Sameh Sidhom, the Egyptian who took three-cushion silver at the World Games
Sidhom reached the three-cushion final at the 2025 World Games in Chengdu and came home with silver, putting an Egyptian on the podium in one of billiards’ most demanding disciplines.
Sameh Sidhom is one of the few Egyptians playing three-cushion billiards at the top of the international game, a discipline long dominated by players from Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey and South Korea.
His biggest result came at the 2025 World Games in Chengdu, China. Sidhom topped his group, beat Turkey’s Tayfun Tasdemir 40–21 in the quarter-final and went on to reach the gold-medal match on 14 August, where he lost 40–22 to South Korea’s Cho Myung-woo. The silver medal was recorded as Egypt’s medal in billiard sports at the Games.
A game of angles
Three-cushion is played on a table without pockets. To score, a player must strike the cue ball so that it touches both object balls and at least three cushions before it reaches the second ball. Matches at the elite level are played to 40 points, and a single miss can hand the table to the opponent for a long run.
Still among the elite
He has since continued on the international circuit. the cairo.kmt Instagram account credits him with a semi-final place at the 78th UMB World Three-Cushion Championship, held in Blois, France, in 2026; official results for that event were not available to verify at the time of publication.
For a player from Egypt, where three-cushion has a far lower profile than football or squash, a World Games medal stands out, and it has made Sidhom one of the most recognisable names in Egyptian billiards.
