Roy's Basement

It’s called Roy’s Basement.

Roy and Dennis Orcollo celebrating a win

Roy Francisco

The name is derived primarily from the fact that it is, in fact, a basement, beneath the home of Ariel Roy Francisco in Gainesville, VA. The space is dominated by a tealcloth, 9-ft. Diamond pool table that sits on shoeshine wooden floors. Just beyond one of the short rails is a memorabilia wall, covered with photos and a shelf above, upon which sit a variety of trophies, and a couple of those oversized winning checks they hand out at the end of major tournaments.

What you can’t see in a photo of the room and what is as important as the pool tools is the rest of the house, where for a portion of every year, a varying number of pool players reside, practice, learn and in some cases, teach the sport. They also go forth to compete; road warriors, traveling the country in search of major tournament victories and action cash.

Roy Francisco is a stake horse these days and the basement of his home is where his ‘stable’ of players comes to eat, drink, sleep and play before they head out to compete in games arranged and financed by Roy and other stake horses with their own ‘stable’ of players. Roy has taken the stake horse concept a step further by offering the players he backs a kind of sanctuary; a safe place that may have developed out of a harrowing incident that kept Roy Francisco out of pool rooms for 18 years.

Born in the Philippines in 1967, Ariel Roy Francisco, the last of 10 children in his family, migrated to the US when his Dad, Rafael, retired from the US Navy in 1981. Attending high school in Norfolk, Virginia, he discovered chess and before long, he was a scholastic junior champion. He was also pursuing an interest in computers, which had been his Dad’s field (data processing) while stationed at Subic Bay. Roy more or less taught basic computer programming skills while still in high school and would later study computer science for two years at Strayer University in Northern Virginia.

Like many pool players, his association with the sport began with casual play among friends. In the late 80 and early 90s, he signed on to play in an APA league. He admits to being very competitive and immediately engaged with the idea of getting better at the sport, but something else about the overall pool experience caught his attention.

“It was a small area,” he said of his Virginia environs at the time, “but there were two or three pool rooms and there was a lot of history in those rooms; a lot of hustling road players in those days.”

Among the many legends of the game that Francisco got to know was Bill “Weenie Beenie” Staton, who won the Virginia State Pool Championship five times, was a European Billiard Champion and won a World Championship One Pocket title, which led to his induction into the One Pocket Hall of Fame in 2004. In the early 1960s, Staton founded the Weenie Beenie hot dog stand chain (thus, the nickname) in Northern Virginia. Staton and his brother would then, in 1968, open Jack and Jill’s Cue Club in Arlington, VA; a room with 32 tables, a pro shop, a snack bar and a tournament area with tiered seating for 180 spectators. It became a favorite stop for East Coast pool players, like Johnny Archer, Earl Strickland and Tommy Kennedy, to name just a few, and was still in operation when Francisco started playing there in the late 80s.

“There were a lot of local players who were into the money games,” said Francisco, “so I was exposed to this kind of thing and it intrigued me. I started to think that maybe I could be more than just an APA player, that maybe I could go out and be a money player or find myself a player.”

He hooked up for a spell with high school classmate Max Eberle and they made some road trips together, traveling to New Orleans, for example, where the whole issue of pool gambling was still a “grey area” legally.

“This is what happened,” said Francisco of the next step toward Roy’s Basement. “In the early 90s, I heard about this US Open 9-Ball event that happened every year in Norfolk and I knew that a lot of Filipino players played in that tournament. So I figured ‘let me meet these guys.’ I was very intrigued about the money side of it.”

“I went to my first US Open event in 1992 (the year that Tommy Kennedy won),” he added. “I was there strictly because I heard about the gambling going on at Q Master Billiards.”

At that US Open, he met a number of players, including the one who would become the first player in his ‘stable’ – Leonardo Andam.

“He came home with me and started working in Virginia,” said Francisco. “That was it. This was all fueled because of the money and plans to keep making more and more.”

“I was still in my apartment at the time,” he added. “My living room had the pool table in it.”

"CEO" Grace and Roy

Roy Francisco

From 1992 to 1998, he added steadily to his stable, as word got out that he was staking Filipino players. Among those he added in those years, was Jose Parica, with whom he traveled quite a bit on the East Coast.

“Parica was the best ‘grinder’ I’ve ever had,” said Francisco. “Bustamante was around at that time. “Ginky” (George Sansouci) loved to gamble with me back then, too. I was the one that (established) northern Virginia as a haven for Filipino players; started ‘adopting’ them and playing money games all around the country.”

