The unlikely story of how a Russian pool champion became a star of Team USA
By Jeremy Herb, CNN
Atlantic City, New Jersey (CNN) — After struggling to keep up with Europe for more than a decade, Team USA’s pool team acquired an unlikely star: Russian world champion Fedor Gorst.
Gorst, 25, is the No. 1 ranked pool player in the world and has quickly racked up some of the game’s biggest titles, including two 9-ball world championships and the US Open.
“I knew that I would take heat from a lot of friends back home and my country where I was born,” Gorst told CNN Sports in an interview at the US Open Pool Championship in Atlantic City, where he was trying to repeat as champion at one of the sport’s biggest annual events.
“But I also felt it was natural for me to make that decision because I did have a lot of friends in the United States, and everybody was already treating me like one of their own,” he said.
Gorst’s unlikely journey from Russian world champion to a top player on Team USA was set in motion more than three years ago, when he was suspended from major competitions due to an International Olympic Committee-led ban on Russian athletes following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Gorst moved up a planned trip to the US – and effectively never left. He moved to southern Indiana with his then-girlfriend, Kristina Tkach, who is the top-ranked female pool-player, where they lived with Gorst’s manager. He later helped one of his closest friends on the pro circuit, a Ukrainian living in Kyiv, make the move to the US.
The next year, Gorst obtained his green card, and pool’s biggest tournament operator, Matchroom Sport, made the savvy — if controversial — decision to allow him to begin competing under an American flag at a time when rising tensions between the two nations echoed the Cold War.
Though he’s not yet a citizen, Gorst is poised to be the face of American pool amid one of the biggest pushes in years to get more money and eyeballs on the game’s stars and to help pool regain a place in mainstream American culture, where it’s had a long and storied — albeit checkered — history.
Gorst was added to Team USA in 2023 for the Mosconi Cup, an end-of-year event where the US faces off against Europe in a way that’s similar to golf’s Ryder Cup. The US has lost 13 of the last 15 competitions, and Gorst gave the five-man US team some world-class firepower to try to close a talent gap.
“Technically, it’s kind of farcical, but it made sense from the standpoint: This is where he’s living. This is where he’s most comfortable. This is where he’s developed a fan base,” said Mike Panozzo, the longtime publisher of industry magazine Billiards Digest.
The Mosconi Cup, which is organized by Matchroom, is the most anticipated event on the pool calendar, attracting roughly 3,000 fans each year, compared to roughly 500 tickets sold for the US Open finals. The atmosphere for most pool tournaments is similar to a tennis match, where fans are quiet during play and cheer between shots. The Mosconi Cup is the exception — it’s a raucous, party-like scene with a home crowd that taunts the opposing team like it’s a basketball or football game (or this year’s Ryder Cup).
“I get all the people who just roll their eyes and say, ‘Well, obviously he’s not American,’” Panozzo said of Gorst. “No one’s arguing, but it still makes sense. It’s good for pool, it’s good for Fedor, it’s good for the US.”
‘He’s embraced the publicity’
Away from the table, Gorst comes across as mild-mannered and reserved. But in competition, he brings intensity and competitiveness to his craft often seen in world-class athletes. He moves quickly and purposefully around a pool table, looking intently at the angle of each shot before he leans forward, pauses and delivers the cue with a fluid and powerful follow through.
At the US Open in August, 256 players competed for a prize pool of $500,000, with $100,000 for first place. Gorst won his first five matches without much resistance to reach the final 16, raising his arms and curling his biceps in a pose for the cameras after he made the final ball.
After his matches, Gorst signed cue balls and other memorabilia and took selfies with fans. While Gorst’s primary focus is to win championships, he has also built a personal brand that’s grown to more than 700,000 followers across his social media accounts.
