World 10-Ball Championship 2037: Szewczyk Completes the Brace, Kaci and the Limits of Break Power

Eklent Kaci broke six times in his match against Hoang Sao at the World 10-Ball Championship. Six times he cleared the table and never gave it back. I had to rewatch the footage three times before I dared write that number into my notebook, because at a tournament fielding 96 players, six break-and-runs in a single match sits outside the normal data range.

In 10-ball, a clean break with the cue ball settling in the right zone leaves the opponent with no table to play. Kaci did not beat Hoang Sao with difficult shots. He beat Hoang Sao by erasing him from the table.

And then, in the final match, the man lifting the trophy was Wojciech Szewczyk, 32 years old, with a completely opposite style.

Context: a discipline read through the wrong sport's vocabulary

The World 10-Ball Championship is American pool, 10-ball discipline. This is a rotation game: the lowest-numbered ball must be struck first, and the 10-ball is the final ball. There are no centuries, no 147s, no snooker. Every snooker analytical framework is meaningless here.

At professional level, 10-ball is typically played under called-shot rules: the player must nominate the pocket, and usually the ball as well. That rule detail matters more than it appears. Called-shot play sharply cuts the luck factor that defines 9-ball, and turns 10-ball into a discipline that rewards precision and sustained run-out ability.

The format deserves attention too. The event is played in sets, modified from 2026, rather than a continuous race-to-N. Set play compresses variance: a player who loses one set still has every chance, but a player with a weak break gets punished more consistently across many sets. In other words, this format rewards consistency.

Two fundamentally different championship profiles

Szewczyk won the front-running way. He carved up the entire field from round one, never let anyone put heat on him, and won by comfortable margins match after match. This is the margin-control model: no need for beautiful shots, only the need to make sure the opponent never touches the table at the right moment.

Kaci took the opposite road. He came back from a deficit four separate times, including a recovery when his opponent was already standing at the edge of victory. This is the resilient, hard-breaking model.

These two profiles differ technically and psychologically, and the final was a direct collision between them. The result: the control model beat the power model.

In called-shot 10-ball, the break is the single highest-leverage technical variable, but the thing that neutralises it is an error-free player.

The reason lies in the structure of the game. A good break plus a break-and-run takes an entire rack and strips the opponent of any chance to touch the table. But that leverage only exists when a player gets to break. Szewczyk did not need to break better than Kaci. He needed to clear the table every time it was handed to him, and to force Kaci into safety play every time Kaci came to the table. The more racks cleared in one visit, the fewer breaks Kaci got, and the smaller his greatest advantage became.

This is what I always check before praising a break: where does the cue ball stop, and does the opponent get to the table afterwards. Before you tell me about a great break, tell me where the cue ball stopped. A powerful break with the cue ball jumping out of its control zone is just an expensive way to hand over the table.

The data behind the story

The title table in this discipline is narrow. Szewczyk has two championships. Kaci has two. Ko Ping-Chung has two. Only three players in history have ever reached two or more titles. At 32, Szewczyk sits squarely in his peak years, the phase where technique has matured and big-match experience has accumulated.

A competitive system is only trustworthy when I can find its hole. And here, the hole is not Szewczyk.

The contrarian angle: four comebacks can be a symptom

The story told most often after the event was Kaci and his comeback resilience. I read that number in a different direction.

Four deficits in one tournament speak to recovery ability, and they also speak to four slow starts. In a set format, a slow start is survivable. In a long race format, or against a clean run-out player like Szewczyk, that gap does not close itself. Comeback ability is an asset, but it is an asset that only holds value when you have already pushed yourself into the position of needing it.

The second problem lies in how we read the final itself. The conclusion that "control beats power" is built on a single match. There is no run-out percentage, no break-pot percentage, no safety statistics. I do not watch a pool match for entertainment; I watch to find the moment the position starts to collapse. With the data available, I could not identify which rack that moment fell in.

And here is the biggest blind spot: safety play has almost vanished from every account. In called-shot 10-ball, most racks are not decided by a beautiful clearance, but by a safety that forces the opponent to shoot from a position they cannot clear. Nobody measures it, so nobody praises it. Champions are not the unbeaten; they are the ones who err fewer times under the same pressure.

What to watch next

Three players now stand at two titles, and next season will answer one very specific thing: who breaks that tie first. Ko Ping-Chung has favourable career timing. Joshua Filler, Fedor Gorst, Shane Van Boening and Francisco Sanchez Ruiz remain in the chasing group, but 10-ball has never been generous to late arrivals.

For Vietnamese pool, Hoang Sao's 0-6 defeat to Kaci is a cheap lesson. The gap is not in potting ability. It is in where the cue ball stops after the break. Six racks without touching the table are six racks in which individual technique becomes meaningless, because technique only has value when a player is still allowed to stand at the table.