The World Golf Village is known for its golf but for the next week it will also be the center of the billiards world as the 2024 International Open is underway and will be played at the World Golf Village Renaissance Resort in St. Augustine through Nov. 26.
Several champions will be crowned during the tournament in many categories, such as nine-ball, 10-ball, straight pool and a junior competition.
It is the first year that the event will be held at the venue after making the move to St. Agustine after spending the last 45 years in Norfolk, Virginia.
“Players from all over the world come for this event and we needed a bigger space and the representative for that hotel was also a representative for this one and said, ‘how about Florida?’” Tournament organizer Pat Fleming said. “As soon as we walked through the door, we thought it was unbelievable, and not only did we love the place but we’re also going to have even more types of tournaments.”
The space led to not only having professional tournaments played but there is also a nine-ball semi-pro competition going on as well as a couple of mini competitions called shot rack banks, where players must bank shots of the walls of the table, and one-pocket, where six players can play and must get the most balls they can into their assigned pocket.
“One-pocket is a very strategic game, and it’s kind of like chess on a pool table,” Fleming said.
As a result of the additional tournaments, there are more than 300 players from roughly 27 countries represented and competing for a prize fund of $290,000 across all the tournaments.
The convention hall at the World Golf Village Renaissance Resort was filled with 32 tables consisting of games happening of each one with a featured table in the center that is equipped with television cameras with stadium-type seating around it.
According to straight pool director Karl Kantrowitz, 40 million people play pool across the United States, and it can be played no matter a person’s age of gender.
Billiards is one of the most popular sports in the Philippines, according to Fleming, and there are several top players in the world that come from Asian and European countries.
This has led to a shift over the past four years and an extra focus on developing the next generation of billiards players in America, which has led to the junior tournament taking place, which is one of eight stops the Junior American Series makes throughout the year.
“Over the year’s we’ve been getting beat the Europeans and other players from around the world because their governments hep support it, so with this tour it brings up the level of play, and we actually have some of our players that are here playing in the pro events,” Kory Wolford said. “I think in the next 10 years this will level the playing field with that of what Europe has.”
Johnny Archer, who was voted Player of the Decade in the 1990s by Billiards Digest is competing in the event’s straight pool tournament after getting back into playing the professional tournament scene after a retirement stint.
Seeing the junior players competing brings him back to when he first started playing the game and the passion that he developed for it over the years.
“I was playing video games with my friends in a town in South Georgia and I remember one summer the video games were getting boring because we had gotten really good at, so we decided to go in the back of this little store where they had a pool table and we just started playing,” Archer said. “Turns out I kept playing and they didn’t.”
The nine-ball and junior championships will be played on Nov. 22, while the 10-ball title match will be on Nov. 24 and the straight pool title decided on Nov. 26.
