WNT, WPA and 2026

Frosty said:
It’s not a bad thing that the rest of the world fell in love with and started to engage in, and succeed at this game at an elite level, THAT is a sign of a sport gaining traction as you state, but not in the USA.

Sadly while the rest of the world has flocked to the sport, Americans have turned away from it, for a bastardized version of it. I don’t agree with your assessment of the status of juniors in this country, but you are entitled to your opinions.

As I stated in the post you partially quoted, Americas potential prospects are few because Americans have turned away from the game PROPER, and embraced bar boxes, insisting that it’s pool, when it isn’t. As a result pool halls have dwindled to an all time low in number, either going out of business, or having a fire sale for their actual pool tables, and refilling their space with bar boxes to serve league and recreational bangers. You know, those that you serve with your rating system, APA, TAP, etc.

I don’t know if it can be reversed to where Americans will ever again have more than a few players at the upper elite levels of the pro game. To do so, then Americans need to embrace the actual game again, just as those those in Europe and Asia did. For the BCA to get off their ass and form youth programs that compete on 9’ tables to develop the skills necessary to compete at elite levels again with the International players that now dominate the sport. I’m doubtful that will occur though.

We as a country are not going to produce world class players on bar boxes. You don’t see players rise on the PGA golf tour from miniature golf courses or from 9 hole par 3 courses. There’s a reason for that, because you cannot gain the skill set to be a professional golfer from those 2 venues. Likewise we as a country will not produce pro pool players from bar box pool venues and leagues.

EDIT: let me add this for the bar boxes enthusiasts on here that will read this post and loudly declare for the umpteenth time that all of you, “league players have kept pool alive in this country”. In the slang words of our youth, STOP THE CAP!!!
You have NOT kept pool alive, you killed it by abandoning pool halls with proper pool tables to play on a miniature version of it that’s EASIER and makes you feel better about your abilities. Also for those that say “all we have in our region is bar boxes”. Well that’s because in your region the players abandoned the game long ago causing halls to close and leaving only venues with bar boxes. The only thing that recreational and league bar box players have kept alive is pool equipment manufacturers. Those that make all the cues, cases, specialized LD and carbon fiber shafts, $20 chalk and all the other things you spend a fortune on, buying every new offering, to either impress your fellow league players, or an attempt to buy an actual skill set, which can’t be done. The only thing you can buy to really improve your game is table time and then put in the work. Sadly in this current day and age of desire for instant gratification, putting in time and effort isn’t as appealing as buying the new Predator 5000 Z supercharged shaft or fancy chalk.
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good post, and i agree. you need proper commercial pool rooms and/or pool clubs, not bars, to grow pro pool talent.

the thing about demand for instant gratification is weird though. why would that be the case in US and not in taiwan, china, philippines, germany etc? i'm not sure i buy the demand argument. the supply side is obvious; if you can fit two tables instead of one in your establishment, it's a rational decision for the supplier.
 
I'm not buying the argument that the US has a shortage of 9 foot tables, and establishments that allow people under 21 are more likely to have 9 foot tables anyway.

I'm also skeptical of the idea that the US needs to be nothing but a sterile, European billiard academy style of environment for us to produce pros. However, access to pool tables in the formative years is important.
 
Lowell said:
I'm not buying the argument that the US has a shortage of 9 foot tables, and establishments that allow people under 21 are more likely to have 9 foot tables anyway.

I'm also skeptical of the idea that the US needs to be nothing but a sterile, European billiard academy style of environment for us to produce pros. However, access to pool tables in the formative years is important.
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Does pool in the US need to change in any way to make the US more competitive? How can that change happen?
 
Bob Jewett said:
Does pool in the US need to change in any way to make the US more competitive? How can that change happen?
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More commercial money and attention are the only options, and neither looks promising, even with ESPN dipping its toes back into the water.

Unless pool became an Olympic sport, I don't see how the change can happen. It will remain individual initiative in the U.S. - there's nobody with the resources or ability to do the organizing.
 
Just looked at the calendar again. Seems a slim possibility at best of a WPC being held this year.

The only potential weeks still available are November 3-9, November 10-15 and Dec. 8-13, it looks like. Other WNT and WPA/Predator events are scheduled for all other time slots, plus the Qatar Open.

Matchroom made a lot of progress this year in scheduling. Most, but not all, events were announced earlier than usual. Matchroom has also already announced the dates for the next World Masters, PLP and Florida 2027 opens.

Still, not having the WPC is a big miss. Ditto for the absence of the Hanoi Open.
 
