“Your daughter must be a billiards genius.”
In 2011, Lim Sang-yeol (60), who was running a billiards room in Seongnam-si, Gyeonggi-do, said this to Han Joo-cheol (60), the owner of a snack bar who was playing billiards with him after delivering meals. I showed Han Ji-eun (22), her daughter in elementary school, her strokes for fun, and her posture was really perfect. Mr. Lim persistently persuaded her Mr. Han, saying, “I will not pay for her lessons,” and after a week, he gave permission to “teach her daughter to play billiards.”
Less than a week after this, Lim withdrew the ‘Han Ji-eun genius theory’. Just because she learned her posture quickly didn’t mean she learned to play billiards quickly either. Instead, Lim found another extraordinary thing about Han Ji-eun. It was persistence. Han Ji-eun went to the billiard room at around 3pm after school and practiced until 11pm without saying anything. She even trained her to repeat her strokes for over a month with her cue filled with 0.5kg sandbags, but Han Ji-eun finished her training without complaint.
Han Ji-eun, who had never won a national championship until graduating from middle school, said that she would “focus more on her billiards” in 2017 when she was in her first year of high school. left In 2019, two years after her dropout, she won the international tournament by defeating World No.
Han Ji-eun, whom we met at the PBC Carom Club in Seongbuk-gu, Seoul on the 1st, said, “In middle and high school, I thought, ‘I must have no talent for billiards. I trained this far, but how can I only get results like this?” he blamed himself. Even if I think about it, it seems to be coming. Rather than thinking that ‘billiards is fun’, the competitive spirit of ‘I want to do well once I started’ brought me here.”
The target Han Ji-eun really wanted to defeat was not the opponent, but ‘Han Ji-eun of yesterday’. Han Ji-eun said, “I tend to focus more on evaluating myself than my opponent during a game. In the end, billiards is a fight with me, no matter who스포츠토토 I play with,” he said. But the win wasn’t happy either. “I won the game, but I felt like I couldn’t hit myself,” he said. He continued, “I have always thought that what is more important than tournament rankings is average (average runs per inning). If the average is good, I am satisfied even if I fight fiercely and lose.”
Han Ji-eun is now recognized as one of the strongest players in Korean women’s billiards. In the 2022-2023 season, she rose to No. 1 in the Korea Billiards Federation (Amateur) rankings. In September of last year she was the runner-up at the World Women’s 3-Cushion Championships held in the Netherlands, where she also moved up to second in the world rankings. She is the first Korean female 3-cushion player to rank second in the world.
Han Ji-eun, who has achieved everything she could have accomplished as an amateur player, will move on to women’s professional billiards (LPBA) from next month. Han Ji-eun said, “I have conquered amateur billiards, so now I want to take a picture of the top in the pro. Gayoung Kim (40, Hana Card), who she said was the best at her first LPBA competition, and her goal is to beat her older sister and win,” she said. When Han Ji-eun fulfills her promise at the Blue One Resort Championship, her first tournament of the season, a new history is written for her LPBA as well. After her professional turn, she had yet to win the season opener straight away.
Han Ji-eun’s performance is low at the beginning of the game, but it’s a style that hits hard in the second half. Unlike amateur billiards, which scores 25 to 30 points, LPBA only scores 11 points per set, so this style can be a weakness. Han Ji-eun said, “I know I have to hit well from the beginning. He is making a routine to quickly warm up his body, such as doing stroke practice dozens of times before entering.”
And he continued, “When I won my first national championship after a long wait, he realized, ‘I have to help me in any situation. Since then, it has become a habit to remind myself that I am a person who can do it. Even in the professional world, my confidence will not change,” he smiled.