SJM at the 2025 Derby City Classic

Think I want to say something sacrilegious. I'm sure most would agree that Efren had the best cue ball speed control of any player this century.

Watching Gorst this weekend, however, has me thinking that he might just be Efren's equal in cue ball speed control. Seeing him pin his opponent to the back rail time and time again with his exquisite defense in both bank pool and one pocket really wowed me.
 
Think I want to say something sacrilegious. I'm sure most would agree that Efren had the best cue ball speed control of any player this century.

Watching Gorst this weekend, however, has me thinking that he might just be Efren's equal in cue ball speed control. Seeing him pin his opponent to the back rail time and time again with his exquisite defense in both bank pool and one pocket really wowed me.
I watch a few of Chinahov's old 14.1 matches, and I gotta say.. I am not sure it is "possible" to have better speed control. But.. He doesn't play the other games at the same level...
 
I always wonder how many of the spectators I see are on this forum.

sjm looks just like his avatar so he's easy to spot sitting in the front row.
 
Big shout out to @sjm !!! The highlight of the trip to DCC for my wife and I was watching SVB and Moritz play on the TV table in Stu's seats. In case you were wondering, here is what it looks like from Stu's seat :)

SVB-Mortiz.jpg
 
Big shout out to @sjm !!! The highlight of the trip to DCC for my wife and I was watching SVB and Moritz play on the TV table in Stu's seats. In case you were wondering, here is what it looks like from Stu's seat :)

View attachment 804527
It was great spending time with you guys. I'm glad you and your wife accepted my invitation to watch a match from my seats.
 
I watch a few of Chinahov's old 14.1 matches, and I gotta say.. I am not sure it is "possible" to have better speed control. But.. He doesn't play the other games at the same level...
Yeah, at 14.1, Ruslan is superb, but I feel that bank pool and one pocket are greater tests of one's cue ball speed.
 
Who watched the Derby on the internet? How was the stream quality? How good was the commentary? I was told that every table was streamed. Was this true and how much better did it make the Derby experience?
 
Who watched the Derby on the internet? How was the stream quality? How good was the commentary? I was told that every table was streamed. Was this true and how much better did it make the Derby experience?


If you paid I think you had access to every table. If not PA Proam and Billiardnet were the main streamers that got to pick any table and add commentary. Sharkstream was another and Railbirds came on towards the end with the UK color commentator guy. The stream quality wasn't as good as accustats but very watchable. Billiardnet was doing 2 - 3 seperate streams at a time (or 2 streams on 1 screen together) and 1 or 2 had commentators.

I found Troy Jones commentary on Billiardnet to be topnotch especially bank pool and 1pocket. Fedor streams all of his matches not on a TV table and Alex also streams his but I didn't find out until the tourney ended. The Lunda vs Filler 1P match may be the best I've ever seen!
 
If you paid I think you had access to every table. If not PA Proam and Billiardnet were the main streamers that got to pick any table and add commentary. Sharkstream was another and Railbirds came on towards the end with the UK color commentator guy. The stream quality wasn't as good as accustats but very watchable. Billiardnet was doing 2 - 3 seperate streams at a time (or 2 streams on 1 screen together) and 1 or 2 had commentators.

I found Troy Jones commentary on Billiardnet to be topnotch especially bank pool and 1pocket. Fedor streams all of his matches not on a TV table and Alex also streams his but I didn't find out until the tourney ended. The Lunda vs Filler 1P match may be the best I've ever seen!
Thanks for that. I would not have expected the stream quality to be comparable to Accu-stats, but glad to hear it was watchable, but I see the streaming of every match to be a big step forward.
 
If you paid I think you had access to every table. If not PA Proam and Billiardnet were the main streamers that got to pick any table and add commentary. Sharkstream was another and Railbirds came on towards the end with the UK color commentator guy. The stream quality wasn't as good as accustats but very watchable. Billiardnet was doing 2 - 3 seperate streams at a time (or 2 streams on 1 screen together) and 1 or 2 had commentators.

I found Troy Jones commentary on Billiardnet to be topnotch especially bank pool and 1pocket. Fedor streams all of his matches not on a TV table and Alex also streams his but I didn't find out until the tourney ended. The Lunda vs Filler 1P match may be the best I've ever seen!

i watched one match labelled troy jones and it was good. the main guy on that channel though is like a character from napoleon dynamite.

lunda v filler was the best 1p match this year. the 1p final was good but rather lopsided, i prefer more drama but i do appreciate flawless play. those runouts by fedor may have been the cleanest i've seen in a DCC final.
 
The Lunda vs Filler 1P match may be the best I've ever seen!
Agreed, and Evan's aggressive play in the final rack was inspiring.

I was also lucky enough to have watched Filler vs Gorst from beginning to end. Many of us watching felt the third rack, in which Fedor made a two rail kick in of the seven ball to win the rack, agreed it was the best rack of one pocket we had ever seen.
 
Agreed, and Evan's aggressive play in the final rack was inspiring.

I was also lucky enough to have watched Filler vs Gorst from beginning to end. Many of us watching felt the third rack, in which Fedor made a two rail kick in of the seven ball to win the rack, agreed it was the best rack of one pocket we had ever seen.
To this day... The game with Efren's crazy 3-cushion style position off a back cut ball against Jason Miller in the DCC One Pocket finals holds that title for me. I've played a bit of 3 Cushion, even had a run of 5 against some unsuspecting Korean billiard hall owner (who spotted me 5 points to 15, site unseen!!!), and the shot he shot was not even within the realm of possibility in my mind.... Efren had Billy Incardona literally falling out of his chair after he pulled it out of the hat...
 
Who watched the Derby on the internet? How was the stream quality? How good was the commentary? I was told that every table was streamed. Was this true and how much better did it make the Derby experience?
Huge improvement as far as I experienced almost no drops or severe degradation of stream quality, for the first time.

Only the single accu-stats arena table had commentary. As usual the camera coverage, when done by the accu-stats crew, was excellent. Except they tended to all disappear around 10pm or 11pm, leaving one static camera going, no scoring, no commentary. For $70-$80, the highest premium of any pool streaming service, I expect there to at minimum be a scoreboard kept for every match.

The remaining tables were a mixed bag. Many of the tables were mounted in terrible locations, where they would be covering several tables for example. Digitalpool provided no scoring or commentary on these. I rarely saw players accurately keeping their scores on the tablets, and if they were, it took a long time to update. A couple of games might complete before it showed up on the digitalpool.com site. Most cameras were swinging in some breeze, like they were playing on a cruise ship.

There were more syndicates this year, and most of them were great. They provided a far better service than accu-stats or digital pool, as far as commentary and score keeping (some had their own scoreboard overlays). Most improved was the railbirdtv youtube channel, which actually streamed live matches this year. In previous years they didn't post matches until months after DCC was over. Not only that, they had good commentary and good scoring, their presentation was more professional than accu-stats if you ask me.

It was next to impossible to know who was going to be streaming on the TV table at any given time, unless you are talking about the bigfoot.

Digitalpool made great strides at showing something in lieu of brackets, but the information was often inaccurate, laggy, or would just freeze up. For example it would show players had no buybacks when they did. Nonetheless, my hat is off to them for figuring out something, it can't be easy with 4 tournaments going on, 3 of them with 400-500 players, and the buyback system.

Overall it was much improved, but I still feel $70-$80 remains FAR FAR too much.
 
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