If the plug for the WPC got pulled entirely due to the Iran conflict it would be understandable. MR would have been caught off guard. But I have to wonder if they were negotiating with the Saudis well before the event was canceled. If so, they failed badly in not finding a makeup date.

Oddly, Emily was in Qatar last year. Got me wondering whether she was seeing if they would be receptive to making the Qatar Open this year's WPC. Doubt it, but I do wonder what she was doing there.

The absence of Hanoi is an even bigger mystery. Last year's event was a tough one because of the monsoon. Conditions in the arena were difficult since it didn't have AC and it was so humid.

But is MR really abandoning Vietnam and leaving it to WPA/Predator? Hard for me to think so, but then, Frazer and Matchroom don't tells us anything. I think they do a disservice to fans by not communicating more openly.
 
Frazer did hint at the Florida Open at another potential major in the U.S. in the future Really seems like WNT is putting a lot of eggs in the US basket, and I have to wonder why. What are they seeing?
 
jbart65 said:
Frazer did hint at the Florida Open at another potential major in the U.S. in the future Really seems like WNT is putting a lot of eggs in the US basket, and I have to wonder why. What are they seeing?
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The same thing most foreign World Cup visitors saw...one of the greatest countries in the world.🇺🇸

Heck we have states with economies bigger than most countries. I don't know for a fact, but it hard for me to imagine any other country spend as much on personal recreation than we do...especially when every redneck I know has a 20k side by side and usually a 50k boat in the garage.

Its really not that hard to imagine why EF wants the American market$$$. If, and that is a mighty big IF, pool ever catches fire again, I imagine they would want to be well established.
 
Bob Jewett said:
Does pool in the US need to change in any way to make the US more competitive? How can that change happen?
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I have spent the last 20 years asking questions which leads me to these insights.

I believe the USA needs a billiard school which teaches pool and billiards.
We have none besides pool rooms. If we want legitimacy in the sports world, we must be legitimate.

I believe we need a farm system, as baseball has, as golf has.
Without an infrastructure to support a tour with quality sponsorship (Rolex as official timekeeper for example) and prize funds worthy of attention, pool will continue to play for the same prize money they competed for at the turn of the last century.
They were playing for 10K then, and not much has changed.

If I could get the Michael Jordan’s and Mickey Mantle’s of pool to play for me for pennies on the dollar to my profit, what’s the problem?🙄

Exposure.
Starting at school.
Bart Mahoney, had begun to get pool in school, high and collegiate in California!
He and his program were a success!!
Please talk to him.
It had been achieved at a local level, and for want of 30K it had missed a deadline to go statewide.

Bart Mahoney’s entire plan is still on the Billiard Education Foundation’s website!!
⬇️⬇️⬇️

Billiard Education Foundation - Pool in School

billiardeducationfoundation.wildapricot.org billiardeducationfoundation.wildapricot.org
 
skogstokig said:
good post, and i agree. you need proper commercial pool rooms and/or pool clubs, not bars, to grow pro pool talent.

the thing about demand for instant gratification is weird though. why would that be the case in US and not in taiwan, china, philippines, germany etc? i'm not sure i buy the demand argument. the supply side is obvious; if you can fit two tables instead of one in your establishment, it's a rational decision for the supplier.
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Well as I understand it, you’re in Europe. As many Europeans recently discovered when visiting the USA for the World Cup, Americans are very different from Europeans.

Regarding the supply side thing. You have clubs where you live. Are any of the owners getting rid of 9’ tables to install 2 bar boxes in the same space, not really huh? Why, well because where you are there’s no demand for them. It’s the same in Taiwan and the Philippines, you don’t see bar boxes.

Sadly in America, they seem to be the preference for most players for the reasons I described in my initial post. I know a guy in the state I’m from that opened a room in the Southern part of the state where there were no places with 9’ tables hoping it would become an Action spot. He put in twelve 9’ Diamonds and twelve 7’ Diamonds for leagues. The area he’s in is notorious for its concentration of bar league players. Several months after opening he was barely treading water. They had 3 league nights which were jam packed, but only the occasional player on the 9’ tables. He ended up pulling out 10 of the 9’s and putting in 2 more 7’ boxes due to demand and the remaining space he put corn hole pits in for corn hole leagues, leaving only two 9’ tables for the couple of 1 pocket players that played there. He told me he was just speechless that the people from that area preferred the bar boxes and wouldn’t play on the 9’ tables.
 
jbart65 said:
If the plug for the WPC got pulled entirely due to the Iran conflict it would be understandable. MR would have been caught off guard. But I have to wonder if they were negotiating with the Saudis well before the event was canceled. If so, they failed badly in not finding a makeup date.

