3rd December, Hong Kong: After near misses in two events, fourth-seed Team USA delivered its first gold medal at the 2018 CGSE • Million Tinkle World Men Championships with victory over Indonesia, 632-551 in the Trios final.

Fourth-seed, Kyle Troup, EJ Tackett and Andrew Anderson had to dig deep to beat topseed, Kim Kyungmin and Park Jongwoo of Korea, 695-654 in the first semi-final to earn a third crack at the gold medal match.

Second-seed, Billy Muhammad Islam, Hardy Rachmadian and Ryan Lalisang of Indonesia also had a narrow victory over third-seed, Mattias Wetterberg, Jesper Svensson and Martin Larsen of Sweden, 632-591 in the other semi-final match.

In the final match, Indonesia had a slight advantage when Sweden's anchorman, Anderson failed to spare his opening frame while Indonesia's anchorman doubled in the second and third frames. Islam then had a bad split in the fourth but Lalisang added a third strike.

Troup struck out from frame eighth, Tackett doubled again the in the ninth and tenth frame allowing USA to seal the well-deserved victory for the gold. Indonesian men, who have never won any medal in the World Championships, created history when they picked up the silver.

Korea and Sweden were awarded a bronze medal each as losing semi-finalists. Meanwhile, Tackett claimed his first individual gold medal after topping the All Events standings with 5352 pinfalls over 24 games.

Anderson, who also won a bronze medal in the Singles, secured the silver medal with 5285 while Singles bronze medallist, Dan MacLelland of Canada won his second bronze finishing third with 5277. Troup missed out of the podium in fourth, just 27 pins away.

The top 24 in the standings qualified for the Masters finals. Qualifiers positioned first to eighth earned a bye and automatically advanced to Round 2 finals while qualifiers positioned 9 to 24 will contest the Round 1 finals in a best-of-3 matchplay format.

The field will be cut to eighth then to four for the Semi-finals to decide the winners of the final event of the championships.