And then, in 1998 . . . . .

Roy and a friend were out shooting pool one night at Champion Billiards in Arlington, VA (a room that has since closed). It’s nearly 3 o’clock in the morning in the facility that was open 24 hours a day and it was “jampacked,” every table occupied with players. Unbeknownst to Francisco and his friend at the time, a pair of off-duty D.C. police officers, a man and a woman, were playing pool at a table nearby.

According to Francisco, a man walked into the pool hall, stepped up to the front desk, brandished a weapon and demanded cash. Francisco was never aware of the precise order of the events that occurred at that moment, but what he does remember is the sudden, paralyzing sound of gunfire, as the two nearby off-duty police officers engaged with the armed robber and bullets started flying.

Francisco and his friend hit the proverbial ‘deck,’ scrambling to take cover under the pool tables as the sound of gunfire and varying levels of patron panic turned the scene chaotic. Before Francisco could adequately consider the option of exiting out of a back door, supplementary forces arrived on the scene, bursting in with weapons drawn, with little or no idea what the hell was actually going on. According to Francisco, once they ascertained that the robber had been fatally shot, and the off-duty female officer had been shot as well (as it turned out, by a ricocheting bullet from a friendly-fire weapon), they pretty much arrested everybody who hadn’t managed to make it out the door.

“They ran out of handcuffs,” Francisco recalled, “and had to use zip ties for everybody else.”

It was the days before common usage of cell phones, and as a result, Francisco, handcuffed, couldn’t reach his wife. When he was finally released and managed to reach his home, he found her waiting for him in their driveway at 8 a.m. in the morning.

“There she was, waiting for me in the driveway, seven months pregnant,” said Francisco, “and I had to tell her what had happened.”

“It was such a close call,” he added, “and it hit me so hard, I never went back. I gave away all my pool cues. I was thinking about the baby and swore that from that point on, you’d never see me set foot in a pool room again.”

And he never did, until his son turned 18.

His son, Alex was born, and by the time he was five years old, Dad had picked up a new hobby – playing poker on-line. Certainly, a work/play (poker) environment that was easier to control.

It was home. Sanctuary.

“Turns out, I had some talent at it,” said Francisco, “and eventually I started making money at it. I’d be playing multiple tables at once.”

He started playing live in Vegas, and would make frequent trips to Manila, where he found players with “plenty of money and no skills.” It’s his contention that the two disciplines – pool and poker – are full of competitors who want to be good at both.

“Good poker players want to be good pool players, and vice versa,” said Francisco. “And sometimes (at casinos), you can have a crowd of both of them in the same room.”

He developed his skills and the size of his bank account, while establishing poker-playing relationships with a number of active pool players; Dennis Orcollo being only one of many. And then, in 2016, a timer he’d set on that night(mare) at Champion Billiards went off when his son turned 18.

“Something popped in my head,” he recalled, “and I asked myself ‘What about you call all your friends from the APA and pull together another team?”

He did just that and last year, that team placed 32 nd out of 850 teams at the APA’s annual World Pool Championships in Las Vegas. In the meantime, Francisco was looking to “get the band back together,” so to speak.

“I was back into it,” he said, “and since I was back into it, I wanted to see the gambling part of it again. A lot of the old players were gone by then, but I met up with Dennis and we hooked up.”

Roy and a couple of "students"

Roy Francisco

It was about this time that the name “Roy’s Basement” started to emerge from the activities. Francisco started following all of these players around the country and live-casting whatever was going on to a Roy’s Basement Facebook page. At last count, Francisco figured he had around 25,000 followers (as of this moment, the site has 22,710 and has been ‘liked’ by 15,000 of them). The site’s frontpage profile photo shows a central “Roy’s Basement” logo, surrounded by cropped pictures of nine pool players, most recognizable with a single name, like Bustamante, Pagulayan, Biado, and Orcollo, and a few who, if not first-name recognizable now, will be shortly, like Johann Chua, Siming Chen, Kristina Tkach, Ruslan Chinakhov and James Aranas. Each of the photos is framed with the symbol of a playing-card suit. The ladies are hearts, the diamonds are Orcollo, Bustamante and Pagulayan, the clubs are Aranas and Biado. Chinakhov and Chua are the spades.

