Ivan Kakovsky from St. Petersburg won the “Moscow Mayor's Cup” in billiards in the “Chinese eight” format.
For the first time in the history of the tournament its organizers decided to replace traditional pool with “Chinese eight” and played the Cup in this discipline. 58 players participated in the competition - almost all the best pool players from Russia and Belarus.
Ivan Kakovsky had an advantage - he already had a successful experience of participation in “Chinese eight” tournaments, and in the homeland of this game.
Nevertheless, he also faced difficulties in the course of the tournament. The starting match with Moscow's Anton Plisko proved to be difficult. After Ivan's smash the balls rolled successfully across the table, but they were slow to fall into the hole, and only at the last moment one of them found its way in.
The result - the St. Petersburg player won with a score of 7:6. He won the play-off match with Artyom Alekseev from Moscow with an even bigger margin of victory - 7:2. With the same score in the 1/8 finals Ivan beat 16-year-old Muscovite Mikhail Novosyolov.
In the following matches Ivan's opponents were International Master of Sports Maxim Dudanets, Andrey Dzuskaev and 20-year-old Arseny Kovalerchik, a multiple Russian pool champion. With Kovalerchik the St. Petersburg resident won the final with his trademark score of 7:2 in less than an hour of play.
“The tournament was not easy. In the first meeting I managed to win only in the return game. Adapting to the tables and the cloth was difficult enough. But by the third day of the tournament I felt that the feel of the table had become quite good. At first I was losing, but luckily I managed to pull myself together at the right moment and win the games that were important to me. In the final I showed probably my best game. As I think, I managed to win the tournament due to the fact that I'm used to hitting balls into fairly tight holes,” Ivan Kakovsky, the winner himself, commented on his game to RuNews24.
“Chinese Eight” is a symbiosis of pool and snooker. The table has the same dimensions as in pool, but the cloth and the holes are snooker ones. The rules are also slightly different from the classic pool eight. For example, this game counts the so-called “fools” - randomly scored balls.