Szewczyk Wins Second World 10-Ball Title: The 4-1, 1-4, 4-2, 4-3 Scorecard and a Campaign Without a Deciding Set

I open the contract before I open my mouth.

The first page of the tournament document carries one line: the World 10-Ball Championship winner receives 80,000 USD. The next page is the final's scorecard, four lines and nothing more: 4-1, 1-4, 4-2, 4-3. Wojciech Szewczyk beat Eklent Kaci by three sets to one. No fifth line was ever written. Across the whole event, the Polish cueist never allowed a single match of his to drift into a deciding set.

In pool, a scorecard like that does not say who played prettier. It says who controlled the rhythm. And rhythm is what Szewczyk held from the first round to the last, in Ho Chi Minh City — where a world championship was staged in a market full of pool players but rarely treated as a centre of power for the discipline.

This is Szewczyk's second World 10-Ball title. The first came roughly four years ago, when he beat Cristopher Tevez in the final. Between the two, he reached the last 16 in four of the past five seasons — a floor few cueists sustain at world-championship level.

The format is the most important structural factor this year. Each match is split into sets, each set a race to four racks, with three sets winning the match. The bracket runs from double elimination into a single-elimination knockout, closing with a final 16. That structure both protects the better player and still allows a set to be stolen by one dry break.

Around Szewczyk sits a power map with no dominant nation: Kaci (Albania), Ko Ping-Chung (Chinese Taipei), Joshua Filler (Germany), Niels Feijen (Netherlands), Francisco Sanchez-Ruiz (Spain), Olivér Szolnoki (Hungary), Sanjin Pehlivanovic (Bosnia), Johann Chua (Philippines), Hijikata (Japan), and Duong Quoc Hoang — the Vietnamese hometown cueist.

The clearest technical thread in the match data is Szewczyk's ability to win tactical exchanges. He took the majority of the safety battles — the long exchanges of defensive play when the table offers no clean route. The original report calls his safety work "sublime." In 10-Ball, safety play is a far more valuable skill than in 9-Ball, because call-shot rules require the player to nominate both ball and pocket before striking, and fluked pots do not count. Once luck is removed from the equation by rule, what remains is who reads the table better.

Szewczyk's break quality was uneven. He committed a dry break that was punished late in the final, yet also produced his first break-and-run at a pivotal moment — clearing the table off his own break. This was the seam both finalists showed: Kaci suffered three dry breaks plus a couple of uncharacteristic errors, and the third set was practically handed over.

The final was settled by error management, not by highlights. In the fourth set, Szewczyk trailed 0-2 before turning it around, then misplayed a 2-6-7 combination at the decisive stage — but Kaci failed to punish it, missing the 3-ball. In a set of only four racks, every single error carries far more weight than in a long race.

One technical detail gets little mention: Szewczyk used a jump cue to play a spectacular cut on the 1-ball. That is an advanced escape skill, implying the table after the break was unfavourable and that he had rehearsed escape patterns. For long-time pool observers, shots like that rarely make the bulletin, yet they decide who is still sitting there at the end of the week.

Kaci's physical load deserves separate treatment. He reached the final after five straight matches in which he fell behind a set and had to come back, three of those going to a deciding set. In an earlier round, Pehlivanovic played around nine hours on the Friday. That accumulated load is not attributed directly to Kaci by the report, but it is a variable that cannot be ignored when a player walks into the week's last match.

Here I have to separate two layers. One layer is the result — clean, clear, with no rules controversy. The other layer is the origin of the title, and that layer is not as clean as it looks.

The source document lists Kaci as champion of this event in 2026 and 2026, and dates Szewczyk's first title to roughly four years ago. Those two timelines do not reconcile easily. In pool, multiple "World 10-Ball Championship" lineages run by different bodies are a known feature of the sport. If that is the case here, the list of "world champions" the public reads may be a merged list from two separate systems — and the claim that Szewczyk equals Kaci or Ko Ping-Chung on title count should be held provisionally, because the source names no sanctioning body behind this year's event.

The next layer of the problem is data. There is no break-potting percentage, no safety-success rate, no run-out rate, and no world ranking for the player. Every conclusion about a "safety-first style" therefore carries qualitative weight only. It is plausible, but it is not proven by numbers.

One more point gets little attention: the source is a discipline-vertical pool outlet, not mainstream media. Words like "ruthless," "sublime," "stunning," or "Poland's greatest ever" belong to the writer, not to independent verification. The article itself cools the temperature by noting that this title was "certainly no surprise" — the result was expected, not a shock. A mistake in 2026 taught me that a microphone never corrects an error, it only exposes the truth. Here, the microphone is exposing a genuine champion, but the rest is the writer's heat.

One final counterpoint: if safety play is the decisive weapon, it is also a weapon neutralised by a genuinely elite breaker. In a four-rack set format, one dry break can be enough to lose an entire set. Szewczyk did not meet that profile this week. That is a gap in the file, not a hole in the title.

I write about sport, but what I dig up always sits outside the touchline. The flow of pool is moving toward Southeast Asia: a world championship staged in Ho Chi Minh City, a hometown cueist competing, a live crowd in the room, while the technical elite still sits in Europe. That "European elite, Asian market" structure is the discipline's signature, and it differs sharply from snooker, where England still holds both ends.

For Szewczyk, the next question is not whether he can win another title. It is how long the market will take to price a cueist correctly who owns two world titles, reaches the last 16 in four of five seasons, and never lets a match drift into a deciding set — yet is still not regarded as a star of his own sport.