A videographer travels with Gorst to tournaments, and he posts clips to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Tik-Tok showing off his personality through live practice sessions, snippets from his globe-trotting and streams of matches. The videos offer a window to his supporters that show the professional way he approaches the game and some of his quirky off-the-table habits, like frequent between-match pit stops at Chipotle for a chicken burrito bowl.
“He was the most introverted person ever, super shy,” said Oscar Dominguez, a veteran American professional pool-player from California. “Within the last year or so, he kind of broke out of his shell. He’s becoming more sociable, and he’s embraced the publicity.”
Gorst has embraced his new American identity as part of his brand and his merchandise. The front of one shirt that he sells says, “Stars-Stripes-Strokes,” with a logo of his nickname, “Ghost” written as a stripe in the American flag on the back.
Another shirt displays “Fedor Gorst” stylistically written in the shape of the United States.
Gorst has made inroads into mainstream American culture with the help of the biggest podcaster in the United States, Joe Rogan. An avid pool-player, Rogan has interviewed Gorst on his show twice, including this summer.
“Really good pool is about as fun as anything. … What we need is more people playing,” Rogan said to Gorst, jokingly asking aloud how many “regular” people were still tuned in to hear them talk pool. “It’s a game I really wish more people would appreciate.”
A champion at a young age
Gorst was born in 2000 in Moscow, where his father owned a table for a different game, Russian pyramid, which has extremely small pockets and is taller than a pool table.
While he’s now a lanky 6-foot-1, as a 7-year-old, Gorst struggled to reach the pyramid table. A coach his father had hired suggested Gorst should play pool instead until he grew to keep from developing bad habits. Gorst said he began playing amateur pool tournaments when he was 10, did well, and never went back to pyramid.
At 14, Gorst’s father died suddenly, a tragedy Gorst said eventually led him toward his desire to take the game more seriously and as a means to support his family.
“2015 was when I realized I wanted to make a career out of it,” Gorst said. “I started practicing more, going to school a lot less, and trying to figure out how to dedicate more time toward pool.”
“My mom didn’t like it at the time,” he added with a wry smile.
When Gorst was a teenager, Russia’s pool federation hired well-known Dutch coach Johan Ruijsink, who would have a big impact on Gorst’s trajectory. Gorst was one of several young players on the Russian team, creating a dynamic of internal competition that pushed them all to improve, Riujsink said in an interview.
“He was still young, but he was also kind of different because he wasn’t really interested in finishing exercises really fast — he was more interested in the idea behind it, what he would learn from it,” Riujsink said. “The one thing that stood out was his mental stability. He wasn’t afraid, he wasn’t hyped, he was always quite cool.”
Gorst continued to climb the ranks in tournaments around the globe, including his first venture to the US for the Derby City Classic in southern Indiana. He won the Junior World 9-Ball Championship at 17 years old. In 2019, still a teenager, Gorst won the 9-Ball World Pool Championship in Doha, Qatar.
He earned a spot on the five-man European roster for the Mosconi Cup the next year, helping Europe cruise to an 11-3 blowout.
His career was quickly on a hall-of-fame trajectory. Then geopolitics turned it upside down.
‘I didn’t know anybody here’
Gorst was playing at a tournament in Slovenia in February 2022 two days after Russian troops invaded Ukraine. On the final day of the tournament, the International Olympic Committee recommended banning Russian athletes from competition. While pool is not an Olympic sport, its governing body still has aspirations of getting into the Olympics and followed through on the ban.
Gorst decided to move up a trip he had already planned to the US. He and Tkach, who were dating, landed in the Washington, DC, area before heading to Memphis, Indiana, a rural town north of Louisville, Kentucky, where they lived with Gorst’s manager, Jason Sword.
The move and the adjustment to small-town living in the US was tough for both of them, Gorst said. While he was banned from major competitions, Gorst traveled around the US playing smaller regional events that didn’t fall under pool’s international governing rules.
One of Gorst’s closest friends on the European pro tour going back to their days as juniors was Vitaliy Patsura, a Ukrainian player who was in Kyiv when the war started. After Gorst moved to the US, he helped Patrusa make the trek, too.
