The inaugural World 10-Ball Championship is set to kickoff at 10am Monday morning at the Philippine International Convention Center in Manila.
The opening draw was completed on Sunday night and is available online at http://www.wpa-tour.com.
All of the action on Sunday was ceremonial in nature. A press conference was held early in the day and was attended by a number of top stars who will compete in the event. Notable players in attendance included Ralf Souquet, Thorsten Hohmann, Thomas Engert, Shane Van Boening, Chia-Ching Wu, Marlon Manalo, Antonio Gabica, Ernesto Dominguez, Oscar Dominguez, Pin-Yi Ko and Jung-Ling Chang. Also joining the press conference were two of the ladies entries in the event, former Women's World Champion Shin-Mei Liu and current Women's World Champion Yuan-chun Lin.
Raya Sports president Yen Makabenta spoke at the press conference and pointed out that the World 10-Ball event is the largest tournament so far this year. It has players from the most number of countries, it features the most prize money and will have the largest television exposure of any event this year.
Later in the day were the players meeting and tournament draw. Thirty two players were seeded into the sixteen groups of eight players. The players were seeded using the following format. The top three seeds were the reigning World 9-Ball, 8-Ball and Straight Pool Champions. Positions 4-30 were based on the top 9 players in the BCA, EPBA and APBU. The final two seeded players came from Australia and Africa.
The seeded players are...
Daryl Peach
Ralf Souquet
Niels Feijen
Shane Van Boening
Mark Gray
Chia-Ching Wu
Johnny Archer
Bruno Muratore
Kuo-Pin Wang
Louie Ulrich
Thomas Engert
Ching-Shun Yang
Gabe Owen
Nick Van Den Berg
Che-Wei Fu
Charlie Williams
Imran Majid
Young-hwa Jeong
Ronnie Wiseman
Darren Appleton
Pei-Wei Chang
Corey Deuel
David Alcaide
Marlon Manalo
Shaun Wilkie
Oliver Ortmann
Ibrahim Bin Amir
Stevie Moore
Tony Drago
Antonio Gabica
Louis Condo
Dayne Sage
With a field as strong as this, there are bound to be marquee matches in the first round. And there definitely are.
Round one marquee matches include Charlie Williams vs Raj Hundal, Marcus Chamat vs Antonio Gabica, Jung-Lin Chang vs Nick Van Den Berg, Jasmin Ouschan vs Yuan-Chun Lin, Max Eberle vs Jeffrey De Luna, Sandor Tot vs Louie Ulrich and Konstantin Stepanov vs Satoshi Kawabata.
