Efren Manalang Reyes, popularly known by the nicknames "Bata" and "The Magician", is a Filipino professional pool player. Reyes is widely considered one of the greatest pool players of all time. A winner of over 100 international titles, Reyes was the first player to win the WPA World Championships in two different pool disciplines. Among his numerous titles, Reyes is a WPA World Nine-ball Champion and WPA World Eight-ball Champion, a U.S. Open 9-Ball Championship winner, a four-time Sands Regency 9-Ball Open winner, and a thirteen-time Derby City Classic winner. Reyes also represented the Philippines at the World Cup of Pool, winning the event with his partner Francisco Bustamante in 2006 and 2009. Reyes defeated American legend Earl Strickland in The Color of Money challenge match in 1996, in a winner-take-all prize of $100,000.
William Joseph Mosconi was an American professional pool player from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Mosconi is widely considered one of the greatest pool players of all time. Between the years of 1941 and 1957, he won the World Straight Pool Championship nineteen times. For most of the 20th century, his name was essentially synonymous with pool in North America – he was nicknamed "Mr. Pocket Billiards" – and he was among the first Billiard Congress of America Hall of Fame inductees. Mosconi pioneered and regularly employed numerous trick shots, set many records, and helped to popularize pool as a national recreation activity.
Straight pool, which is also called 14.1 continuous and 14.1 rack, is a cue sport in which two competing players attempt to pot as many billiard balls as possible without playing a foul. The game was the primary version of pool played in professional competition until it was superseded by faster-playing games like nine-ball and eight-ball in the 1980s.
Pool is a classification of cue sports played on a table with six pockets along the rails, into which balls are shot. Each specific pool game has its own name; some of the better-known include eight-ball, blackball, nine-ball, ten-ball, seven-ball, straight pool, one-pocket, and bank pool. Eight-ball is the most frequently played discipline of pool, and is often thought of as synonymous with "pool".
The American Poolplayers Association (APA) is a governing body for amateur pool competition in the United States. The APA conducts pool leagues and tournaments in the disciplines of eight-ball and nine-ball with a unified ruleset. The organization was founded in 1981 by professional pool players Terry Bell and Larry Hubbart, with roots dating back to the National Pool League (NPL), founded in 1979. The APA bills itself as the largest pool league in the world with a membership of nearly 250,000 players in the United States, Canada, Japan, and China. The organization franchises its local league operations worldwide; some of these league operators are former professional pool players, including Ewa Laurance and Jeanette Lee. The APA is headquartered in Lake St. Louis, Missouri.
Francisco Bustamante is a Filipino professional pool player from Tarlac, Central Luzon and the 2010 World Nine-ball Champion, nicknamed "Django", after the lead character of the 1966 film of the same name, and sometimes also called "Bustie", especially in the United States. Bustamante has won over 70 International titles.
Niels Feijen is a Dutch professional pool player, from the Hague. His nickname is "the Terminator". In 2014 he won the WPA World 9-ball championship.
Alfredo de Oro was a Cuban professional carom billiards and pool player who several times held the world title in both three-cushion billiards and straight pool simultaneously. He was posthumously inducted into the Billiard Congress of America's Hall of Fame in 1967, the first non-American to receive the honor. He was ranked number 4 on the Billiards Digest 50 Greatest Players of the Century.
Alejandro Salvador "Alex" Pagulayan is a Filipino-born Canadian professional pool player. His nickname is "the Lion", given to him by the great Cliff Thorburn, former World Snooker champion. Alex was born in Cabagan, Isabela, Philippines and was raised in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In 2012, Pagulayan became a citizen of Canada and now resides in Toronto.
Dennis Orcollo, sometimes called Dennis Orcullo, is a Filipino professional pool player, nicknamed "Surigao" and "RoboCop". He has been called "The Money-Game King".
Michael Sigel is an American professional pool player nicknamed "Captain Hook." He earned the nickname from his ability to hook his opponents with safety plays. Sigel was dominant during the 1980s in 9-Ball and Straight Pool and has a high run of 339 balls in Straight Pool. Mike Sigel is widely considered one of the greatest pool players of all time. In the year 2000, Sigel was voted "Greatest Living Player of the Century" by Billiards Digest Magazine.
Ronato (Ronnie) Alcano, is a Filipino professional pool player, nicknamed "Ronnie Calamba" and "the Volcano". He won both the 2006 WPA World Nine-ball Championship and the 2007 WPA World Eight-ball Championship.
Jasmin Ouschan is an Austrian professional pool player from Klagenfurt, Carinthia. Her first professional competition occurred in 2002, but she did not officially become a professional member of the Women's Professional Billiards Association (WPBA) until 2007. She is currently one of the top-ranked women in the world according to the 2010 prize money list and by the WPBA rankings. At times, she has been ranked as the number one female player in the world. Since 2006, she has been listed among the top-ten women in the annual prize money rankings. Ouschan competes regularly with men on the Euro Tour and in 2008 became the first woman to earn a medal in an open world pool championship.
The World Straight Pool Championship, sometimes marked as simply the World Tournament among other names, is a pocket billiards (pool) competition, that has been held annually in United States in its present form since 2006. It is one of the successor tournaments to the historical World 14.1 Continuous Championship (1912–1990). During the modern tournament's early years, it was the only global professional title for straight pool. The event is organized by Dragon Promotions, in part to restore the game's popularity in the United States. Throughout the current event's history, only the 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2010 editions were sanctioned by the World Pool-Billiard Association (WPA) to have world titles. Since then, the tournament continued to be held under its current name as a de facto world championship.
The Derby City Classic is an annual pool convention and tournament held every January at the Caesars Southern Indiana casino in Elizabeth, Indiana, near Louisville, Kentucky. It is eight days long and offers various disciplines of competition for pool players of all caliber. It is often referred to as the DCC.
Darren Appleton is an English pool player, best known for playing Eight-ball, Nine-ball and Ten-ball pool.
Roberto Gomez is a professional pocket billiards player from Zamboanga City, Philippines. Known for 9-ball, he competed in the final of both the 2007 WPA World Nine-ball Championships, and the 2007 World Cup of Pool. Gomez was the first qualifier to reach the final of the WPA World Nine-ball Championships.
John Schmidt is an American pool player, born in Keokuk, Iowa. Nicknamed "Mr. 600", Specialising in straight pool, Schmidt held the record for the highest run ever made (626), until Jayson Shaw broke that record with a high run of 669 in January 2022. Schmidt won the U.S. Open 9-Ball Championships in 2006 defeating Rodolfo Luat in the final. He was also part of the American team at two Mosconi Cups in 2006 and 2014.
The American Straight Pool Championship is a prestigious professional straight pool tournament held in the United States since 2014. It is organized by promoter Peter Burrows.
Irving Crane 
Oliver Ortmann 
Dennis Orcollo 
