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

"Before we talk about the break, tell me where the cue ball stops after the break." That is the question I ask myself every time I sit in front of a screen to watch a professional pool match, and at the recent World 10-Ball Championship it explained almost the entire story. When Eklent Kaci faced Duong Quoc Hoang — the Vietnamese player known as Hoang Sao — the Albanian produced something most domestic fans had only heard about through highlight reels: six break-and-runs in a single match. Six. The opponent sat out, able only to watch. In a rotation game, that is total dominance — not winning through flashy shot-making, but by stripping the opponent of the right to play. Then the final happened. And the man lifting the trophy was not Kaci. Wojciech Szewczyk, the 32-year-old Polish player, completed his brace of World 10-Ball titles. Meanwhile Kaci — the man who had just produced the most fearsome break of the tournament — was stopped. On the surface this looks paradoxical. But when you break it down into technical variables, it becomes far clearer. To read it correctly, you have to place it in the right discipline. This is American pool, specifically 10-ball — a rotation game. The rule is simple but brutal: the ball struck first must be the lowest-numbered ball remaining on the table, and the 10-ball is the last to be pocketed. Unlike 9-ball, professional 10-ball is typically played under a called-shot format — the player must nominate the pocket, and often the target ball. This rule sharply reduces the luck factor, because a fortunate shot does not count if you did not call it. In other words, professional 10-ball rewards precision and run-out consistency, not fortune. One detail about the format also matters. This year's event was staged as a set-based competition, and that format was modified in 2026. Set play differs from a continuous race-to-N in that it compresses variance. You cannot let a single lapse stretch across a whole match; each set is a fresh contest, and the steadier player usually advances. That carries real weight when we look at the two standout figures of the event. In scale, this is a punishing arena: 96 players competing, and only three men in history have ever reached the milestone of two or more World 10-Ball titles. Szewczyk has two. Kaci has two. Ko Ping-Chung also has two. That is an extremely rare tier — men who did not win once on a hot streak, but proved durability across years in a discipline that demands high precision. What makes it fascinating is that these two double champions won in completely opposite ways. Szewczyk is the front-runner, controlling matches from the start and never letting anyone build pressure. He won by comfortable margins, carving up the whole field from round one. It is the kind of championship I call "silent, ruthless, efficient" — no explosive moment worth a highlight reel, but also no hole for an opponent to exploit. Kaci is the opposite. He is the grinder, living on stamina and nerve. Throughout the event he fell behind four separate times and turned the match around. Four times. That number says something about competitive psychology that no scoreboard ever captures: the ability to stay cold when pinned against the wall, and the ability to close a match at the decisive moment. There is a principle I always repeat: "A champion is not an unbeaten team; it is the team that errs less under the same pressure." In pool, this translates into a specific variable — how many times you give up the table after a missed shot. Szewczyk won because he almost never handed the table away. Kaci lost the final because on the most important day, his run-out streak was no longer as flawless as it had been against Hoang Sao. The break is the highest-leverage variable in this discipline. The reason is simple: a clean break and run removes the opponent from the table entirely. They never touch a ball, never get a chance to create an error, never get a chance to counter. So when the source analysis ties Kaci's 10-ball success to "breaking power" and calls it the quality that makes him special, I find that point entirely sound on technical grounds. Six break-and-runs in one match is the single strongest technical data point of the whole event. But precisely because of that, the final deserves to be dissected. If the break is Kaci's number-one weapon, then his defeat in the biggest match suggests his opponent found a way to neutralize it. And the most effective way to neutralize it in pool is not to break better, but to keep the opponent from breaking at all. When you clear the table on your own visit, the opponent never steps up to break. Szewczyk won with a margin-control model, while Kaci lost with a power model — and I regard this as a style-matchup result, not a universal law. This is the point I want to stress, because it is easily misread: "A tactical system is only trustworthy when I can find its hole." The conclusion that "efficiency beats power" sounds tidy, but it is drawn from a single match with no frame-level data. We have no run-out percentage, no break-pot percentage, no safety statistics. Without those numbers, every statement about style is an interpretation. One more telling detail: under called-shot 10-ball, the luck factor is significantly suppressed compared to 9-ball. That means Kaci's four comeback wins are unlikely to be products of fortune. They are far more likely to be a genuine signal of nerve and pressure tolerance. This is exactly what I always verify on video before concluding, because a stats sheet sometimes omits the decisive shots. I still remember a lesson from my early years. Analyzing a series of matches on StatsBomb data, I once found a shot that hit the post in the 67th minute had been omitted from the statistics. From then on I built the habit of cross-checking video against data before asserting anything. At this 10-ball event I did the same: I rewatched Kaci's breaks from multiple angles to establish where the cue ball stopped, and only then drew conclusions about break quality. And what I saw is this: break power and break control are two different things. A powerful break that leaves the cue ball in the wrong place pushes the player into trouble, forcing a safety instead of a run-out. Conversely, a break with just enough power that keeps the cue ball near the center