HO CHI MINH - He already caused a furore once at the World championship in Porto, where Eddy Merckx became the world’s best and the completely unknown Japanese player Takeshima O was the sensation as a debutant by eliminating Dick Jaspers. For years, O (family name) did not appear often in international billiards arenas, in the Ho Chi Minh World Cup, the jolly Japanese was back in the rankings of the second preliminary round. He follows Korean Su Yeong Park (4 match points, 1.875, run 7) with a slightly lower average: 1.818.
Still, he made a b ig impression with two 13 runs in his two matches and the Japanese may well cause another surprise. By the way, the player with the highest runs (14) was Jeung Hee Han, who with 2 match points and 1.166 finished far away in the second part and was eliminated as number 26 in the daily rankings.
The top 16 group winners, led by Su Yeong Park, closed by Ali Ibraimov, consisted of 5 Vietnamese, 3 Koreans and 3 Turks, 2 Japanese, 1 German, 1 Austrian and Belgian Frédéric Caudron, who was the number 4 ranked player with 4-1,578-7.
TTT Nguyen (2-1,928-7), with the best average of all players, fell just outside, the same did Dimitrios Seleventas, Tarik Yavuz and Sergio Jimenez. Monday's frontrunner, Van Anh Huy Pham, was ranked No 23 and 2nd in his group with 2-1,290-9.
Tuesday's daily rankings:
- Su Yeong Park 4-1,875-7
- Takeshima O 4-1,818-13
- Nguyen Chi Long 4-1,666-11
- Frédéric Caudron 4-1,578-7
- Chi Thanh Tran 4-1,463-6
- Quoc Ho Le 4-1,395-7
- Duy Thanh Pham 4-1,395-6
- Park Jeongu 4-1,200-5
- Emrullah Basegmez 4-1,176-5
- Ryuuji Umeda 4-1,111-7
- Jaein Jung 4-1,111-5
- Birol Uymaz 4-1,071-9
- Herbert Szivacz 4-0.952-6
- Serdal Bas 3-1,176-6
- Duc Minh Tran 2-1,696-11
- Ali Ibraimov 2-0.746-5
The most interesting groups for Wednesday:
Group A with Pierre Soumagne and Ali Ibraimov
Group E with Ja In Kang, Dong Ryong Kim and Birol Uymaz
Group G with Ryuuji Umeda and Mehmet Goren
Group H with Emrullah Basegmez, Turgay Orak and Ronny Lindemann
Group K with Trung Hau Do Nguyen and Volkan Cetin
Group M with Frédéric Caudron, Takao Miyashita and Claus Maurer
Group N: Ji Hun Ahn, Nguyen Chi Long, Joey de Kok
Group O: Takeshima O, Hyeong Kon Kim, TTT Nguyen
Group P: Lukas Stam, Huub Wilkowski, Su Yeong Park.