In the spirit of the 4th of the July, time for a bump.
The UK is indeed a top 5 cue sport country/nation, especially in tournaments, but I think the Filipinos are still the overall best. They can play 3 cushion (I don't like to penis measure the difficulty of cue sport games against one another, but 3 cushion is the hardest cue sport on the planet. The imagination those players display is unrivaled),
Agreed
all the major variants of American pool, and they are typically the best at one pocketNobody plays one pocket in the Phillipines. They are good at it because they play 15 ball rotation and carom games. and 15 ball rotation, which are probably the most difficult variants. And Orcollo did well in Chinese 8 ball, which is not a major cue sport and is basically English 8 ball on a heated 9 foot table, so of course the British contingent would do well.
Snewka this, snewka that. Great game, indeed, but the OP, like all UK cue sport fans overrate its worldwide appeal. LOL. Snooker is played all over Asia, Europe and especially in the former British colonies. Eurosport which broadcasts all over Europe shows snooker for weeks at a time. They've shown Eurotour pool maybe twice in the last 10 years and then only for an hour, and I always look for it..China has a huge number of snooker players as well. It's the third most watched sport in China after football and NBA basketball.It's not at all big outside of the UK, and probably shares cue sport popularity in Australia/Canada with English pool and American pool. You MUST be joking! You can't pay people in any non Asian country to watch American pool (with the possible exception of Mosconi Cup, which still isn't that popular. UK pool is popular as a pub game all over the world, especially in former colonies, but again you'd have to forcefully restrain people to make them watch one minute of UK pool on TV. I also find it funny when he said the US has a lot people who play snooker seriously. Lol no. The US is probably the worst place in the West and Asia for snooker in the world. You'd have to go to Africa for a worse snooker area. The same handful of guys (mostly immigrants) have participated in the US Snooker Championship for the past decade. Then Corey took it up as a hobby for a year and easily beat all of them. Alex did the same thing up North. Silly games like English Billiards are even more insular (ever see a 600 point nursery carom?)Wrong again. That kind of thing doesn't happen in English billiards anymore. They revised the rules. But I agree that it's an insular game, played by a handful.
American pool is probably the "hardest" cue sport to do well in on a worldwide stage since the talent pool you have to compete against is vastly larger than any other cue sport. L O L It's the 2nd most popular sport outright in the Philippines (a nation of 98 million) after basketball, it's of course our most popular cue sport, Taipei's most popular cue sport, it's the most popular cue sport in Western Europe sans the UK (Germany, Scandinavia, etc don't play snooker) Wrong again. Scandianavia and Germany both watch and play snooker. The sport may be smaller in active number of serious players, but in mass appeal it's not even close. Refer to previous tv coverage comment., and is probably as equally as popular in China as snooker, maybe much more so, especially with all the popular female players China has produced.
So on that point, the success of Appleton is impressive (I don't think he's the world's best pool player, just the world's best tourney player. That is what the worlds best player means. I'm by no means an Appleton fan, but I'm sick and tired of his accomplishments being put down in this fashion. I'd have him as an underdog against Orcollo, Ko, Alex, and a few others in a long race challenge match)Long range challenge matches are contrived nonsense. No sport settles who the best is this way, and for good reason. but other than him and maybe Shaw and Boyes, no Brit has really impressed at the world's most competitive cue sport: American pool and its variants. A lot of brits have done well at pool. On the Eurotour they've done very well (for instance Gray, Mellling). Melling did pretty well in the world championship as well. Davis also came quite far a couple of times.
We just need to get some kind of structured league/tour going, considering how popular it is. Prize money really should be higher than snooker. It's just that no one will watch it in the US, like Brits do snooker, meaning no television ratings=no sponsors=no money. Shame.
