Wow, that does look pretty bad. By the way, that isn't tearing, but rather artifacts from a very low bitrate. Tearing is something else entirely.

The bitrate you specified should be high enough. 1080p 4.5 Mbps, or 720p 3.5 Mbps should be enough for a smooth stream, especially for a pool tournament. Are you using software or hardware encoding? Can you share the stream encoder settings?

Since you say the internet is plenty fast, I'd experiment with higher bitrates. I just did a pool tournament this weekend at 8 Mbps, and it looked great.

I also stream pool tournaments (RailbirdsTV on YouTube), and often only stream around 2-3 Mbps over WiFi, and get good results.

(You shouldn't post your stream key in public forums)

Since you say the local recordings look good, but not the live stream, I think that rules out the camera as being the culprit.

I just did some testing with low bitrates, and I had to drop the bitrate to 1/10 of what you're using to get anything to create artifacts like that. I was surprised how low I could go with the bitrate and still have it look decent. It's possible that the hardware encoding on your laptop isn't working properly, for whatever reason. Try unchecking the "use hardware encoder" and try a test (private or unlisted) stream. I'd add a video input into vMix, and use one of your (known good) match recordings as the source. That way you can simulate streaming a pool match.

-- Kevin

After some testing today I've found when using the h.264 1080p 6mbps preset that when I use the hardware encoder my stream bitrate drops to 2.3-3mbps.

If I disable hardware encoding it is consistently around the 6mbps mark. So I'm now wondering if this could be driver related for the gpu?

I've now checked CBR for my FB stream and the bitrate is higher and have not had any artifacts since.