Cue Sports Weekly: ESPN Comes Calling, Championship League Chaos & the Drill That'll Fix Your Stroke

It's been another packed week across the cue sports world, and honestly, this one's got a bit of everything — a genuinely huge broadcast deal for pool in the US, a snooker story that has nothing to do with the actual snooker, and Heyball planting its flag in a brand new country.

Plus the Auckland Q Tour leg is now just a week away, which for those of us on this side of the world is worth circling on the calendar. Let's get into it.

Pool's Getting a Massive US TV Deal — and It's a Big Deal for the Sport

Start with the headline. The World Nineball Tour announced a landmark agreement with ESPN that'll bring two of pool's biggest events — the 2026 Mosconi Cup (27-30 November) and the 2026 US Open Pool Championship (25-30 August) — to a proper US audience, streaming live on ESPN+ through the ESPN app on mobile and connected TV.

This matters more than it might look on the surface.

Pool has always struggled to get consistent, high-profile coverage in the States compared to how it's treated in parts of Europe and Asia, and getting the Mosconi Cup and US Open onto ESPN's platform is exactly the kind of exposure the sport needs to pull in new fans who wouldn't otherwise stumble across a livestream on a random Tuesday night.

The US Open in particular should be worth watching closely. It's the headline event of the WNT's stacked summer stretch — eleven events across five countries and over $1.2 million in prize money running from June through August — and it's the kind of tournament that tends to produce genuinely great television.

Having ESPN behind it gives the whole event a different level of legitimacy in the US market.

The Universal Open Kicks Off in Jakarta This Weekend

While the ESPN news was landing, the tour's already rolling straight into its next stop. The Universal Open gets underway today in Jakarta at Mille Billiards, running through 3-5 July with a $63,000 prize fund on the line — a solid mid-tier ranking event that'll be worth keeping an eye on over the weekend before the tour heads to Bucharest and then Prague later in the month.

Indonesia has become a genuinely strong market for the WNT in recent years, and events there consistently draw big, passionate crowds. Worth a look if you want something to stream over the weekend.

Snooker: A Brilliant Story Turns Sour for Kyren Wilson

Here's where the week got strange. The 2026 Championship League — snooker's first ranking event of the new 2026/27 season — got underway on 22 June at the Mattioli Arena in Leicester, and it's been running as 32 rounds of round-robin group play ever since, with two groups played every day across two tables.

Then came the story nobody wanted. 2024 World Champion Kyren Wilson opened his season in style, winning his first match 3-0 with breaks of 81 and 59. But while he was still competing in Leicester, his family home back in Kettering was burgled — thieves got in and out in under twenty minutes, making off with luxury watches, jewellery, and cash that had been set aside for a children's cancer charity.

Wilson found out mid-tournament and immediately withdrew, with his remaining group matches awarded as walkovers. He posted the full details to Instagram, including the exact time window of the break-in, and appealed to the public for any information that might help recover the stolen items. It's a genuinely rough way to start a new season, and it puts everything else that happened in the group stages into a bit of perspective.

On the actual snooker side of things, Dylan Emery and Ian Burns have both won their groups and advanced through to Stage Two, and Chang Bingyu — one of the sport's brightest young talents — has been putting together some eye-catching form on the feature table alongside four-time ranking event winner Ryan Day.

Group play continues through most of July, with the winners' groups and the final wrapping the whole thing up on 15 July.

For those of us in Auckland, the timing lines up nicely. The Asia Pacific Q Tour's second leg of the year lands at the Papatoetoe Cosmopolitan Club from 10-12 July — so if you fancy watching some genuinely high-level snooker live and local, that's the one to get to.

Heyball Lands in Japan for the First Time

Heyball keeps expanding into new territory, and this week it was Japan's turn. The HEYBALL JOY JAPAN OPEN ran from 25-28 June, the first official Heyball Cup ever held in the country, with qualifying rounds at JOY ACE Billiards and JOY Billiards Soka before the finals moved into a special venue in the basement of Tokyo Tower.

It's a proper event too — 256-entry capacity, a ¥1.5 million prize pool, and full WPA Heyball rules including a dress code that rules out shorts, sandals and jeans, which tells you the organisers are serious about presenting this properly.

This is part of a much bigger picture. Heyball has genuine Olympic ambitions — the WPA has been explicit that growing the sport globally is part of a push toward inclusion at the Brisbane 2032 Games — and getting a first foothold in Japan, a country with a huge existing billiards culture, is a meaningful step in that direction. Worth remembering this one in a few years' time as the sport's history gets written.

The Mighty X Drill

Drill of the Week: The Mighty X

Discipline: 8-ball / 9-ball / General pool Origin: Bert Kinister, legendary pool instructor and one of the most respected names in cue sports coaching Difficulty: Beginner-Intermediate What it trains: Stroke consistency, follow-through, speed control, and vertical axis alignment.

Setup

Mark two diagonal lines running from the centre of one corner pocket to the centre of the opposite corner, and do the same for the other two corners. You end up with a big X across the table, running through the middle. That's your practice grid for the whole session.

Here's the bit people often get wrong. You don't line every ball up at once. Think about it — if you stacked three balls in a row on the same line, the front one's blocking the path for the others, and you'd never get a clean straight shot at anything behind it. Instead, you place one object ball on one arm of the X, pot it, then bring another ball up and place it on the next line. One shot, one setup, then reset and go again.

The Task

Play the shot dead straight, cue ball following through so it travels down the same line the object ball just occupied. Only one backswing allowed — no re-gripping, no second-guessing, no adjusting halfway through the stroke. You commit, and you go.

Once you've got that down, this is where the drill gets genuinely useful. Don't just stop the cue ball dead every time. Experiment. Leave it a foot short one shot, follow it right through to where the ball was on the next, then try drawing it back a diamond or two after that. Same straight line, same clean stroke, but you're now training touch and cue ball control on top of the pure fundamentals. That's really the whole point of the drill — potting the ball is the easy part.

Why It Works

Long straight shots expose bad habits that shorter shots let you get away with. Any slight deviation in your stroke, any dip or steer, any inconsistency in your follow-through — it all shows up immediately, because there's so much distance for the error to compound over.

Working through the four arms of the X one ball at a time also stops you from grooving a single repeated motion on autopilot. You're resetting, refocusing, and building the shot fresh each time, which is a lot closer to how it actually feels in a match.

Some of Bert's own students have credited this one with genuinely transforming their fundamentals. It looks almost too simple to matter. It isn't.

The Local Angle

With the Auckland Q Tour leg coming up on the 10th to the 12th at Papatoetoe, this is exactly the kind of drill worth building into a short warm-up routine beforehand. Stroke consistency is the foundation everything else gets built on, and there's no substitute for grooving it in the week before you're playing under any kind of pressure.

Looking Ahead

The WNT's summer run keeps rolling — Jakarta this weekend, Bucharest from the 8th to the 11th, then Prague hot on its heels. The US Open at the end of August is shaping up to be one of the biggest events of the year, and now with ESPN in the picture, it's going to reach more eyes than ever.

In snooker, Championship League group play continues through most of July before the winners' groups and final wrap things up on the 15th, and the tour then heads toward the China Open and Wuhan Open later in the year.

And for those of us at club level here in New Zealand, the Auckland Q Tour leg on the 10th to the 12th is the one to circle.

Get down and watch if you can — live high-level snooker doesn't come to South Auckland every week.