Da Nang, Day Two: Jayson Shaw, Duong Quoc Hoang and the War Over the Cue Ball

At roughly 3:40 p.m. on the second day of the showmatch at Peri Pool Arena in Da Nang, Duong Quoc Hoang had just missed a four ball in the right corner. He straightened up, his left hand still on the cue. Jayson Shaw did not stand immediately. He raised his right hand, two fingers, toward the referee. He said nothing. The room understood. The referee walked over, pulled a clean cloth from a pocket, lifted the white ball off the bed and wiped it. Two hundred people heard the fabric rasp, then the click of the ball being replaced. Across four hours that afternoon, it was the most repeated sound in the arena. I was sitting in the third row on the left side of the table, notebook ruled into columns. By the twenty-third rack I abandoned the column counting wipes because it had become meaningless, and started logging the interval between Hoang's shots instead. That interval lengthened rack by rack. That is the number worth talking about from day two. I do not watch a match from the stands. I count the gaps between two positions. Peri Pool Arena sits inside a new entertainment complex in Da Nang. The playing area is far smaller than the word "arena" suggests: around two hundred spectators circling a nine-foot table, the front row less than three metres from the cushion. This is the Taom Challenge x J Flowers showmatch, race-to-120 — first man to 120 racks wins. It sits outside the ranking system. It is a bespoke contest, staged across three days, split into sessions, with one table and a crowd close enough to hear the cue tip grip. Day one belonged to Duong Quoc Hoang. Day two nearly belonged to Jayson Shaw. The Scotsman trailed by twelve racks at one stage, then detonated through the middle of the session with a run of twelve straight racks to level at 45-45. By the close, Hoang had held his thin advantage: 60-56. Two sessions remain. Day three runs to the 90-rack mark for whoever gets there first. Shaw is known as "Eagle Eye", one of the fastest attacking cueists in modern nine-ball. Duong Quoc Hoang is the leading Vietnamese player on the international circuit and, since 2026, an official brand ambassador for Turning Point — the chalk he plays with. He debuted that chalk at the Hanoi Open Championship the same year, then made it a permanent fixture across his WNT and WPA campaigns, including his maiden Premier League Pool title in March. That coincidence — a brand ambassador for a chalk, and a controversy erupting around that very chalk — is something nobody in Da Nang wanted to say out loud. READING THE RHYTHM OF A RACE-TO-120 A race-to-120 sounds like an ultramarathon. In practice it is ten short matches stitched together by the same two cueists. Its rhythm does not live inside individual racks; it lives in the joins between them. In a race-to-9 or race-to-11, a four-rack deficit is close to a death sentence. In a race-to-120, four racks is an afternoon. So is twelve. The long format manufactures a different kind of pressure: not the fear of being left behind, but the burden of sustaining decision quality across hours without a break in concentration. I have tracked long races on the WNT and at Premier League Pool, and the pattern never changes. The real contest does not begin at rack one. It begins around rack forty, when both men are equally tired and one of them starts revealing that he is thinking about the scoreboard. That was the moment Shaw caught fire. SHAW'S TWELVE-RACK RUN From the thirtieth rack to the forty-second, Shaw won almost everything. He levelled at 45-45. I logged every rack, and three features repeated. First, his break conversion jumped. Not because the break got harder. Shaw's break speed stayed essentially constant all afternoon. The difference was where the cue ball finished: he parked it in the top half of the table, about a hand's width off the long rail, and almost always with an open ball in the corner. In nine-ball, the break is the sport's largest single variable. A good break does not merely create a chance — it dictates the shape of the next two or three racks, because the balls re-rack to the same template and whoever controls the cue ball after the break controls the tempo. Through twelve racks, Shaw kept the cue ball in the zone he wanted. That is why the run lasted. Second, he barely took on hard shots. Across those twelve racks I counted only three occasions where he chose an option with a probability under fifty per cent. For a man nicknamed Eagle Eye, that patience was a far more telling signal than any spectacular pot. The summer I spent with the German coach taught me that pressure is not anger. It is arithmetic. Third, and this is the point I want to press, Shaw won most of the safety battles. He did not win by playing beautiful shots. He won by steering Hoang into positions where every available option was poor — and then collecting the dividend in the following rack. At the top level, a good safety is not measured by whether your opponent can hit a ball. It is measured by what he is forced to leave you afterwards. Shaw played exactly to that principle: he did not try to take a rack with one shot, he took it by forcing his opponent to open a door. In other words, that twelve-rack run was built on defence, not attack. And it arrived precisely as the room reached its hottest. HEAT, HUMIDITY AND THE BRIDGE HAND The air conditioning at Peri Pool Arena was not switched on that day. Shaw said so plainly afterwards, and he had grounds. A pool table responds to humidity far more than outsiders assume. Cloth that absorbs moisture runs slower, the balls decelerate sooner, and shots that depend on a soft push become less predictable. With two hundred people ringed around a single table in central Vietnamese weather, the local humidity climbs noticeably within an hour. Hands behave the same way. Sweat on the bridge hand — the one guiding the cue — changes the sensation of the slide. The grip hand holds firmer, and firmer is not better: the stroke loses its release. For fast players, rhythm depends heavily on the cue gliding evenly across the bridge. With air conditioning, these variables are largely erased. Without it in Da Nang, both men had to recalibrate their entire scale of force, and the slower adapter pays the price. Based on my experience covering matches in venues without proper climate control, this is the kind of variable no statistics sheet ever records. During the pandemic shutdown I buried myself in a data set to measure how much home advantage disappeared