Ralf Souquet

This year heralds the 69th World Tournament for 14.1, and players of the highest calibre such as Ralf Souquet, Thorsten Hohmann, John Schmidt, Danny Harriman, Tony Robles, and Mika Immonen are just a few to mention of the long  list of world class players who will be heading to  the greatest straight pool tournament so far.

Dragon Promotions revived event is in its 4th consecutive year alive with help of industry giants such as Predator, Ozone Billiards, Brunswick Billiards, Simonis Cloth, Master Chalk, Aramith Balls, Accu-Stats and the Laser Rack. Comet Billiards will host this year’s event which will start play on August 24, 2009 and end August 29. The greatest straight pool players from around the world will arrive on USA’s east coast again to New Jersey, and attend this prestigious event to play for the coveted title of World Straight Pool Champion.

The format for the event will be 48 players round robin race to 100 the first 3 days. Half the field will be cut and the final 24 will play a double elimination board race to 150, with the #1 seed in each group from round robin getting a bye first round. 16 players will make it out of the double elimination board and advance to the final stage single elimination race to 200 points.

Ralf Souquet is cosidered to be one of the top favorite billiard player to win. Unfortunately this was not the case in the Qatar 9-Ball Pool Open by Jalal Al Saresi of Jordan, 11-9. Al Saresi lost his first match of the tournament to Serge Das but then stayed alive through the losers side in the group stages to survive those groups only to be blind drawn into the single-elimination stages against Souquet. He handled the task at hand and survives now to face the chinese billiard player Chei-Wei Fu.

Please visit the completed brackets with scores here (please note that this event is now single elimination). You will find that Pin Yi Ko has moved on to face Karl Boyes. Shane Van Boening bested Marlon Manalo and now faces Chin Shun Yang, Darren Appleton dominated Marcus Chamat 11-5, Feijen ended the run of De Luna and Imran Majid now must face old friend Daryl Peach.

The stage was set for a dream ending to the men’s 9-ball tournament at the World Games, with Kaohsiung native Ching-shun Yang playing for a gold medal in his home town.

The 31-year-old Yang has a long list of 9-ball titles to his name during an illustrious career, winning gold in the 2001 World Games and the 1998 and 2002 Asian Games, but he was desperately hoping to clinch a major international title at home and seemed poised to fulfill his dream Sunday.

Germany’s Ralf Souquet, however, had little interest in sentimentality. Showing the same clinical form he displayed throughout the World Games, Souquet dispatched Yang with relative ease, 11-4, to win the gold medal.

Yang, who said Saturday he had never been as nervous at any tournament in his career as he was at the World Games, looked shaky from the start and failed to raise his level of play throughout the match.

He made a mistake in the very first game and quickly trailed 2-0.

Down 2-1, he was given a temporary reprieve when Souquet made his only mistake of the day, a scratch on the break, to pull even, and then cleared the table on his break to take a 3-2 lead.

But in the sixth game, Yang committed a foul while trying to pot the 1 ball, a mistake that was the beginning of the end.

He scratched off the break in the seventh game, scratched when trying to sink the 2 ball in the eighth game, played a bad safety shot in the ninth game, and didn’t pot any balls on his break in the 11th game.

Souquet took advantage of those mistakes and his own clinical breaking and shotmaking to win seven straight games and take a 9-3 lead.

Yang broke the run by potting a nine-ball off the break in the 13th game, one of the few times he broke well on Sunday, but it had little effect in derailing the 1996 9-ball world champion, who won the final two games and the tournament.

“The key was the sixth game,” a disappointed Yang said. “If I had sunk the 1 and cleared the table, I might have had a chance to widen the lead. It was just one mistake, but it decided the match.”

Yang acknowledged that Souquet was a tough, experienced foe against whom he could ill afford to make any mistakes, and he knew that once the German opened a sizable lead, the match was over.

The Kaohsiung native, nicknamed the “Son of Pool, ” also bemoaned his own troubles on the break. “I played my breaks too conservatively, and they didn’t turn out well.”

(from azbilliards)