He’s gathered them steadily and beyond organizing and staking them in meticulously arranged and ‘ruled’ pool matches, he brings them home. To his house, with five bedrooms, some with a couple of beds. He and his wife, whom the players call CEO Grace, along with their now-grown son, whom they call Coach Alex feed them. They prod them into training, although some don’t need as much prodding as others. Some train others. Sometimes they just play, and sometimes, they’ll even kick back and play a little poker.

Wherever they’re from, these 21 st century road warriors identify Roy’s Basement as a home away from home. Many speak a common language, and not all the same common language. The Filipinos speak Filipino. The Russians speak Russian. Siming Chen presumably speaks Chinese. They all speak English much better than most of us could manage Filipino, Russian or Chinese. And now, with the addition of a Russian ‘stake horse’ by the name of Dima Kvan, whom he met at a US Open (and for whom, at the time, Ruslan Chinakhov was already playing), it’s even more of an international haven. And when they’re there, in the Basement, they’re safe. In Roy’s sanctuary.

Roy, James Aranas, CEO Grace and Kristina Tkach

Erwin Dionisio

And now. . . a word from the stable

To most of the pool-playing world, Roy’s Basement and its stable of topnotch players is a collective and formidable force to be reckoned with at tournaments and action tables all over the world, particularly here in the US. For the older already road-toughened players, who are not as focused on fundamentals training or needing necessarily, a place to stay while they’re in America, it’s something of a welcome convenience; one man (with wife and child), associated with one place, coordinating and supporting their efforts to make a living out of pool. More of a place for ‘R & R’ in between bouts of ‘PP’ (pool-playing).

Sanctuary from the grind of life on the road.

The same is somewhat true of the newer Basement residents, although for them – Tkach, Aranas and Siming Chen, for example – the training component is key, the housing is greatly appreciated and the value of the opportunity they’ve been presented to play, immeasureable.

“It’s the dream of any pool-player,” said 19-year-old Kristina Tkach from Moscow. “They’ve given me much more than pool and something other than just the money. They’ve given me an American family.”

“The opportunity to make a good living, to make a good life,” she added. “It’s what everybody wants.”

Tkach grew up around pool with her father as her first teacher. He was, reportedly, as excited as his daughter when he learned of the opportunity. Tkach had travelled here before, but this. . . this was something else altogether, and it set a wide range of emotions in motion. Fear, however, was not among them.

“Of course,” said Tkach, “when you’re young, you do things that you might not do when you’ve gotten a little older.”

“I was more excited than nervous,” she recalled. “My Mom was worried, but my Dad was very, very happy, because he’d taught me pool.”

From early childhood, she was considering the option of becoming a professional pool player to “make a good living, make a good life.” She’d been good, even excellent in high school, but thoughts of further academic pursuits were not on her agenda.

“I was good at everything, open to many things,” she said. “I was always interested in languages, but I never thought of studying the Russian language or literature, or anything.

“Pool,’ she added, “was pretty much the only thing I had on my mind.”

As her teen years progressed, she and her Dad were actively pursuing ways to increase her activities in the world of professional pool, and though they glanced at Asia and Europe, the invitation to come to America showed up on her doorstep in October of 2018.

Allaying at least some of her Mother’s concerns and maybe a few unspoken ones of her Dad’s, she was able to come here with a Russian friend, another ‘horse’ in the Roy’s Basement stable – Ruslan Chinakhov.

“He’s a good friend of both me and my Dad,” she said. “Ruslan is like an older brother to me and he was with me to look out for me.”

Anchoring the external trappings of a family here (roof, sustenance, and a bed), was a growing sense of responsibility to perform well, not only for the personal satisfaction of private growth, but as a means of demonstrating the extent of her appreciation for her hosts and fellow players in the Basement.

“These people,” she said of her Basement hosts and fellow tenants, “when you mess up, you feel as though you’re failing them. When I lose, and I hate losing, I feel even worse for letting them down.

“I’m so grateful for what they’re doing for me,” she added, “that I feel bad when, for whatever reason, I’m not the best that I can be.”

“Nowadays,” says her sponsor, teacher, host and friend, Roy Francisco, “Kristina is the MVP of money games for Roy’s Basement.”

Roy and James Aranas

Erwin Dionisio

Though emerging from a different set of circumstances, 5,139 miles away (Manila to Moscow), Zoren James Aranas feels much the same way as Tkach. There seems to be a difference in opinion as to who contacted whom three years ago that led to Aranas’ invitation to the Basement. Aranas seemed to think it was his friend, Ramon Mistica, who told him of the opportunity, while Francisco is under the impression that it was Johann Chua who was responsible for bringing them together. As to Aranas’ first reaction to the idea, like Tkach, it was less about any apprehension that might have been conceivable with such a ‘dream come true’ kind of invitation and more about what it meant, and where’s the nearest plane.

