Four U.S. players are participating in the preliminaries of the 18th Samsung Cup, being held August 2-8 in Korea. A total of 345 players will be divided into 19 groups and the winner of each group will advance and join the 13 seeded players in the main tournament, which will start in September. The 19 groups include 14 open groups, two for senior pros, two for women. The last group, called the “world group”, is formed with four North American and four European players. The pairings in this group will start with Yinli Wang (US) vs. Oleg Mezhov, Benjamin Lockhart (US) vs. Rob Van Zeist, Yunxuan Li (US) vs. Jan Hora, and Eric Lui (US) vs. Cristian Pop.
