Szewczyk's Seven Unbeaten Days: How a Saigon Pool Table Restored the Truth of 10-Ball

At the corner of table three, the yellow ball sat motionless on the long rail. Wojciech Szewczyk bent low, his cue pausing in the empty air before it ever touched the cue ball — a silence longer than any shot taken all week. It was the final minute of the final, and the Polishman stood one stroke away from closing out seven unbeaten days at Phú Thọ Indoor Stadium, Ho Chi Minh City.

The final scoreline read 3-1 over Besar Kaçi, and a second world title. But if I wrote only the 3-1, I would lose most of the story. I learned to read matches through numbers, but only when they know how to dance.

Context: a world championship on Vietnamese soil

The 2026 WPA Men's 10-Ball World Championship — officially the Iwan Simonis WPA Men's 10-Ball World Championship — took place in late September 2026, drawing 96 players from across every continent. The total prize fund was 300,000 US dollars, with the champion taking 80,000 dollars, roughly 26.7 percent of the pool. Hold that figure; I will return to it.

The format opened with double elimination before shifting to a knockout stage. Phú Thọ Indoor Stadium, long a host to international events, became the centre of a week of world-class pool. Immediately after, the Predator Pro Billiard Series moved on to Bali, Indonesia, bundling three titles: Women's 9-Ball, Men's Open, and Men's Doubles.

This was not a standalone event. It is one link in Predator's Southeast Asian expansion — something I have tracked for years as an outsider who nonetheless sits at the very heart of the story.

Core analysis: why 7-0 matters more than a title

Szewczyk won without losing a single match. Seven matches, seven victories. In 10-ball, that means something entirely different than it would in 9-ball.

The reason lies in call-shot rules. In 10-ball, a player must nominate the intended ball before striking — no room for accidental luck. The layout is denser, the gaps tighter, every shot demanding more precision. If 9-ball rewards big breaks and fortunate rolls, 10-ball hands the table back to the player who truly controls it.

No one runs seven matches in this format on luck. That is the strongest technical signal the data can offer in a report short on granular statistics.

Szewczyk's knockout path proves it: Szolnoki, then Chua, then Sánchez Ruiz, then Pehlivanovic, then Kaçi in the final — a genuine international gauntlet spanning Hungary, the Philippines, Spain, Bosnia, and Albania. No soft draw here.

What struck me most: Szewczyk beat Kaçi twice in one event — 2-0 in the elimination stage, then 3-1 in the final. Beating an elite opponent twice in a week, across two different competitive formats, is not coincidence. It speaks to tactical adjustment between matches, something bare stat sheets cannot measure.

Szewczyk first won the world 10-ball title in 2026. Four years later, he stood atop again. That four-year gap is the defining data point of his career: either a sustained-elite player with a mid-cycle dip, or a man whose form swings wildly at the very top. No source says which. But a second title lifts him from "one-time champion" to "multiple world champion" — a tier carrying entirely different commercial and legacy weight in professional pool.

Contrarian angle: they host, but Vietnam has not yet won

There is something international reporting rarely says aloud about tournaments in Southeast Asia. The event was held in Ho Chi Minh City, yet the winners' list — Szewczyk of Poland, Kaçi of Albania, Chua of the Philippines, Filler of Germany, Sánchez Ruiz of Spain — contains not one Vietnamese cueist.

The gap between hosting and winning, between being a market and being a power, is the blind spot local media often skips because it is too busy celebrating.

I do not say this to diminish anyone. I say it because I live here, in Nha Trang, and I see the devotion of Vietnamese players at late-night tables every evening. But devotion does not convert overnight into world-class form. Southeast Asia keeps being chosen — Saigon this week, Bali the next — because costs are lower and the player base is growing, not because a domestic generation is ready to storm the semifinals.

More telling is how Predator bundles three titles — Women's 9-Ball, Men's Open, Men's Doubles — into a single Bali stop. It is a cost-efficiency play: pack multiple trophies into one trip, maximise field density and sponsor exposure. It also reveals reliance on a fixed sponsor cluster — Simonis, Aramith, Kamui, Predator, Yalin. If one commercial link exits, the tour's scale can shrink fast.

And when you set that 80,000-dollar champion's cheque beside a field of 96, a sustainability question surfaces: can those eliminated early in double elimination cover travel and lodging for a full week in Saigon? Professional pool remains a sport where prize money lags well behind its global competitive intensity.

Takeaway

The match truly begins the moment the ball touches no one. For Szewczyk, the decisive silence was not the final stroke, but the four quiet years between two titles. That gap never appears on a scoreboard, yet it tells the story of why a cueist climbs back to the summit.

Some victories are not on the scoreboard, but in the breath of the crowd. Some championships are not in the 3-1, but in seven days without a single bow to defeat.

And as the series leaves Saigon for Bali, the question I keep is not how many more titles Szewczyk will win. It is this: when will a Vietnamese cueist stand at that corner of the table, in his own hometown arena, and not merely watch?