without crowds. The lesson was not in the final figure but in the principle: when the environment shifts, old data loses its value. The player who lives on habit is exposed first. CHALK, THE CUE BALL, AND A FORGOTTEN PHYSICS LESSON Back to the white ball. The technical point Shaw raised was entirely legitimate. Chalk residue on the cue ball is the most common cause of a skid, or kick — a stroke where the tip grips the ball instead of sliding across it, sending the cue ball off its intended line and killing the spin. The physics: when the tip contacts the cue ball, friction determines how spin is transferred. A clean surface lets the tip slide as intended. A fine film of chalk raises local friction, and the contact shifts from sliding to gripping. The typical result is a ball struck thinner than intended, or a cue ball carrying less spin. For a player positioning the cue ball to the centimetre, that margin costs a rack. The organisers confirmed as much on the live broadcast. Event organiser Khong Ten said from the commentary booth that visible chalk residue had indeed been coating the cue ball. And here is a technical detail few noticed. The Turning Point chalk Hoang uses is black. Black chalk leaves a very visible mark on a white ball. Which means that for the same amount of residue, black chalk becomes evidence while traditional blue chalk stays invisible. A player whose blue chalk left identical deposits would raise no eyebrows. A player using black chalk turns every cue ball into an accusation. WIPING THE CUE BALL AS PROCEDURE — AND AS A WEAPON Asking for the cue ball to be cleaned before a significant shot is standard professional practice. Referees do it constantly. The problems were frequency and timing. From what I watched in the second session, nearly every time Hoang left the table, Shaw signalled. He did not ask before his own shots. He asked after his opponent's visit. That distinction matters. Requesting a wipe before your own shot is equipment hygiene. Requesting a wipe after your opponent's visit is an intervention in the transition interval — the stretch of time when a cueist sits down and maps the next rack. So was Shaw sharking? From the outside, it is easy to conclude so. A trailing player repeatedly calling the referee, disrupting the rhythm of the man ahead: a tidy picture of psychological warfare. Commentators discussed it. Social media argued about it. Shaw was forced to explain himself, saying that Hoang uses black Turning Point chalk, that it is everywhere on the cues, that an absurd amount ends up on the cue ball, and that is why he wants it cleaned. I believe the technical half of that explanation. I do not believe it is the whole story. Because there is something in pool no cueist likes to admit: when you are in the middle of a run, the thing that kills you is not your opponent. It is the pause. WHAT HOANG DID RIGHT IN THE SESSION SHAW OWNED Hoang lost twelve racks in a row and still walked out of the session four racks ahead. Reading my notebook, he did three things. He slowed down. During Shaw's barrage, Hoang's average shot time rose markedly. He began playing long safeties instead of hunting for an opening. He accepted handing over the table. There were at least four racks where Hoang had an open ball mid-table and chose to push the cue ball to the long rail. Those are the racks a cueist in full flow tries to win at any cost. Hoang did not try. And he protected his break. This is the most overlooked detail of the day. Shaw's twelve-rack sequence was largely break-and-run — yet Hoang retained the break in the majority of the racks that followed. Shaw could not turn his run into a closed loop. That is the difference between winning on inspiration and winning on structure. Hoang let Shaw have his run. He did not let Shaw have the break as well. When Shaw finally had the chance to level and go ahead, Hoang took the bulk of the closing racks. The score settled at 60-56. THE BLIND SPOT: WHO THE WIPE ACTUALLY HURT This is where I want to read the story backwards, against the version the arena was telling itself. The popular theory: Shaw called for wipes to break Hoang's rhythm. If that were true, the outcome should have been a Hoang collapse. Instead Hoang won the session and kept his lead. The contradiction sits right there. The second reading: every time the referee stepped in, the man whose rhythm was cut hardest was the cueist in a state of flow — Shaw himself. A player who has just won twelve straight racks is running on momentum. Every pause forces him to restart from zero: re-read the table, re-calculate the force, rebuild the feel in the hand. The third reading, and the one I consider decisive: disruption favours the man in front. Hoang plays a positional, patient game built on accepted trade-offs. A match chopped into fragments is the ideal environment for that style. Shaw plays on rhythm. Cut repeatedly, he loses his sharpest weapon. If that holds, the wipes in Da Nang were not Shaw attacking. They were Shaw shooting himself in the foot without noticing. There is one further layer beneath the technical story. A player is a brand ambassador for a chalk, uses that chalk in every WNT and WPA event, and that chalk leaves a visible deposit on the cue ball. Current competition regulations say very little about the composition of chalk or the volume of residue it transfers. When equipment outruns the rulebook, arguments repeat — not because anyone cheats, but because nobody has the authority to define what "too much" means. When the arena falls silent, I hear the crack of a system that refuses to change. LOOKING AHEAD TO DAY THREE Day three runs to the 90-rack mark. Hoang enters with a four-rack cushion and control of the tempo. Shaw enters with the most dangerous weapon in long-form pool: he knows he can erase twelve racks in an afternoon. I will count two things. First, how often the Scotsman raises his hand for the referee in the opening ten racks. If the frequency drops, he has understood what I have just written. Second, Hoang's average shot time — if it keeps lengthening, he is dragging the match towards the shape that suits him. Do not ask me for a philosophy. Ask me how much rhythm that cueist has left in the final fifteen minutes. At fifty-nine, I still believe what I mocked at twenty: pool is a game of a single moment. Except a race-to-120 was built to prove the opposite — that the moment must pay interest for three days straight. And the man who pays on time is rarely the most brilliant potter. It is the man who knows exactly which rack he is on.