Oddly, Emily was in Qatar last year. Got me wondering whether she was seeing if they would be receptive to making the Qatar Open this year's WPC. Doubt it, but I do wonder what she was doing there.
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Doing what Emily does, chase after ways to put more shekels in MR’s coffers. If MR was really interested in making pool into something they would have put a pool person at the helm instead of her. They’re interested in 💰, hence Emily’s coronation, pool is just a means to an end for her.
 
Frosty said:
Doing what Emily does, chase after ways to put more shekels in MR’s coffers. If MR was really interested in making pool into something they would have put a pool person at the helm instead of her. They’re interested in 💰, hence Emily’s coronation, pool is just a means to an end for her.
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You make some good observations in this thread. This is not one of them.

A "pool" person is not an expert necessarily in media production, marketing, scheduling and all the non-pool things that go into trying to build a profession pool tour. Those are different skills.

It's possible a pool person could have or develop those skills, too, but it's not like there are lots of obvious candidates. I sure can't think of any. The field of potential talent to do her job is very thin.

If Frazer really wanted a means to an end, what's more, she would not have sought to run the WNT. It might be a dead-end job.

There are few "shekels" in pro pool despite the efforts of Matchroom and Predator. Matchroom is not making any money on pool. I doubt anyone is going to give her a much bigger job based on what she does with the WNT.

She would have better off trying to become the head of darts.
 
Frosty said:
Well as I understand it, you’re in Europe. As many Europeans recently discovered when visiting the USA for the World Cup, Americans are very different from Europeans.

Regarding the supply side thing. You have clubs where you live. Are any of the owners getting rid of 9’ tables to install 2 bar boxes in the same space, not really huh? Why, well because where you are there’s no demand for them. It’s the same in Taiwan and the Philippines, you don’t see bar boxes.

Sadly in America, they seem to be the preference for most players for the reasons I described in my initial post. I know a guy in the state I’m from that opened a room in the Southern part of the state where there were no places with 9’ tables hoping it would become an Action spot. He put in twelve 9’ Diamonds and twelve 7’ Diamonds for leagues. The area he’s in is notorious for its concentration of bar league players. Several months after opening he was barely treading water. They had 3 league nights which were jam packed, but only the occasional player on the 9’ tables. He ended up pulling out 10 of the 9’s and putting in 2 more 7’ boxes due to demand and the remaining space he put corn hole pits in for corn hole leagues, leaving only two 9’ tables for the couple of 1 pocket players that played there. He told me he was just speechless that the people from that area preferred the bar boxes and wouldn’t play on the 9’ tables.
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you would know better than me, obviously. seems to be geographical differences within the US also, i haven't seen many youtube streams with barboxes in new england / mid atlantic states
 
skogstokig said:
you would know better than me, obviously. seems to be geographical differences within the US also, i haven't seen many youtube streams with barboxes in new england / mid atlantic states
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There ARE geographic differences. But it is not a simple popularity of barboxes issue. There are two different subcultures regarding them.
At the risk of oversimplifying, I'll call them two-world and one-world,

TWO-WORLD (northeast is an example, some very strong APA areas other examples)

Here there is a bar-pool culture and a pool-hall culture without a clean overlap between them. There is not only table-size difference. But the pool hall is playing on, e.g., simonis and good balls, while the bars more likely have heavy cueballs and slower cloth. Significantly, the strong players in the pool halls don't tend to be people who "graduated" from the bar scene; they are more often players who grew up in the pool hall. The better bar-pool players (say 550 speed) may not even be able to name the 650s in their area. Even though the most serious players here are "9-foot" players, these areas don't tend to produce as many good players.

ONE-WORLD (Midwest and particularly upper midwest largely this; other areas are mixed)

First, a few facts.

Tyler Styer had 2000 games in FargoRate before his first game on a 9-foot table. It was at the Super Billiards expo in 2024 when his 9-foot games (5,000 then) reached his 7-foot games (5,000 also).

You referred to Hayden Ernst as "a 9-foot player." In his record, though, the 9-foot games are from national-level junior tournaments like BEF, etc. The league games in his record and the vast majority of tournament games in the system are on 7-foot tables.

This is part of a different scene where the tables in the pool hall are mixed (Railyard, where Hayden plays, has 23 7-foot tables and 8 9-foot tables. Q-Master, the closest big room to me, has 39 7-foot tables and 29 9-foot tables. With some 9-foot tables in use for one pocket and people matching up, it is the 7-foot tables that are most available for tournaments. These aren't just the low-level league night. They also include serious play by serious players. Many good players bounce seamlessly between them. These 7-foot tables tend to have cloth and balls that mimic the 9-foot tables.