“He was trying to support me,” Patsura said. “I didn’t know nobody here, right? So, Fedor invited me to come here. He introduced me to Jason Sword. That’s how I started my way in the US.”
Patsura immigrated to the US under the federal government’s Uniting for Ukraine program, a legal pathway for Ukrainians displaced by the war to temporarily live and work in the US. He settled in Chicago, where there’s a large Ukrainian population, and is hoping to get a green card so he can remain in the US.
Gorst’s first event back in major competitions was the Matchroom-run US Open in October 2022, in which he competed under a neutral flag.
The next year, when Gorst obtained a green card allowing him to remain in the US indefinitely, he began discussions with Matchroom about a more permanent move in the pool world, too.
“It was smart for them. It was smart for me,” he said of the switch to Team USA. (Gorst still competes under a neutral flag in non-Matchroom events.)
‘It’s tough if you’re not at the top’
Team USA won 10 of the first 12 Mosconi Cups after it began in 1994, after the game saw a surge in popularity from the 1986 Tom Cruise film, “The Color of Money.”
The US was “the place for pool” for several decades into the 1990s, Panozzo said. “But the rest of the world caught up and passed it by professionally.”
In many European countries, government-funded pool federations sponsor their top players, like Olympic training for other sports, even if the notion of pool making the Olympics remains a longshot. But that’s also the reason that the World Confederation of Billiards Sports enacted the ban on Russian players in 2022.
“Europe, on the training side of things, they’ve always been real structured in sports. I think that bled over to pool pretty easily,” said Jeremy Jones, a US Open champion and former captain of Team USA.
There’s no similar setup for American professionals or promising junior players. The economics of the game make it a challenging career path: Only a handful of players in the US earn enough to make a living solely from pool. Many on the pro circuit supplement their income through lessons, sponsorships and gambling matches, or other businesses like Dominguez, who owns a pool hall in California.
Jayson Shaw, a Scottish player and fixture on Europe’s Mosconi Cup squads, said there are more major tournaments than ever, but the expenses to fly around the world quickly add up for second-and-third tier players.
“It’s tough if you’re not at the top,” said Shaw, who moved to the US over a decade ago and also owns a pool room in Connecticut.
The hunt for more casual sports fans
Pool’s biggest operator, British sports promotion company Matchroom Sport, is making a bet that it can help change the trajectory of pool so more players can make it a career, like it’s done for its more well-known sports in the UK like snooker and darts.
Matchroom has focused much of its attention on growing pool in two markets: the US and Asia. It’s added events in countries like Vietnam — where players like Gorst have found significant followings. Matchroom tripled the prize pool of the 9-Ball World Pool Championship to $1 million thanks to a 10-year partnership with Saudi Arabia, where the event is now held, in another instance where the Gulf state has looked to sports to shore up its reputation amid a questionable human rights record.
There are still plenty of headwinds. The billiards industry has seen the number of pool halls in the US shrink considerably over the past two decades. At one time, pool was a staple of ESPN weekend programming, but the game has struggled for decades to maintain a consistent professional tour, where past promises of big paydays and interest have repeatedly failed to materialize.
Matchroom’s tournaments are 9-ball, a game where the balls are shot in order and whoever makes the 9-ball wins the rack. For those who have tried a game or two of 8-ball before, it might look unfamiliar, though it’s simple to learn. But that’s emblematic of the larger challenge for growing pool in the US, because even many amateurs who play in 8-ball pool leagues might not recognize Gorst or the best American of the last two decades, five-time US Open champion Shane Van Boening.
Matchroom has sought to professionalize the production of tournaments. The US Open had four tables streamed online, three under Matchroom’s paid streaming service and a fourth on YouTube. An emcee revs up the crowd in the arena before the matches begin, and players get an introduction and walkout music. The main TV table includes multiple cameras and commentary for a broadcast aired on TV networks in some countries, including Sky Sports in the United Kingdom.
