never even knew it existed. Flag football gets more marketing and exposure...
