Abstract We discuss CUECARD, the program that won the 2008 Computer Olympiad computational pool tournament. Beside addressing intrinsic interest in a complex competitive environment with unique features, our goal is to isolate the factors that contributed to the performance so that the lessons can be transferred to other, similar domains. Specififi- cally, we distinguish among pure engineering factors (such as using a computer cluster), domainspecifific factors (such as optimized break shots), and domain-independent factors (such as state clustering). Our conclusion is that each type of factor contributed to the performance of the program