By Patrick Sampey
M
onday, August 1st, 2022 – Aloysius Yapp, from Singapore, is a player in pool that I believe has gone under the radar. From my perspective, he is up there with Joshua Filler, Shane Van Boening, Francisco Sanchez Ruiz, Dennis Orcollo, and so many other top-world-ranked players. Currently, he is ranked world #7 and is a former world #1, so, at just age 26, he has already achieved an impressive pool resume. Yapp is a very cool, easygoing, and easy-totalk-to; he was just eight years old when he first played pocket billiards and a friend of mine that I’ve known on Facebook for a little while now. He has allowed me to interview him on Facebook Messenger and through Zoom, which Kathryn Brown Day (editor of Sneaky Pete Mafia magazine) had set up for us. Kathryn and I were able to catch up with Aloysius just after he defeated Carlo Biado to win the Bronze medal in The World Games, held recently at Birmingham, Alabama – Joshua Filler having won the Gold medal. So,
Yapp overcame Biado, who had beat him in the US Open just last year in the finals of the event. Yapp had beaten both Filler and Shane Van Boening convincingly prior to the loss to Biado in the finals in the US Open 2021. Yapp gave a detailed account of his introduction to pool at about age 8, “I would normally watch sports. I wasn’t too much of a cartoon guy when I was young. I normally watch sports. I was very interested in soccer back then. I was like, flipping channels, and then I saw this match on the TV. I’m like, what’s this game? It looks interesting, so I asked my grandmother what it is, then she told me, ‘this is pool,’ then I’m like, ‘oh, that’s interesting.’ Then, I just watched the whole thing. I still remember who it was: Tony Robles playing Santos Sambajon; I think it was the BCA Open? It was really long ago, so that was the first match I ever watched in my life. Then somehow, I just wanted to play the game, so at night when my mom came home from work, I asked her, can you bring 58
