Taking a Chance on Nine Ball
“If you want to play billiards really well, you must drop your family and work,” renowned American pool player Robert Birn once said. From this angle, the participants in the billiard tournament among media representatives held the Friday before last at the Green Glade Club could have hardly shown high skill in handling the cue.
Moreover, the tournament, organized by the Billiard Sports Federation of Ukraine, was conducted under the so-called American system and on tables a little larger than traditional coin- operated ones in Kyiv’s pool halls. Another point: of all kinds of American pool, Kyiv players prefer eight ball (whoever pockets the black ball after all of either the stripes or solids wins), and very seldom do they opt for rotation pool (in which one must win as many points as possible). But the journalists competed in nine ball, so far little known in this country. Unlike other varieties of pool, this game uses nine instead of fifteen balls. Shots must be taken at the lowest-numbered ball. Whoever pockets the nine ball wins.
At first glance (including that of many competitors), the game is a free ride. For you can hit home eight balls and make a mistake, while your rival can hit home the nine ball and thus win. But nine ball is in fact an American game. Any competitor has a chance not to make an error and a chance to take advantage of his opponent’s mistake. What is most important here is not only to play but also not to let your adversary play. Of course, the tournament of journalists, most of whom were playing this variety of pool for the first time, in fact showed no clear cut tactical patterns of play: hence the impression of a free ride, the more so that the competition displayed more than enough vivid examples.
In the semifinals, first secretary at the embassy of Slovakia, Igor Barto, brought the nine ball close to the middle pocket. The four ball, at which he was to take a shot, lay by the table rim on the opposite side, while the cue ball was almost in the table center. If the cue ball had rebounded correctly from the four, the match would have ended. But there was a mistake: the four ball flew to the center, and the cue ball fell into the pocket. Scratch. The Komsomolskaya pravda representative in Ukraine, Oleksandr Yevsiukov, had nothing to do but complete the match with a bank shot. Later in the finals, the opponent again made a mistake and set the cue ball and the object ball almost along the same line, putting the nine ball almost in the pocket. All Yevsiukov had to do was take a gentle slightly-undercut shot, and he would have surely won. But his shot was too strong, and his opponent got the cue ball, the object ball, and the nine ball on the same line with the pocket. Oleksandr Popov (the newspaper Arssmen ) made no mistakes and became the winner of the Marconi Elite Cup along with a high-class cue. In the losers’ final, Oleksandr Rakosd (STB) beat the Slovak emissary.
With a few exceptions the journalists’ tourney failed to show any high billiard skill. But the very fact that after the award ceremony the journalists were slow to gather at the buffet table (they were playing nine ball on vacant tables) can testify to the infectious nature of this game. “I liked the journalists’ tournament, and there will be a sequel in the immediate future,” Liudmyla Savchenko, secretary of the Billiard Sports Federation of Ukraine, promised The Day’s correspondent who had managed to pocket one nine ball in the tournament.
