EFREN ‘Bata’ Reyes and Francisco ‘Django’ Bustamante played a near-flawless game to defeat Hong Kong, 8-3, on Tuesday night to open their campaign in the PartyPoker.net World Cup of Pool at the Robinsons Midtown mall in Manila.
Reyes and Bustamante put on a masterful performance in front of the Pinoy crowd with vintage shots and safeties to handily beat the team of Lee Chen-man and Kenny Kwok.
The Philippines will next face the Alex Pagulayan-led Canada team in the round-of-16 on Thursday night.
Officially, the eighth-ranked Reyes-Bustamante tandem is the ‘B’ team of the Philippines with Lee Van Corteza and Dennis Orcollo seeded second. On this occasion, they didn’t play like the ‘B’ team.
The Filipino living legends of pool took off to a 2-0 lead then won three straight racks for a 5-1 advantage.
Hong Kong broke that run after a dry break by Reyes, one of few miscues of the Philippine team in the match, before storming to a 7-2 lead to reach hill.
Reyes missed a long shot at the one ball which led to another rack won by Hong Kong but Bustamante converted a bank shot on the one to the corner pocket to pave the way for the win on the 11th rack.
Pagulayan and John Morra earlier beat Sweden’s Marcus Chamat and Andreas Gerwen, 8-7.
In other results, Austria beat Kuwait, 8-2, while the United States squeezed past India, 8-7.
Cortez and Orcollo take their turn to compete on Wednesday night when they face Switzerland.
