How Fedor Gorst Became the World's Best Player (And What His Game Actually Looks Like)

In 2024, Fedor Gorst won the World Pool Masters, the World Pool Championship, and the US Open in the same calendar year. No player had ever done it. The three events together represent the closest thing pool has to a Grand Slam, and Gorst swept them in roughly four months. His AZBilliards-tracked earnings that year came to $510,163 USD, placing him first on the money leaderboard by a margin that wasn't close. Matchroom Pool lists him as the longest-reigning World No. 1 in WNT history.

None of it happened overnight. The arc from Moscow kid to the most dominant player of his generation took about a decade, and understanding how he got here tells you more about what makes him exceptional than any results table can.

Where He Came From

Gorst was born in Moscow on May 31, 2000, and started playing pool at age 10. By 14 he was on the Russian national team. At 17, he won the WPA World Nine-ball Junior Championship and the U19 8-Ball European Pool Championship in the same year, announcing himself to anyone paying attention to the junior circuit.

Two years later, at 19, he walked into the 2019 World Pool Championship and won it, defeating Chang Jung-lin 13-11 in the final. That made him one of the youngest winners in the tournament's history. No extended apprenticeship period, no years grinding the mid-tier events waiting for his moment. He showed up and ran out.

What followed wasn't a straight line upward. The years between 2019 and 2022 featured strong results and consistent prize money, but the major titles didn't come. He represented Team Europe at the Mosconi Cup in 2020, 2021, and 2022, competing at the highest team level while his individual circuit results kept him consistently in the top 10 without delivering the second major. Anyone watching the tour during that stretch saw a player who was obviously elite but hadn't yet separated himself from the group chasing him.

That changed in 2023. Gorst established US permanent residency and relocated to southern Indiana, aligning himself professionally with Team USA and shifting his competitive base. He made the US Open final that year and lost to Ko Ping-Chung 13-6, which looked decisive on the scoreboard but didn't reflect how close the match was in key moments. Gorst was building toward something.

2024 confirmed it.

The Gorst Slam

The World Pool Masters came first, held in Hildesheim, Germany. Gorst beat Joshua Filler 13-12 in the final, overcoming a deficit to take the title in a match that required the kind of composure under pressure that separates the players who collect majors from the ones who just reach them.

The World Pool Championship followed in Jeddah. Gorst faced Eklent Kaci in what became the longest final in WNT history, a race-to-15 that went 29 racks. The match was hill-hill twice. Kaci executed a two-rail kick combo on the 2-9 to tie things at 13-13 in one of the most remarkable shots the event has produced. Gorst forced his way to hill-hill again when Kaci's break came up dry, then cleared the table in the deciding rack to win 15-14. That combination of endurance, composure in the longest possible pressure format, and the technical ability to run out when everything was on the line defined the performance.

The US Open completed the set at Harrah's Resort in Atlantic City. Gorst beat Shane Van Boening in an all-American final, completing pool's first verified Grand Slam. He was 24 years old.

Those three titles in one calendar year, against the current field, at the longest race formats, with the world watching. That's not a hot streak. That's the best player in the world operating at his ceiling.

What His Game Actually Looks Like

Gorst's dominance is often described in terms of results, which is accurate but incomplete. What the results reflect is a style of play that addresses 9-ball's most common breakdown points before they occur.

Pattern play is the foundation. Watch his shot selection over a full match and you notice that difficult positions rarely stay difficult for long. He reads the table while standing, identifies his route before he gets down, and moves systematically through the rack with a positional strategy that minimizes the number of shots where he needs exceptional execution to maintain shape. Other players at this level have brilliant shot-making ability. Gorst deploys his brilliant shot-making ability less often because his route selection means he needs it less often.

His pre-shot routine is one of the most studied in the game, and it breaks down into two clear phases: planning and execution. The sequence below shows what it looks like in practice.

Phase 1: Planning

Step 1: Standing fully upright behind the cue ball, reading the table. Route selection and position zone are identified before getting down into stance.

Step 2: Moving to stand at the line of the next object ball and looking back toward the cue ball. This forces a precise decision about where the cue ball needs to land before the player commits to a shot.