“For me,” said Aranas, a day or two before boarding another plane, on his way to Puerto Rico for a 10-ball tournament on the last weekend in June, “I didn’t care who he was. The most important thing to me was that there was a guy in America who was willing to sponsor me.”

For Aranas, pool was already a way of life. A girlfriend and seven-yearold daughter put that in the category of necessity, and when the invitation reached him, he was already hard at work putting the roof over his head and food on the table with a pool cue. Aranas and Francisco reached each other via Facebook Messenger to solidify the invitation and discuss its particulars. Like Tkach’s father, Aranas’ girlfriend probably had a few unspoken misgivings about packing him off to America leaving her in sole charge of their child, but she supported the decision.

“She said to me, ‘This is your time. This is it,” he said. “Once we get you the visa,’ she said to me, ‘you’re going to America. For our future, especially for our daughter.”

When he arrived in the US, flying into LA and then, on to Las Vegas, he wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. And having witnessed the phenomenon of Las Vegas, only through the pages of Facebook and films, it was a little overwhelming, but not nearly as overwhelming as what Francisco had planned for him.

“He didn’t tell me there was a tournament going on,” said Aranas. “I came in July (2017), got there too late to play in the 10-Ball Open and played in the BCAPL National Championships.”

Given the circumstances, it wasn’t too much of a surprise that he lost to Josh Roberts in an opening-round, double-hill match. What was something of a surprise was that he went on to win 11 matches on the loss side, downing, among others, Vilmos Foldes (a shutout), Jason Klatt, and Alex Kazakis (in the semifinals). It was countryman Warren Kiamco, who stopped his run in the finals to claim that event title. Then, in a manner of speaking, after going head-to-head in some action with Corey Deuel, he went home.

“I went with Roy to his home in Virginia,” he said. “It was the first time I’d ever been here and I thought, ‘This is my dream. This is where I belong.”

His introduction and on-going relationship to the Basement had an almost immediate effect on his game. He didn’t magically get better or anything like that, but the existence of a home away from home was of unmistakable value to him.

“I felt like it gave me more strength to play my best,” he said, “because someone was willing to help me.”

“I felt I owed it to Roy to be the best that I could be,” he added in an echo of Tkach’s feelings on the subject. “I wanted him (Roy) to feel that he wasn’t going to regret helping me.”

And to date, at least, Roy doesn’t.

“Roy’s Basement is a good place to train,” said Roy. “We’re going to train you in a way that you haven’t been trained before. I want to make sure you get proper training and all the resources to help your game.”

And the training, it should be noted, is not an all top-down experience. The older players help the younger players, the young players help each other and Roy, CEO Grace and Coach Alex are there to help everybody (“They all tip CEO Grace,” said Roy. “They all want to make her happy.”) They all contribute to what Aranas believes is the most important part of the experience. “

Work discipline,” he said. “When (Roy’s) with me, watching my game, he’s always telling me how to improve, to practice this shot or that shot. When I got here, they were all trying to help me and I’d never really gotten that kind of (help) before.

“And I end up trying to help Kristina, too,” he added, “so it’s not just about older, more experienced players teaching a younger generation. It’s about the younger players commenting on each other’s games. What Alex (Pagulayan) tells me, I can share with Kristina.”

With the inclusion of the Reality TV component of Roy following the players in his stable around with a camera, recording activities that range from the mundane to the practical, Roy’s Basement is developing a bit of a reputation, and not just for the quirky entertainment value of players caught in the act of living out there lives.

“I back what I say,” said Roy. “If I promise a pool player that a match is going to be conducted (in a certain way), it gets conducted that way. I deliver on the money end of things. People are loving the live-casting of their activities; the way they eat, train and they’ve even gotten a little famous for karaoke.”

“Everything,” he added, “is about how it’s being done (and a part of that) is being protective of what they’re doing.”

More than just a game, a home away from home, a family and a community of professional pool players under one roof. It is arguably, too, about that moment, 18 years ago, when for a brief, scary moment, Ariel Roy Francisco did not feel safe. Coming back to the sport, he built an enterprise that would foster, train and provide talented pool players, young and old, with a safe place to be.

In a word, a sanctuary.