Szewczyk and his second 10-Ball title: a safety map drawn in Saigon

The deciding rack of the fourth set, and Szewczyk had just made a mess of it. He misplayed a 2-6-7 combination — the kind of error that, at this level, usually costs a whole title. Eklent Kaci stepped to the table with the cue ball in hand, one clean clearance away from forcing a fifth set. Then he missed the 3-ball. I rewound that passage four times in my flat in Liverpool at two in the morning. Not to watch the miss. To watch Szewczyk sitting on his chair, hands on his thighs, eyes off the table. A cue-sport writer sees something the scoreboard never shows in that posture: the Pole had already won this title before Kaci put his hand on the cue. Wojciech Szewczyk has won the World 10-Ball Championship for the second time, beating Kaci 3-1 in sets (4-1, 1-4, 4-2, 4-3) in Ho Chi Minh City, collecting 80,000 US dollars. The most telling number of the entire week sits somewhere else. It sits in the fact that he was never once pushed to a deciding set. 10-Ball is not 9-Ball. The discipline is call-shot: every ball and pocket must be nominated before the cue touches the ball, and fluked pots do not count. People still say American pool leans on luck; that is truer of 9-Ball and far less true of 10-Ball. Here every mistake has a name and a coordinate. The tournament format is a variable too. Each set is a race to four racks, the match is best-of-five sets, and the early rounds run double-elimination before switching to single-elimination knockout from the last 16. That structure creates repeated small resets, favouring whoever holds consistency across the week rather than whoever owns one explosive evening. Kaci reached the final the hard way: five straight matches won from a set behind, three of them dragged into a deciding set. In the previous round, Pehlivanovic played close to nine hours on the Friday. Kaci had already won this title twice, in 2026 and 2026. The final was a Poland-Albania affair staged in Vietnam, where Duong Quoc Hoang carried the home crowd. Reading the original Absolute Pool report, one technical thread runs through it and is easy to skim past: sublime safety play. Szewczyk won the tactical exchanges. He won multiple safety battles. That is a description of how a title is built, not decorative colour for the piece. In 10-Ball, a safety is a tool of spatial control. It produces no highlight; it produces position. Every time an opponent is forced to shoot from a bad place, the probability of an error rises, and in a call-shot format that probability cannot be offset by luck. The best shot of the final may well have been a safety that left Kaci no route to the 3-ball. Break management sits alongside it. Szewczyk suffered a dry break late in the final and was punished for it; he also produced his first break and run at a pivotal moment. Kaci broke dry three times, plus a couple of additional uncharacteristic errors. In a format where each rack carries heavy weight, the gap is not in the best shot — it is in the number of unforced errors. The moment I remember most is the cut with the jump cue on the one-ball. In pool, using a jump cue to open the table is an advanced escape skill: it only appears when the layout after the break is unfavourable, and it forces a player to rehearse situations few bother to rehearse. Without it, there is no fourth set to win. And here is the number I keep. In four of the last five years, Szewczyk has reached the final 16. He won his first title roughly four years ago, beating Cristopher Tevez in the final. One title can be luck; five years of floor plus a second title cannot. A crooked diamond only appears when you stop looking at the ball — and here, the crooked diamond is the whole of Szewczyk's safety architecture, the thing nobody puts on a poster but the thing that decides who lifts the trophy. But I have to distrust the way this story is being told. The report calls Szewczyk the greatest player in Polish history. That is a national-scope claim, not a metric, and it cannot be measured by any figure in the piece. The bigger blind spot lies elsewhere. We have just spent several hundred words praising a safety game while no safety-success percentage has been published. No break-potting rate, no run-out rate, no world ranking for Szewczyk. All we have is language — sublime, ruthless, stunning — written by the event's own pen. That is a promotional signal, not verified data. Based on my experience of watching these matches, this is a familiar hole in every sport: people remember the shot, people forget the safety. The same logic applies to distance-covered metrics in football — running a lot is not the same as running in the right place. In pool, you can clear a table with easy shots while your opponent walks you into position. No instrument measures that invisible labour. There are three explanations for the same result, and I am in no hurry to pick one. Szewczyk won with safety — the most obvious reading. But Kaci may also have been running on empty after a long comeback run, and three dry breaks look more like a physical symptom than a technical one. And the race-to-four format creates repeated restart points, where whoever holds rhythm better benefits, even if that man breaks worse. The second and third readings are stronger than I first assumed. More data is needed to separate them. One purely technical note: I am not certain of the lineage behind the World 10-Ball Championship title. Kaci is listed as champion in 2026 and 2026, while Szewczyk's first title is dated four years ago. Those two facts may reconcile, or may not, depending on the publication date of the original piece. Pool is no stranger to different bodies running their own world championships. Until the sanctioning authority is confirmed, I hold the phrase two-time world champion at approximately right. What deserves tracking next month is not whether Szewczyk is worthy. He is, and the manner of his win — no deciding set across the whole event — is a stronger signal than any superlative. What deserves tracking is how long this safety-anchored style holds up against a genuinely elite breaker. In 10-Ball, a single dry break in the right rack can swing an entire set. And if a title won in Ho Chi Minh City signals that the commercial centre of pool is drifting toward Southeast Asia, then somebody should start measuring it before the headlines do the job for us. The match ends from the eleventh viewpoint — where nobody keeps score, but where the title is actually settled. Genius always leaves a gap few people can measure. Szewczyk left one of those in Saigon, and I will be testing it at the next event.