“We just try to do things to get more of a casual sports fan hooked on it,” said Emily Frazer, CEO of Matchroom Multi Sport, the arm of the company that includes pool. “You’ve got personalities screaming to get across to the fans.”
Frazer pointed to a memorable scene when last year’s USA Mosconi Cup captain, Skyler Woodward, won a doubles match with Gorst and then asked the crowd for two beers, which the pair downed while the American fans soaked up the antics and cheered them on.
Part of the effort in the US is to shed pool’s reputation as a game of “hustling,” how it’s most often depicted in popular culture. That’s not to say professional pool-players don’t gamble — they often do, for high stakes. But there’s no trickery in those matches — the big ones are pay-per-view promoted events. Gorst and Van Boening, for instance, played lengthy matches for $100,000 each of the past two years (they split the two contests).
Last year, Matchroom created a new event held in the Philippines, the Reyes Cup, named for Filipino pool legend Efren Reyes. The first event pitted Team Asia against Team Europe, but Matchroom changed the format this year so that Asia played against a team “Rest of the World.”
That tweak allowed Gorst to be added to the squad. Woodward was also named to the team as a wild card, even though there were European players higher than him in the rankings.
‘He feels a lot more pressure’
While Gorst’s addition to the American Mosconi Cup team improved its talent level, it also meant there’s one fewer roster spot for the rest of the American players each year, so long as Gorst remains a top player.
“When he first got on the team, I was actually rooming with him in Vietnam, and I told him, ‘You owe me dinner for the rest of your career, because you’re literally taking one of my spots,’” Dominguez, who has played on the US Mosconi Cup team three times, said with a laugh.
Gorst’s first Mosconi Cup for Team USA in 2023 didn’t go well. The US was defeated by Europe 11-3, and the fans in London needled Gorst by chanting “not born in the USA!” in the tune of the Bruce Springsteen classic.
Last year, Gorst easily was the game’s top player, winning a trio of major events, the World Pool Masters, the 9-Ball World Pool Championship and the US Open, in what was dubbed the “Gorst Slam.” At the Mosconi Cup, however, the US and Gorst were soundly defeated, 11-6.
“I think he feels a lot more pressure knowing that he’s already played once for Europe, and now he’s on the USA team,” Shaw said.
This year, Gorst had the chance to add to his hall-of-fame resume by winning back-to-back titles. At the 9-Ball World Championship in Saudi Arabia, he reached the finals before losing to Filipino Carlo Biado, 15-13.
At the US Open, Gorst showcased his ability to eke out tight matches, which has been key to his big tournament wins. He fell behind 9-6 in his round-of-16 match and 9-7 in the quarterfinals, in races to 10 racks. Gorst came back in both contests, including a late-night quarterfinal against Michael Baoanan, a player from the Philippines who was backed by a sizable cheering section that created a rowdier atmosphere.
Gorst won his semi-final match the next day to reach the finals for the third year in a row. Yet again, Gorst fell behind in a race to 13 racks to Aloysius Yapp of Singapore, trailing 8-3. But he displayed his resilience again, too, with a third comeback to tie the score 10-10 and then 11-11.
This time, however, Gorst’s remarkable string of comebacks ran out as Yapp held him off and won the title, 13-11.
Gorst smiled shaking Yapp’s hand after the match, but the disappointment on his face was clear while Yapp leapt atop the table to celebrate his major championship. Gorst’s 2nd place finish still came with the consolation of a $50,000 payday.
Gorst says he remains highly driven even after reaching the pinnacle of his sport. While the legacy he’s creating expanding his trophy collection is important, Gorst said that his motivation can also be explained in an even simpler way.
“I do have big goals when it comes to my career in pool,” Gorst said. “For me, it was easy, I’ll be honest, financial motivation was always the biggest motivator for me.”
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