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At
the second stop of the EuroTour 2005 in Monfalcone, Italy, the IBP could
welcome 192 players. For many players, this was the determining tournament
for their nomination for the WC in Taiwan in July.
After a walk-through, I played S. Comisso from Italy and won clearly 9-2. In
my second match the following day, I was opposed to youngster J. Kaplan who
plays for the Blues Brothers. I a match full of mistakes, I managed to win
with the tightest of all scores 9-8. In the next match, the stake was
already the qualification of the final KO bracket of the last 32 players.
The match against M. Castriota (ITA) turned out to be a real thriller,
although I was in control of the match for the most of the time. At 8-5, my
opponent was lucky and came back. At the next break, and the matches are
played with changing break, I was unlucky again, although I potted four
balls. I was forced to play a safety, and this safety was all but bad. But a
desperate hammer shot by my opponent made him come back even closer to 8-7.
He also scored the next rack and the 17th rack was once more to
bring the decision. My advantage was that I had won the break shot-out and
so it was my turn to break. I could run out the table to finally win 9-8 and
I was qualified for the final round.
The draw made me play Dutchman G. Smit. The match was very balanced, even if
I was leading all the time by one or two racks. At 8-5, I had a three racks
advantage for the first time, but the Dutchman had the break and scored. A
black break of mine brought him back to 7-8. With the break to come, he had
the chance to equal the score, but played a bad position on the 5 ball and
had to play a rail shot. He played a nice safety, but I could solve it with
a difficult and thin shot and won the match 9-7.
In the next round, I had
to play the Swedish champion D. Larsson. Again, I had the better start and
was leading 2-0 and 5-3. But again, I had no good position upon the break
and so I changed
to a soft break. But this did not change anything and all of a sudden, I was
trailing 5-7. At 6-8, the Swedish player had the chance to win the match,
but missed an easy 6 ball. I scored to come back to 7-8, but then the Swede
had the break. He hit the rack so badly that he found himself with a series
of problems on the table. I had decided for an aggressive shot with safety
option and played a good safety. Larsson shot a hammer shot on the rail on
the 4 ball and potted it and on top of it, found himself with a good
position to continue. It was not easy even to contact the ball, but the
probability to pot it was below 10 %. With this 7-9 defeat I was eliminated
from the tournament and exited once more too early from an EuroTour event.
Rank 9 made me climb in the overall ranking from 8 to 7 and the
qualification for the upcoming World Pool Masters seems to be very difficult
now. Best German player was T. Engert from Düren, wo was crashed in the
quarter-finals by S. Tot from Hungary 9-3.
In the first semi-final,
S. Tot played against N. Feijen (NED), and the current no. 2 from Hungary
won against the overall ranking leader 9-6. In the second semi-final, A.
Lely (NED) defeated the Czech player R. Hybler who plays for Dachau 9-3.
Lely won the final with the same score of 9-3 and jumped from rank 7 to rank
4 in the overall standings. N. Feijen (NED) is still leading before S. Tot (HUN)
and M. Chamat (SWE).
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