Sixty-Four Players, Races to Four, and a Shootout: Inside the 2026 Poison Saigon Women’s 9-Ball Open

Military Zone 7 Stadium in Ho Chi Minh City is running three pool events at once this week, and the one that deserves more attention than it usually gets started yesterday. The 2026 Poison Saigon Women’s 9-Ball Open runs September 21 through September 25, it pays $90,000 across the field with $25,000 waiting for the winner, and it has pulled a 64-player entry that includes seven former women’s world 9-ball champions. That is a deeper field than most majors managed a decade ago.

It sits inside a bigger week. The Iwan Simonis WPA Men’s 10-Ball World Championship is on the same floor from September 19 through September 26, and the Box Billiards Mixed Doubles Open ran September 19 through September 23. Across the three events, the Predator Pro Billiard Series and Box Billiards have put roughly $490,000 on the table in a single Vietnamese venue. For a sport that spent years apologizing for its purses, that is a real number.

The format is the actual story

Sixty-four players start in a double elimination bracket. Sixteen survive into single elimination. Every match, from the first round to the final, is played as a best of three sets, and each set is a race to four racks. If the deciding set reaches three racks apiece, a shootout settles it.

Read that again, because it changes how these matches will look. A race to four is not a shorter version of a race to nine. It is a different problem. In a long race you can lose the first three games, find your stroke, and still win comfortably. In a race to four you can lose the first three games and be one rack from losing the set. Two of those and you are packing your case.

What short races reward

The first reward is a break that produces something every single time. Not a break that makes a ball on six racks out of ten with two dry breaks and two scratches mixed in. A break that puts a ball down, keeps the cue ball near the middle of the table, and leaves a first shot that does not require a miracle. When there are only four racks to win, a dry break is not a small leak. It is a quarter of the set handed over.

The second reward is starting on time. Players who need three racks to warm up are in trouble before they settle in. Watch the pros this week and you will notice how many of them arrive at the table already at full speed, with the pre-shot routine locked in on the opening break. That is not talent. That is preparation, and it is copyable.

The third reward is knowing when to stop trying to run out. A short race raises the value of a good safety, because one stolen rack is worth twenty five percent of a set. A player who fires at a low percentage runout because it looks better gives away exactly the rack that decides the match. Shot selection matters more when there is less time left to correct the error.

Who is in the field

Wei Tzu-Chien arrives as defending champion and as the top ranked woman in the game. She beat Rubilen Amit in last year’s final in this same city, and Amit is back again. So is Kelly Fisher, whose career has outlasted several generations of challengers, and Jasmin Ouschan, who has been winning on three continents for the better part of two decades.

Then there is the group that has made recent seasons genuinely unpredictable. Chezka Centeno, Han Yu, Liu Shasha, Seo Seoa, Chou Chieh-Yu, Fu Xiaofang, Kristina Tkach, Pia Filler, Meng-Hsia Hung, Chihiro Kawahara and Savannah Easton are all entered. Any of them can win four racks against anybody on a given afternoon, which is exactly why this format produces upsets. In a race to nine the better player usually wins. In a best of three sets of four, the player who breaks well for forty minutes wins.

Featured Mezz Products

Fields like this one show how international the equipment has become. Mezz has been building cues in Japan for decades, and the design language turns up constantly in Asian and European rooms: restrained forearm work, low deflection maple shafts, and a joint engineered for feedback rather than for show. If you have been curious what that hit feels like, here is what is on the shelf right now.

What a Japanese build actually gives you

Take the Mezz ZZAS34 at $1,677.50 as the reference point for the top of the line. It is an ASTR23 series cue with a purpleheart forearm and butt sleeve carrying ivory Juma and turquoise inlays, a black Irish linen wrap, and a 29 inch WX-Mezz Sigma shaft finished at 12.5 mm with a Kamui Original Soft tip and an XJ Powerplate ferrule. The United joint is the part most players comment on after a few hours, because it passes along enough information that you feel a slightly off center hit before you see the result on the table.

Below that, the Mezz ZZPBKW at $663 and the Mezz ZZPBKN at $638 sit side by side as playing cues on classic wood shafts. That is the purchase that makes sense for a league player who has decided this is the last cue for a long while. Full specs on wrap, tip and shaft diameter are listed on each product page, and they are worth reading closely before choosing between the pair.

The one that fits this week’s theme best is the Mezz ZZDFN Dual Force break and jump cue at $770. It runs a 29 inch Dual Force break shaft with a 13 mm sonic trance tip, a paper fiber tip plate and a black sonic ferrule, and the forearm splits off so the same cue becomes a jump butt. Weight bolts let you set it anywhere from 18 to 21 ounces, and it ships with a joint protector. In a race to four, a break cue that gives you the same result twice in a row is not an accessory. It is the equipment that decides sets.

What league players should steal from this event

Most APA and BCA matches are short races. If you play a race to three or a race to five on league night, you are playing something much closer to this Saigon format than to a world championship race to eleven, and you should practice accordingly. Three habits carry over directly.

Practice the first rack, specifically. Rack ten sets of balls, break each one, and score only the break and the first shot after it. Nothing else counts. Most players have never measured this, and the number is usually worse than they expect.

Build a warm up that takes four minutes instead of twenty. Stroke drills along the long rail, a handful of stop shots, two or three full table rolls to set your speed, and one break into an open table. That is enough to arrive ready without burning three racks of match play finding your stroke.

Count what your break costs you. Track the racks you lose to dry breaks and scratches on the break across a month of league. If the number is worse than one in six, the fix is not a new aiming system. It is break technique, a break cue that fits you, and a rack you actually inspect before you get down on the ball.

The takeaway

The Saigon Women’s Open finishes September 25, and whoever lifts the trophy will have won something like fifteen or sixteen sets of four racks in five days. That takes a break you can trust, a first shot you can convert, and enough patience to play safe when the runout is not there. The rest of us can work on the same three things at home. If a more repeatable break is where you want to start, the break cue selection and the wider pool cue catalog are a sensible place to look.