The Official Gear List of the 2026 US Open: What Cuetec, Kamui, TAOM and Diamond Signed Up For

Every professional pool event publishes a partner list, and most fans scroll straight past it. That list is worth reading. When Matchroom locks in an official cue, an official tip, an official chalk and an official cloth for the 2026 US Open Pool Championship, it is publishing a spec sheet for the exact conditions 256 of the best players in the world have agreed to compete under for six days. Nobody gets to bring a friendlier table. Nobody gets a softer cloth on the outer arena tables. The equipment is fixed, and the players adapt.

The 49th edition runs August 25 to 30 at the Embassy Suites by Hilton in Frisco, Texas, with a $500,000 prize fund and $100,000 going to the champion. Sixteen former US Open champions are in the field, including World No.1 and defending champion Aloysius Yapp, five-time winner Shane Van Boening, reigning World Champion Carlo Biado, Fedor Gorst, Francisco Sanchez Ruiz, Joshua Filler and Earl Strickland. Van Boening arrives chasing a record sixth US Open title after taking the Florida Open earlier this month.

Here is what the official partner list says about the week, and what each choice means if you are trying to build a setup at home that behaves the way a tournament table behaves.

Cuetec is the Official Cue, Case and Rest Partner

Cuetec holds the broadest slot on the list. Cue, case and rest is three product categories under one banner, which tells you the brand is supplying the physical furniture of the event, not just a logo on a rail. It is also a meaningful signal about where the modern pro game sits. Cuetec built its reputation on composite and carbon technology at a time when most of the sport still treated maple as the only serious answer, and the Cynergy line is the clearest expression of that bet.

What a carbon composite shaft actually buys a player in a long event is repeatability. Maple moves with humidity and with the beating a shaft takes over hundreds of racks. A carbon shaft in the fourth session of day three plays close to how it played in the first session of day one. Across a double elimination format where a player can log a dozen matches before the field even reaches the Last 64, that consistency is worth more than any single-shot advantage.

The Shane Van Boening signature models are the other half of the story. Van Boening has been a Cuetec player through the stretch that produced five US Open titles, and the SVB Black Gen 2 and its white counterpart are built around a break-friendly balance and a low deflection front end. If you have watched him lace a break and stop the cue ball dead in the middle of the table, you have watched that package work.

Featured Cuetec Pool Cues

Not everyone needs a thousand dollar cue to benefit from the same design thinking. The AVID series sits in the $409 to $449 range and carries a lot of the same geometry in a package built for league night rather than a televised arena. If you are shopping the whole range, the full Cuetec category and the broader pool cue selection are the places to compare.

The case half of the partnership matters more than people admit. A cue that lives in a good case holds its wrap, its finish and its joint faces for years longer than one that rides in a trunk. Cuetec’s Pro Line and soft case range runs from 2×4 to 4×8 configurations, which covers the player carrying a playing cue and a break cue as well as the road player hauling a full arsenal.

Kamui on Tips, TAOM on Chalk

Kamui is the Official Tip Partner and TAOM is the Official Chalk Partner. Those two go together, because the tip and the chalk are a single system. A tip is a piece of layered leather whose job is to hold chalk long enough to grip a phenolic resin ball for roughly a thousandth of a second. Change either half and the amount of spin you can safely apply changes with it.

TAOM’s whole design premise is low residue. Conventional chalk sheds, and the dust it sheds lands on the cloth and on the balls, where it becomes the skid and cling that makes a straight-in shot squirt sideways at the worst possible moment. Under television lights on a six-day event, a chalk that does not powder the table is a competitive decision as much as an aesthetic one. TAOM Pyro and TAOM 2.0 both sit at $19.99, which is more than a two dollar cube and considerably less than a rack of cling-induced misses.

On the tip side, the pro standard is a laminated multi-layer tip that keeps its shape. Kamui Roku chalk and the Kamui tip range are built around the same idea of maximum controlled grip, and the entire tip category is worth browsing if your current tip has gone glassy.

Diamond Tables, CPBA Cloth, Magic Ball Rack

Diamond is the Official Table Partner, CPBA supplies the cloth and Magic Ball Rack is the Official Template Rack Partner. That trio defines how the balls behave more than any cue in the building.

Diamond pockets are notoriously unforgiving. The shelf is deep and the facings reject anything that arrives with the wrong angle and the wrong speed, which is why a ball that rattles home on your local bar box comes back out in Frisco. Fast tournament cloth compounds it. The cue ball travels farther for the same stroke, so position routes that feel comfortable on worn cloth become overruns.

The template rack choice is the quiet one, and it is the one you can actually copy at home for about twenty dollars. A template puts every ball in contact with its neighbors every single time, which removes the biggest single variable in nine ball: whether the rack was tight. Pros insist on it because a loose rack turns a breaking contest into a lottery. An Accu-Rack template set at $21.95 does the same job on your table, and the wider ball rack selection covers wood, plastic and heavy duty triangles if you prefer a traditional rack.

The Format and Why It Rewards Consistent Gear

The 2026 US Open opens double elimination and stays that way through the Last 64, then flips to single elimination for the rest of the championship. Friday, August 28 holds the Last 64, Last 32 and Last 16. Saturday, August 29 covers the quarter-finals and semi-finals. Sunday, August 30 runs the WNT NXTGEN Junior Final from 1:00 PM before the US Open Final at 4:00 PM Central, broadcast live on ESPN2.

That structure is why equipment consistency is not a marketing talking point here. A player who gets sent to the one-loss side early may play three or four matches in a day, in different light, on different tables, against different table conditions as the cloth breaks in. The gear has to behave the same at 9:00 PM as it did at 11:00 AM. Nothing in a partner list is chosen for its ability to produce one spectacular shot. It is chosen because it does not change.

Alongside the main event, WNT NXTGEN Frisco runs from August 27 to 30 with 32 junior players aged 16 and under competing for a $10,000 prize fund and a $2,500 top prize. Those kids are playing on the same equipment specification as the professionals down the hall, which is exactly the point of running the two events together.

How to Watch, and What to Steal for Your Own Table

Table One streams worldwide on ESPN+ and WNT TV, Tables Two and Three are exclusive to WNT TV, and Table Four runs on the talkSPORT and Matchroom Pool YouTube channels. Weekend tickets sold out, with limited seats available earlier in the week. The prize breakdown pays down to 64th place at $3,000, which is a real change in how deep a professional field can now cash.

If you want your practice sessions to transfer to the conditions you see on the stream, the cheapest upgrades are the ones on the partner list that cost the least. A template rack removes rack variance. A low residue chalk removes cling. A fresh laminated tip removes miscues. Those three purchases together cost less than a mid-range shaft and change more about your results than most cue upgrades do. When you are ready for the cue itself, the Cuetec range is the one wearing the official badge in Frisco this week.