Pro Billiard Series All Stars Lands in Jacksonville December 15-20: Doubles, Mixed Doubles and What the New Format Demands

Predator Group announced this week that its Pro Billiard Series will finish the 2026 season with something the sport has not tried before at this scale. The inaugural Pro Billiard Series All Stars runs December 15 through 20 at the Hyatt Regency Jacksonville Riverfront in Jacksonville, Florida, and the format is built around partnerships rather than pure singles bracket play. Thirty two players, drawn from the Top 12 men and Top 12 women in the WPA World Rankings plus four wildcards on each side, will play five separate events across six days.

Jacksonville is not a random pick. Predator Group runs its global headquarters out of the city, so the company is effectively hosting the year end party in its own backyard. The event is scheduled to become a permanent season closer, which means what happens in December sets the template for every All Stars that follows.

The Five Events, and Why the Doubles Matter

The week is split into Women’s All Stars, Men’s All Stars, Men’s Doubles All Stars, Women’s Doubles All Stars, and Mixed Doubles All Stars. Three of those five are team formats. That ratio is the story. A ranking event rewards the player who can grind alone for eight hours. A doubles event rewards something else entirely, and most of the field does not get many reps at it.

In alternating shot doubles, you are not playing the shot in front of you. You are playing the shot in front of your partner two shots from now. A position route that leaves you a comfortable half table cut might leave your partner a stretched out shot they hate. Suddenly the correct pattern depends on somebody else’s stroke, somebody else’s bridge length, somebody else’s tolerance for thin cuts off the rail. Communication, adaptability and teamwork are all in play alongside raw ability.

Mixed doubles adds another layer. Men and women who have spent the season on parallel tours will pair up, sometimes with a player they have never practiced with. The pairs that succeed will be the ones who agree early on a simple set of rules: who takes the tough kick, when to play safe instead of going for a low percentage runout, and how much information to pass along between innings.

Two MVP Awards and a Win-Loss Metric

Rather than crowning one champion for the week, Pro Billiard Series All Stars will hand out two MVP awards based on each player’s match win-loss ratio across all the formats they enter. That is a quietly interesting choice. It rewards the player who stays sharp across singles, doubles and mixed doubles instead of the player who peaks for one final. A competitor could lose a singles semifinal and still walk out with hardware if they carry their partners through three team brackets.

For anybody watching to learn, the MVP race is the thing to follow. Consistency across wildly different formats is a better proxy for how good someone actually is than a single hot weekend.

Every Table, Every Match, Free

All four competition tables will stream live at no cost through Pro Billiard TV on YouTube, Billiard TV, Amazon Prime, Samsung TV and other platforms. That matters for players at home more than it might sound. Most streamed pool shows you one feature table, which means you see the best player in the field playing the best opponent. With four tables running, you can watch the bottom half of the bracket, where the mistakes are more instructive because they look like your mistakes.

What the Right Cue Actually Does for a Doubles Player

Predator built its reputation on low deflection shaft technology, and in a doubles format that technology is worth more than usual. Here is why. When you hand the table to a partner, you want the cue ball to end up exactly where you called it. Deflection is the enemy of predictability on any shot with sidespin, and alternating shot produces a lot of sidespin shots because you are constantly threading position through a layout you did not plan yourself.

Carbon fiber pushes that further. A carbon shaft does not take on humidity, does not need to be conditioned, and does not change how it plays between a cold October league night and a hot summer tournament room. Consistency is the entire argument, and consistency is exactly what a partner is relying on when they walk up to the leave you gave them.

The Scorpion SCO120 sneaky pete in red is a good illustration of where the market has landed. Scorpion sits under the Predator Group umbrella, and these cues pair a traditional no wrap sneaky pete build with a genuine carbon fiber shaft at four hundred and five dollars. Ten years ago that combination did not exist at any price near this. The SCO121 in white and the SCO122 in blue are the same cue in different finishes.

Further up the Predator range, the P3 platform uses a weight cartridge system that lets you move mass between the forearm and the butt, changing how the cue feels through the stroke without changing what the scale says. Players who want a more forward balance for controlled draw can set it up that way, and players who want the cue lighter in the front for finesse can flip it. The True Splice series takes the opposite approach on looks, using real spliced points instead of decals, so the construction reads old school even though the shaft technology underneath is not. Both live in the full Predator cues collection.

Featured Predator Group Cues

Who Actually Qualifies, and Why the Wildcards Matter

Twenty four of the thirty two seats go to the WPA World Rankings, twelve on the men’s side and twelve on the women’s. The remaining eight are wildcards, four in each field. Wildcards in a season ending invitational usually go one of two directions. Promoters either reward a player who had a huge single result but not enough volume to climb the rankings, or they invite someone with a following who will bring viewers to the stream. Both are defensible. Watch which way Predator leans, because it says a lot about whether this event is meant to be a pure meritocracy or a showcase.

The ranking cutoff also creates pressure on every remaining event this fall. A player sitting thirteenth or fourteenth in the world has a concrete reason to enter one more open, and that pushes stronger fields into regional stops between now and December. If you play in a region that hosts a ranking event, you may find yourself in a bracket with somebody chasing a Jacksonville seat.

Practice the Format Before You Need It

If you want to actually get better at alternating shot, the drill is simple and it does not require a partner who is any good. Rack nine balls, break, then alternate every shot with whoever is around, including a beginner. Playing with someone weaker forces you to leave dead simple shots, which trains you to value position zones over position points. Playing with someone stronger forces you to hand off cleanly rather than guessing what they can handle. Twenty racks of that in a week will change how you think about cue ball speed more than a month of solo drills.

Three Things to Steal From All Stars for Your Own Doubles Night

Agree on a safety threshold before you break

The fastest way to lose a doubles match is for one partner to fire at a two percent runout while the other was quietly planning a lock up safe. Decide in advance where the line is. A simple rule works: if the shot is not one you would take at sixty percent confidence in singles, play the safety instead. Removing that disagreement removes most of the friction.

Leave the cue ball where anybody can shoot it

Pros in alternating shot formats aim for position zones rather than position points. A three foot window your partner can work with beats a perfect six inch leave that only you could have executed. Shorter cue ball movement is also more repeatable, so favor patterns that travel one rail instead of three.

Say the plan out loud between innings

Most formats allow partners to talk when it is not their turn at the table. Use it. Naming the key ball and the problem ball takes ten seconds and eliminates the situation where two people are running two different patterns on the same rack.

Getting Your Own Gear Ready for League Season

December is a long way off, but fall league season is not. If you are shopping a playing cue for the winter, the broader pool cues collection at Quarter King Billiards spans everything from first cues under two hundred dollars to tournament level builds. And whatever you carry, protect it. A cue that travels loose in a car trunk through a Northeast winter will not stay straight, so a real case from the pool cue cases collection is not an optional accessory.

Pro Billiard Series All Stars is supported by Predator, Iwan Simonis, Aramith, Yalin, Little Monster, Kamui, Box Billiards, VenBilliards, Seyberts, Poison, Pro Billiard TV, the WPA and Visit Jacksonville. That sponsor list reads like a who’s who of the equipment industry, which tells you the sport is betting real money on the format working. Six days, four tables, five events, and every second of it free to watch. Block out the week.