Szewczyk seals second World 10-Ball title: a win built on safety play and error management

The fourth set of the World 10-Ball Championship final in Ho Chi Minh City closed at 4-3. Wojciech Szewczyk took the second world title of his career, four years after the first. The Polish cueist beat Eklent Kaci three sets to one: 4-1, 1-4, 4-2, 4-3. Kaci, a champion in 2026 and 2026, left the table with nothing left to play for.

The most telling number of the whole week was not in the final. Across a seven-day campaign, Szewczyk was never pushed to a deciding set. At world-championship level, that kind of control is rare enough that most top-20 cueists never reach it across an entire career.

To read this match properly you have to grasp one technical detail that mainstream coverage tends to skip. The discipline here is call-shot 10-Ball: every shot must nominate both the target ball and the pocket. Unlike 9-Ball, a fluked pot does not count. The luck element is compressed, and the value of a quality safety rises accordingly. The structure does the same job. Each set is a race to four racks, the match is best of five sets, so each player gets several small resets instead of one long race.

Safety play is where Szewczyk separated himself. He won most of the tactical exchanges, won safety battles that stretched across multiple visits, and turned control of the table into indirect scoring. The jump cue arrived when it was needed: a cut that lifted the one-ball over an obstructing ball, opening the table when the post-break layout refused to cooperate. In 10-Ball that is an advanced escape skill, and it does not appear in any shot-statistics column.

His break, by contrast, was far from flawless. He produced a dry break late in the final and was punished for it, and he mishandled a 2-6-7 combination in the deciding set. Kaci could not capitalise, and that is the whole story of the match: the title turned on who made fewer unforced errors, in a format that magnifies the value of a single rack.

I still watch pool the way I once read sponsorship contracts: the dry pages first, the glossy ones after. I open the contract before I open my mouth. For a world championship, the contract is the prize breakdown and the tournament regulations. The champion took 80,000 US dollars, top-tier for pool, still a rung below the richest snooker events. That figure, not the praise, decides whether a young cueist chooses 10-Ball, 9-Ball or Chinese 8-Ball as a career.

Kaci arrived in the final off a punishing comeback run: five straight matches won from a set down, three of them reaching a deciding set. A day earlier, Pehlivanovic sat at the table for close to nine hours. Heavy scheduling in the knockout phase is a real physical variable, and it is recorded in no statistics column. I have no direct evidence that Kaci faded in the final, but anyone who has stood behind a microphone for six straight hours understands that the steadiness of the hands depends on the stamina of the head.

This is where I part company with most of the commentary now circulating. Every world title has two readings: one for the audience, one for the tournament file. The audience version talks about a second shock, about the greatest player Poland has produced. The file version records a win built on safety, rhythm control and few errors: technically impressive, but not a stylistic revolution. The Absolute Pool writer reaches for very strong adjectives, and that outlet is a discipline-vertical title with its own readership. Its register should be read as a promotional signal, not as data.

There is another gap worth naming. No published table gives break success rate, safety success rate or run-out percentage. Every conclusion about Szewczyk's style is therefore qualitative. The mistake of 2026 taught me this: a microphone never fixes an error, it only exposes the truth. When verification data is missing, the honest approach is to state clearly where the inference begins.

The same problem appears one level up. Kaci is listed as champion in 2026 and 2026, while Szewczyk's first title is dated four years ago. Those two timelines may not reconcile, and the most plausible explanation is the existence of separate World 10-Ball Championship lineages run by different bodies, a known feature of this discipline. Until the sanctioning authority is confirmed, the phrase two-time world champion should be treated as provisional.

On the power map, this result creates no new order. 10-Ball is genuinely multi-polar: both finalists were European, yet the late rounds carried names from Chinese Taipei, Japan, the Philippines, Spain, Germany and Hungary. Europe holds the sharp end, Asia holds the market and the depth, and Vietnam itself, with a hometown player going deep, is proving it is more than a venue.

The stands were empty in 2026, yet I had never seen so much money appear. The capital flowing into Asian pool over the past half-decade is far larger than a world championship paying 80,000 dollars to its winner can reflect. A world title staged in Ho Chi Minh City signals that the sport's commercial centre of gravity is moving, while its competitive centre stays in Europe.

I write about sport, but what I dig up always lies outside the touchline. Wojciech Szewczyk's title will be remembered as one more entry in the file of a two-time world champion. What I want to know is something else: will a cueist with a record equal to more famous names keep being overlooked by the very sport he represents? If the answer is yes, the problem is not the cue.