Poteet and Chohan Shine in Mobile: How the 7-Foot Table Rewrote the Rules

Poteet and Chohan Shine in Mobile: How the 7-Foot Table Rewrote the Rules

Hook

Tony Chohan does not look at the object ball. In the fourth game of the One Pocket final at The Billiard Club in Mobile, Alabama, he bends low over the table, eyes fixed on the gap between the long rail and the point where the cue ball will stop after its second cushion. He is calculating three shots ahead, while Josh Roberts needs only one ball to close the game. Chohan wins it. The final ends 4-1, and in three of his four winning games, Roberts scored zero or one ball.

Hours earlier, across the room, Devin Poteet ends a game with a 3-9 combination that seals a 7-3 scoreline. He has come from a second-round loss on the one-loss side to win the Alabama 9-Ball Open, through ten straight victories.

I do not watch matches from the stands. I count the gaps between two positions. And when the lights go off, I stay behind to sketch two table diagrams on a sheet of paper, then realise the story worth writing is not in the two names on the trophy board.

Context

The Billiard Club in Mobile, Alabama, is the opening stop of the Making It In America Tavern Series - a chain of events staged in clubs and bars, with a financial structure quite different from professional stops on the global circuit.

One Pocket division: 2,000 USD added money, 300 USD entry, 19 players. Alabama 9-Ball Open: 150 USD entry, 91 players, with added money announced at two different figures - 10,000 USD in one passage and 12,000 USD in another. A 48-player Nine Ball Mini side event ran alongside, won by Ian Jones over William Perry.

The decisive technical detail lies in the equipment. The entire 9-ball division was played on 7-foot Diamond tables, the bar-box standard of American pool halls, smaller than the 9-foot professional table. Organisers applied alternate breaks.

Small tables compress every error. On a 9-foot table, a badly positioned shot can still be rescued with a long rail route. On a 7-foot table, the rails are shorter, the cue ball travels less, and the price of a positional error is a whole game. That is why American bar-box events always reward the player who can close a game straight from the break.

The alternate-break rule completes the transformation. Nobody breaks twice in a row, so the advantage of a dominant breaker is halved. Pressure shifts to each player's second break - the one where a player must manufacture an opportunity from a neutral position.

With 91 players, the 9-ball early rounds ran as races to 9 and 7. The One Pocket winners' side ran races to 3, with some rounds to 2. Only two finals were extended: race to 11 in 9-ball and race to 4 in One Pocket.

Core

The decisive shot of Poteet's 7-3 game was a three-part sequence: cutting a ball into the pocket with inside english, sending the cue ball two rails, and landing exactly on position for the 3-9 combination into the corner. That is the cue-ball control of a Derby City Classic Banks Ring Game champion. But it has to be read under 7-foot conditions: a two-rail route on a small table is roughly thirty per cent shorter than on a 9-foot table, the cue ball arrives faster, friction has less time to intervene, and the margin for error is narrower. The same shot on a 9-foot table needs a quarter more power and an entirely different angle.

The 9-ball final between Poteet and Shane McMinn went to a race of 11 - half again longer than any other round. Poteet closed it with the final nine. Before that, McMinn, a Music City Open winner, had lost a scrappy match in which both men had chances to close early.

Poteet's route is the most instructive part. He lost in the second round to Haas, who went on to finish third. Then came ten straight wins on the one-loss side, including a match against Ann Vennard - a sign of an open, mixed-level field. Ten matches in one weekend on bar boxes is a test of stamina and nerve. On a small table, each game finishes faster, the total number of games is higher, the number of decisions is higher, and the number of times a player must get up from the chair is higher too.

In One Pocket, Tony Chohan showed a different structure altogether. Three of his four winning games in the final ended with the opponent scoring zero or one ball. One Pocket does not reward scoring power. The game splits the table in half, assigns one corner pocket to each player, and asks each to put eight balls into their own pocket while blocking the opponent's. The battlefield is the four-ball zone around the home pocket. Whoever controls that zone sets the tempo of the game. Chohan controlled it throughout the final.

His route to the final tells the opposite story. On the winners' side, Roberts beat Chohan 3-0. Same two players, same day, a three-game margin. Then in the final, Chohan won 4-1. On a 7-foot table, over a race to 3, a player can win three straight games on the back of two good breaks and one opponent error.

Sergio Rivas, the reigning Buffalo's Pro Classic 8-Ball champion, lost 0-3 to Roberts early, then won five straight on the one-loss side before falling 1-2 to Chohan. Kim Davenport, a BCA Hall of Famer and the 2026 Senior One Pocket Classic champion, was on the entry list. All 19 One Pocket entrants held titles, competing for 2,000 USD in added money.

Contrarian

When the pool room falls silent, I hear clearly the crack of a tournament system that refuses to change.

With races to 2 and 3 on the winners' side, the winners' side does not function as a filter of ability. It is a noise generator. A 20th-ranked player can beat a top-three player over three games on a 7-foot table, if the first break lands right. Roberts's 3-0 win over Chohan on the winners' side proves nothing about who is stronger. It proves that for twenty minutes, Roberts broke well twice.

The paradox runs against ordinary intuition: the more players an event draws, the shorter its early rounds, and the less its title reflects true ability. Ninety-one players in 9-ball over races to 9 and 7 means the first three rounds are close to a lottery with skill attached. Only the race to 11 in the final brings the ability filter genuinely into play.

Poteet's ten straight wins on the one-loss side are the most reliable indicator of the whole weekend, because it is the longest stretch in which no game may be lost. Yet the name that reaches the headline is the name that won the short final.

Prize boards do not lie. They merely inflate the truth into a figure that is hard to verify. The 9-ball added money was announced at two levels, 10,000 and 12,000 USD. One of them is wrong. In an event where most of the purse comes from entry fees and player auctions, publishing a conflicting added-money figure is a transparency problem for an entire financial system, rather than a simple typo.

My point, put briefly: when you read results from American bar-box events, read the structure first, the scoreline second.

Takeaway

Watch Poteet over the next three stops of Making It In America. A ten-match run on the one-loss side may be genuine form, or a lucky weekend stretched thin. But if he reaches another final, American rotation pool has another player on the rise.

And keep an eye on Chohan in One Pocket. In a game where patience matters more than shot-making, winning a final 4-1 with three near-shutouts signals a specialist with years left at the top.

At fifty-nine, I still believe something I mocked at twenty: billiards is a game of one moment. And the moment in Mobile this year belonged to two men who chose two different ways of staying silent before they struck.