AFTER a solid start with a sweep of his two matches in the qualifying rounds last Tuesday, Carlo Biado tries to sustain his title-retention bid today (Wednesday in the US) when he faces American Joven Bustamante in the first round of the US Pool Championship at the Harrah’s Resort & Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
Biado swept aside Serbian Nikolin Dalibor and Russian female cue ace Kristina Tkach by identical scores of 9-1 to qualify for the main draw of the $300,000 (around P17.65 million) competition organized by British promotions outfit Matchroom.
The Vietnam Southeast Asian Games men’s 9-ball champion leads four other Filipinos in the hunt for the top prize of $50,000 (P2.94 million) in the prestigious competition that Filipinos, surprisingly, have won only thrice.
The previous winners include Filipino-Canadian Alex Pagulayan and the legendary Efren “Bata” Reyes, who pocketed the titles in 2005 and 1994, respectively.
Johann Chua, who teamed up with Biado and Rubilen Amit in bagging the Predator World 10-ball Teams Championship in Klagenfurt, Austria last month, has the toughest assignment and will be up against newly-crowned Asian men’s 9-ball champion Ko Pin-yi of Taiwan.
Lee Vann Corteza, the 2013 US Pool losing finalist to American star Shane Van Boening, tackles Poland’s Wojciech Szewczyk and Mhet Vergara Takes on Kuwait’s Abdullah Alyousef in the other pairings in the winner’s break, race-to-9 series.