of the table opens a long run-out sequence. Kaci belongs to the first group at peak form, but the consistency of the break is what decides whether he can hold the table across many sets. This is also why I do not fully agree with framing Kaci's career around the single notion of "power." Four comeback wins reveal a different quality: the ability to play safe, read the table and wait for an error. That is a defensive skill, and it appears in no attacking statistic. The fact that the source analysis does not address either player's safety game shows the analytical frame leans toward scoring. For a discipline where defense can decide an entire set, this is a blind spot. "A diagram on paper is only the residue of every decision that happened on the table." In pool, the "diagram" is the position of the cue ball after the break. You can sketch a perfect run-out plan on paper, but if the cue ball stops half a hand's width off, the whole plan collapses. Szewczyk won because he handled better in the moments when the cue ball did not sit where he wanted. Kaci lost because his run-out streak depended too heavily on the cue ball stopping in exactly the right spot. I also want to address age. Szewczyk is 32 — squarely inside the peak phase of a professional player, roughly 23 to 35, when technique has matured and experience is deep enough to handle pressure. This is not a young player who flares and fades, but a man at the exact balance point between ability and composure. His brace did not come from luck; it came from being in the most productive phase of his career. And Kaci? Four comebacks in a single event demand an exceptional physical and mental foundation. I believe this is the most underrated quality in his profile. People remember the powerful breaks, but what kept him alive across sets was endurance. That is a different kind of asset, and it never shows on a scoreboard. This brings me to the most important contrarian angle of this piece. The popular narrative is: the controller beats the power player, efficiency beats flash. But one final is not enough to establish a law. If Kaci met Szewczyk three more times, the result could reverse entirely — because a break at peak level is a weapon that can remove the opponent from the table without giving him any chance to fight back. Kaci's problem in the final may simply have been a day when the break did not click, not a systemic limitation. And here is where I want to question myself. If the data showed Kaci genuinely had a break-pot rate far above the rest of the field, then losing one final would say nothing about the value of the break. It would only say that in a set-based format, one hot day is not enough to guarantee a title. The format compresses variance, and when variance is compressed, the steadiest player wins. That may be the whole story — not a clash of two styles, but a property of the competitive format. If so, the lesson for players is not "play control," but "make your break repeatable across many sets." That is a very different conclusion, and it changes how you practice. You do not abandon power to switch to control; you turn power into something repeatable. I do not watch a pool match for entertainment; I watch to find the moment the table position begins to collapse. And at this event, that moment was not a botched shot, but the instant a break stopped clearing the table. When Kaci's run-out streak broke, he was forced to play safe, and when forced to play safe, he left his comfort zone. Szewczyk was the opposite — he never left his comfort zone, because he rarely let the table fall to his opponent. There is something I have learned across years of analysis: the silence of data also deserves interrogation. Here, the data is silent on defense, on safety, on run-out percentage. That silence does not mean these factors are unimportant; it means we lack the tools to measure them. And when tools are missing, people tend to reduce everything to the easiest thing to measure — in this case, the break and the number of run-outs. Looking back at the whole event, three players have reached the milestone of two World 10-Ball titles: Szewczyk, Kaci and Ko Ping-Chung. That is a group so small that every member deserves individual study. Notably, all three won by different paths. Ko Ping-Chung is famous for a disciplined game and an ability to punish errors. Kaci stands out for power and nerve. Szewczyk for control and consistency. The existence of three different paths to the top is evidence that no single model is optimal. This is the point I want to make to those who practice. You can win many ways, as long as the way suits your strengths and you can handle your errors on your worst days. Szewczyk did not win because he owns the most powerful break — he does not. He won because on a day when his break was imperfect, he still found a way to hold the table. Kaci did not lose because he is weak — he is one of the most dangerous players in the event. He lost because on the most important day, his strongest weapon did not operate at its highest level. There is a moment in matches I always watch for: the point when a player shifts from attack to defense. That is where you see his nature most clearly. A player who only knows attack will flounder. A player with a defensive foundation will find a way to survive. Kaci survived four deficits, which shows he is not merely a break machine. But in the final, Szewczyk put him in a position of having to defend more than he wanted, and that is how a control model strangles a power model. What I want to carry away from this event is not a verdict on who is better than whom. It is a question about how we measure value in professional pool. If the stats sheets only record run-outs and break-pots, we will always undervalue the safety shots that saved a set. And when we undervalue defense, we will misread the real reason a player wins. Szewczyk completed his brace at 32, right in the most productive phase of a player's career. Kaci leaves an event he can be proud of, even without the trophy. Both are double champions in 10-ball — a tier only three men in the world have ever reached. The question for next season is not who will win, but whether Kaci's break can become steady enough that no control model can lock it down. When a player turns his strongest weapon into something repeatable across every set, his limits disappear.