Pool tournament «World 10-Ball Championship 2026»

   A prize fund of $500,000 has pulled the strongest cue players on the planet into Ho Chi Minh City. For eight days running, champions you normally watch on a stream will be shooting a few metres in front of you, and that gap between a screen and a live break is the whole reason to show up.

   The centrepiece of the week is the men's world 10-ball title, run by WPA, the World Pool-Billiard Association. It has been contested since 2008; in 2024 it went to the Filipino player Carlo Biado, and in 2025 to Ko Ping-chung of Chinese Taipei — that edition was hosted by Vietnam as well.

   Three separate competitions share the same week:

• — the men's world 10-ball championship under WPA, the biggest title in the discipline;
• — Box Billiards Mixed Doubles Open, for mixed pairs;
• — Poison Saigon Women's 9-Ball Open, the women's 9-ball event.

   The line-up the organiser put on the poster reads like a world ranking: Shane Van Boening, the 2022 world nine-ball champion and a five-time US Open winner; Joshua Filler, world nine-ball champion in 2018 and world eight-ball champion in 2024; Aloysius Yapp, a former world number one who took the 2025 US Open nine-ball title and the 2026 world eight-ball title.

   You do not need to read patterns on the cloth to enjoy this. Every rack is a short story, and the distance between a perfect shot and a small error shows up immediately on the table. The organiser also frames the week as a meeting point for the billiards community, with fans able to meet the leading names inside the arena.

   Play happens at Nhà thi đấu Phú Thọ (Phú Thọ Indoor Stadium), opened on 20 November 2003, with roughly 5,000 seats for sporting events; it was one of the venues of the 2003 Southeast Asian Games.

   One detail the price field cannot show: tickets are sold per playing day and per tier, so the figure on this card is a single-day price. If you want the whole tournament, there is an eight-day package — 5,000,000 VND for all eight days in the SVIP tier, which includes a commemorative shirt, or 4,000,000 VND in the VVIP tier with a cap. A ticket is valid only for the date and tier bought, is non-refundable and non-exchangeable, and a QR code is scanned at check-in.

   Daily start times were not published in the announcement. The organiser states that the schedule and the player list may be adjusted, and that updates will appear on the tournament's official channels.

   Eight days of world-class pool in one arena in Ho Chi Minh City is a rare chance to watch champions work at close range. If you have spent the year following the sport on a screen, this is the week to rearrange your plans for.