Step 3: Walking back to the shooting line with eyes held on the object ball. The contact point stays locked in while the body moves into position.

That three-step planning sequence happens on almost every shot, even routine ones. Walking to the line of the next ball forces a decision before getting down. Most players skip this and take a rough guess at position from where they're already standing. Gorst doesn't guess.

Phase 2: Execution

Step 4: Practice strokes in shooting stance, decreasing in amplitude with each pass. The stroke settles into the shot rather than stopping abruptly, keeping the arm loose and the timing natural.

Step 5: Full stop. Body, eyes, and cue are completely still before the backswing begins. Frame analysis of Gorst's match footage shows this pause runs between 0.4 and 1.24 seconds depending on the shot.

Step 6: Backswing length varies with the required power. Short draw for soft shots, long draw for power shots. The forward stroke timing stays constant — speed is controlled by how far back the cue travels, not by accelerating through the ball.

That pause in step five is the piece most players underestimate. Frame-by-frame analysis of his match footage shows it runs between roughly 0.4 and 1.24 seconds depending on the shot. During that window, his body, eyes, and arm are completely still. It's not hesitation. It's the stabilization point before execution. In a sport where the margin between making a ball and missing it can be a few millimeters of contact, that stillness before the stroke matters more than most players appreciate. Gorst never skips it, even under a 30-second shot clock.

The jump cue is a separate conversation. Matchroom officially describes him as widely regarded as the greatest player in the world with the jump shot, and nothing in five-plus years of watching his matches contradicts that assessment. What makes his jump shots exceptional isn't just that he makes them at a high rate. It's that he jumps the cue ball over obstructions and lands it in position to continue his run, converting what should be a defensive situation into an offensive one. The 2024 WPC final featured two jump shots that changed the outcome. The US Open final included at least one that forced a foul from Van Boening when Gorst extracted himself from a safety. Players at Gorst's level don't hook each other cleanly very often. When they do, and Gorst jumps out of it and continues the rack, the match dynamic changes fundamentally.

He plays with Viking Cues and a Triple 60 Whyte Carbon shaft, a partnership announced in late 2023 that he has been involved in developing. Low-deflection carbon technology is increasingly standard at the elite level, and Gorst's precision with the jump cue makes the characteristics of that shaft particularly relevant to how he plays.

The Team USA Transition

Switching from Team Europe to Team USA at the Mosconi Cup was more than a logistical update. It changed the competitive dynamic of pool's most visible team event. Gorst competing for Europe from 2020 to 2022 contributed to European dominance in the event. His move to Team USA in 2023 shifted the roster calculus for both sides.

For Team USA specifically, adding Gorst gave them a player who operates at world number one and complements Van Boening's power-break game with a more methodical, pattern-oriented approach. The two represent genuinely different competitive profiles, which creates matchup problems for European opponents who have to prepare for both styles.

2025 and What Comes Next

Gorst finished 2025 as runner-up at both the WPC and the US Open, losing to Biado 15-13 in Jeddah and then falling to Aloysius Yapp at the US Open. Two major finals in one year is an elite outcome for virtually any player on tour. For Gorst, it reads as a step back relative to 2024 only because 2024 set an unrepeatable standard.

What the 2025 results actually demonstrate is that the field has studied him. Biado is a two-time world champion who doesn't panic at 9-2 deficits, and proved it by coming back to win. Yapp is a player whose consistency under pressure is a legitimate threat at the US Open format. These aren't flukes. They're the predictable result of other elite players making Gorst-specific adjustments when the stakes are highest.

The more meaningful read on 2025 is that Gorst reached the final of both events. The ability to keep reaching finals even when opponents have specifically prepared for you is the hallmark of a player who wins because of structural advantages in pattern play and execution, not because opponents are unfamiliar with his game.

At 25, Gorst is in the middle of what should be his peak window. His 2019 world title came when he was still developing the complete game he demonstrated in 2024. The question going forward isn't whether he'll compete for titles. It's whether anyone else develops the full package quickly enough to consistently close out matches against him when it counts.

Right now, the answer is not many. And not often.

This is an independent editorial feature. Crossbank Clothing is not affiliated with or sponsored by Fedor Gorst or Matchroom Pool.