Cue Sports Weekly - Brennan Takes the 8-Ball Worlds, Shenzhen Open Hits the Last Eight

Last week I said we'd have proper results out of Marrakech by now, and we do. It's a good story too.

Declan Brennan went one better than last year to win the IEPF World Singles title, Morocco took the men's team crown at home, and a Moroccan player became the first African to reach a world singles final. Meanwhile the Shenzhen Open has narrowed to the last eight, with a rerun of May's Crucible final on the cards.

One gap before we start. I still can't find match-by-match results for the NZ teams, and I'll come back to that below.

Marrakech: Brennan Finally Gets the Job Done

Brennan lost the final to Giuseppe D'Imperio twelve months ago. This time the 33-year-old from Mayobridge got over the line, beating Morocco's Abderrahmane Chorfy 11-5 in the final. He's the second Northern Irishman to hold the title, after his close friend Ronan McCarthy, who won it in 2022 and 2024.

As second seed he skipped qualifying. He beat Theo Schneider 8-2, squeaked past Johan Attard 8-7, then took out two Moroccans in Amine Amiri and Houssam El Amrani before seeing off Shaun Sharkey 10-4 in the semi.

The other half of the draw is where it got interesting. Chorfy, who's spelled Cherfi in some reports, came through four rounds of qualifying to reach the main draw. He knocked out 2023 champion Clayton Castaldi, then beat defending champion D'Imperio 10-9 in the semi. That made him the first player from Africa to reach a final at this event.

The final itself was Brennan's from the middle on. He led 2-0, Chorfy levelled at 3-3, and then Brennan won five frames in a row to lead 8-3. Chorfy pulled it back to 8-5 and had a chance to get closer, but he missed a yellow. Brennan cleared for 9-5, a break clearance put him on the hill, and he finished it when Chorfy broke dry in the next frame.

If you've only played the English game on the odd night, a reverse clearance is clearing the table after your opponent's break goes wrong. At this level a dry break or an in-off hands the table straight over, and nobody gives it back.

The team event went the host nation's way. Morocco beat Northern Ireland 11-9 in the men's final after knocking out Ireland 11-4 in the quarters and Wales 11-7 in the semis. It's their second world team title and their first since Blackpool in 2014, twelve years ago. In the women's singles, England's Barbara Taylor completed a hat-trick of titles, adding 2026 to 2018 and 2022 with an 8-5 win over Emma Cunningham.

The scale is worth a mention. There were around 300 players from 18 countries across 24 categories at the Aqua Mirage Resort, and it's only the second time in the IEPF's 33-year history that the flagship event has been held outside the UK and Ireland.

As for the NZ squads, I still haven't found reliable match-by-match reporting for our men's, ladies', under-23's or over-50's teams. As soon as I've got proper results from the team, they'll go up here.

Tight pockets punish lazy cut shots, and that's exactly where this week's drill comes from. More on that shortly.

Shenzhen Open: A Draw Split Right Down the Middle

The £850,000 event at the Bao'an Sports Centre has produced a lopsided last eight. Four lower-ranked players fill the top half, and all four remaining world champions are crammed into the bottom: Judd Trump, Mark Selby, Shaun Murphy and Wu Yize. Only one of them can make the final, according to Totally Snookered's draw report.

Wu got through Ricky Walden 5-3 and is into his first ranking quarter-final since winning the World Championship in May. At 22 he's the second youngest world champion ever. His reward is Murphy, who beat Elliot Slessor 5-1 after a 139 and five frames on the spin. That's a straight rerun of the Crucible final Wu won 18-17.

The other bottom-half quarter is a heavyweight too. Trump beat Si Jiahui 5-2, and Selby, the China Open winner in August, is waiting for him. Trump, recently dethroned as world number one, has won seven of his 31 ranking titles in China.

The top half is where someone unfancied gets a shot at a title. Chris Wakelin is the only top-16 player left up there, and he plays Jimmy Robertson, the world number 45. Yuan Sijun, the world number 33, meets Michael Holt, who's 46th. Yuan is the only man left who has never won or even reached the final of a ranking event.

Ronnie O'Sullivan was among the big names beaten on day one, which feels like a long time ago now.

Pool: A Busy Fortnight Across Asia

It's been a quiet-ish week for headlines, but the results kept coming. Wojciech Szewczyk was crowned WPA Men's 10-Ball World Champion in Ho Chi Minh City on 27 September, which makes it his second world 10-ball title after Las Vegas in 2022.

A few days earlier, Anthony Raga and Chen Siming won the 39th Japan Open. Fedor Gorst and Liu Shasha were the champions at the China Open in Shanghai on 13 September.

Heyball: No Fresh Final, But the Bigger Picture Matters

Nothing new has landed on the Heyball tour this week that I can confirm. The most recent world-level result is still Pune, where Gareth Potts beat Jordan Shepherd 7-4 and Kelly Fisher beat Thailand's Waratthanun Sukritthanes in a shootout. That made it back-to-back titles for both, per the WPA's report from India.

The numbers were big: 128 athletes from 40 nations and a US$400,000 prize fund. That's the sort of scale the WPA needs if it's serious about pushing Heyball toward Brisbane 2032.

If you're still working out how Heyball differs from the 8-ball you play at the club, there's a Heyball vs 8-ball comparison on the tools page. When the next tour stop is announced, you'll see it here first.

Drill of the Week: The Cut Ladder

This one's built for tight pockets, which is exactly what English 8-ball gives you. It trains one skill and one skill only: judging a cut angle and hitting it.

Put a red object ball on the foot spot, aimed at the corner pocket at that end. Then you'll shoot from three cue ball spots, each exactly 2.5 diamonds from the ghost ball position, the point where the cue ball must be at contact to send the red into the pocket. That distance is about 31 inches on a 9-foot table and about 24 inches on a 7-footer.

The three spots give you three cut angles: 15, 30 and 45 degrees. In ball terms that's roughly three-quarter ball, half ball and just over a quarter ball. Use the diagram below to mark the spots. Spot A sits 3.7 diamonds along from the head end and 0.6 up from the bottom rail. Spot B is 3.5 along and 1.2 up, and spot C is 3.4 along and 1.9 up. Being within a ball width of those is plenty.

Here's the task. Pot three in a row from A to climb to B, three in a row from B to climb to C, then pot two in a row from C to finish. Miss on any rung and you go back to the start of that rung, not the whole ladder. Count every shot you take. The minimum possible is eight, and I'd call anything under 15 a solid first run.

C is the hard one. A 45-degree cut from 2.5 diamonds into a corner is thin, and it'll expose any drift in your alignment instantly. That's the point.

The ladder works because the pot never changes, only your view of it. You'll feel how much your aim shifts as the angle opens up, and you'll start noticing which side you under-cut on. Once you've got it, mirror the whole thing into the other corner. If you want a bonus round, play every shot as a pure stun shot at medium pace and watch the cue ball come off at roughly ninety degrees to the line the red took.

If potting in strict order is your thing, Snookong is a decent way to warm up before you try this.

Looking Ahead

The Shenzhen Open final is on Sunday 4 October, and by the time you read this some of those quarter-finals will already be settled. Next up is the Northern Ireland Open, 18 to 25 October at Belfast's Waterfront Hall. After that the International Championship runs 31 October to 7 November in Nanjing.

Away from the pro tour, the Pan American Snooker Championships head to Brazil from 31 October, as flagged on SnookerUSA. For the lead-up to Marrakech, here's last week's edition.