In this ONE-WORLD scene, players who are getting serious about the game naturally add more and more 9-foot play. There is not this big separation between them for the better players.
 
mikepage said:
There ARE geographic differences. But it is not a simple popularity of barboxes issue. There are two different subcultures regarding them.
At the risk of oversimplifying, I'll call them two-world and one-world,

TWO-WORLD (northeast is an example, some very strong APA areas other examples)

Here there is a bar-pool culture and a pool-hall culture without a clean overlap between them. There is not only table-size difference. But the pool hall is playing on, e.g., simonis and good balls, while the bars more likely have heavy cueballs and slower cloth. Significantly, the strong players in the pool halls don't tend to be people who "graduated" from the bar scene; they are more often players who grew up in the pool hall. The better bar-pool players (say 550 speed) may not even be able to name the 650s in their area. Even though the most serious players here are "9-foot" players, these areas don't tend to produce as many good players.

ONE-WORLD (Midwest and particularly upper midwest largely this; other areas are mixed)

First, a few facts.

Tyler Styer had 2000 games in FargoRate before his first game on a 9-foot table. It was at the Super Billiards expo in 2024 when his 9-foot games (5,000 then) reached his 7-foot games (5,000 also).

You referred to Hayden Ernst as "a 9-foot player." In his record, though, the 9-foot games are from national-level junior tournaments like BEF, etc. The league games in his record and the vast majority of tournament games in the system are on 7-foot tables.

This is part of a different scene where the tables in the pool hall are mixed (Railyard, where Hayden plays, has 23 7-foot tables and 8 9-foot tables. Q-Master, the closest big room to me, has 39 7-foot tables and 29 9-foot tables. With some 9-foot tables in use for one pocket and people matching up, it is the 7-foot tables that are most available for tournaments. These aren't just the low-level league night. They also include serious play by serious players. Many good players bounce seamlessly between them. These 7-foot tables tend to have cloth and balls that mimic the 9-foot tables.

In this ONE-WORLD scene, players who are getting serious about the game naturally add more and more 9-foot play. There is not this big separation between them for the better players.
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Raxx is arguably the best pool hall in NY and the bar tables are taken quite seriously, I would say there's overlap.

They are pristine Diamonds and have the same CPBA cloth.

There's also been a gradual sea change from classic Valley style bar tables to Diamond bar tables with 4.5 inch pockets, I would say bar tables in NYC are maybe 2/3 of the former and 1/3 the latter.
 
Lowell said:
Raxx is arguably the best pool hall in NY and the bar tables are taken quite seriously, I would say there's overlap.

They are pristine Diamonds and have the same CPBA cloth.

There's also been a gradual sea change from classic Valley style bar tables to Diamond bar tables with 4.5 inch pockets, I would say bar tables in NYC are maybe 2/3 of the former and 1/3 the latter.
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Thank you. That is good to hear!
 
I've long puzzled over the barbox debate.

I have a 7-foot table at home. It's all I can fit until a reno of my basement. Which, if I am lucky, will allow me to upgrade to an 8-foot table. A 9 footer is out of the question unless I want to spend $125,000 plus to expand my basement.

I can practice every part of my game on a 7-footer. Which is great. When I play in a pool hall, I always play on a 9-footer.

Obviously it's a big adjustment, but the principles of ball movement and pattern play are the same. If I didn't have a 7-footer at all, though, I wouldn't be playing pool, period.

How come? Pool halls are too far away and too expensive for me - a big issue for young players - to have played there all the time to develop the skills I wanted to develop. A 7-foot table at home has allowed that.

From my perspective, barboxes get people into the game. The players who actually want to get better, though, will gravitate to 9 foot tables sooner or later. The problem is, there is not that many of these types of players.

As such, I don't think people who prefer to play mainly on barboxes would ever get serious enough to become a top amateur, never mind a pro.

Magically replacing all barboxes with 9 footers won't change that. Those same players now who want to play on barboxes never would have made a bigger commitment in the first place were they forced to play on 9 footers.

There's only two things that could result in more top-tier US pool players - a developmental organization like those that exist in other parts of the world such as Europe. Or a lot more money being on offer.

Neither is likely.

The best American players are likely to remain the ones whose parents like/play the game, put tables into their homes, encouraged their kids and supported them financially when young.
 
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