Turning Stone Classic

Twice a year I receive an email from Mike Zuglan. It's the invitation for the Turning Stone Classic in Verona, New York and I always look forward to play in this event. I've won the tournament in February 2006 before against Keith McCready and I wanted to do it again.

The venue is in my opinion very beautiful. It has a classy athmosphere and allows spectators a wonderful view when you sit up high on the bleachers.



In my first round match I made a pretty good comeback against Paul Dryden. Trailing 2:6 I managed to win the game 9:7. It followed a win over Paul Rozonewski (9:5) and a strong 9:3 over Shin Park.
Right before my next match against Jason Klatt from Canada I lost my tip on a practice draw shot and I had to switch shafts, resp. get a new tip put on. Jason played solid and I made some silly mistakes, (like a miss on a medium difficult cut shot on the 1-Ball with option of clipping the 9-Ball in at 5:6), which cost me the game 5:9.
I could not recover and lost my game completely against Tom McGonagle with 4:9

In one of my matches I was facing the following situation:



My first option was to cut the 2-Ball into the corner pocket. A difficult shot and easy to miss.
Option two I thought about was to bank the ball into the opposite corner pocket but again - a very risky shot to take on.
So I decided to play the multiple option shot. My goal was to freeze the cueball behind the 3-Ball. But in case I would fail I made sure to put the 2-Ball into a position where my opponent would not have an open shot, because of the 7-Ball.
Luckily I put the cueball dead behind the 3-Ball.

Moral of the story: Don't go aggressive on your first thought. Weight your percentages. Sometimes it's better to play safe and take the higher percentage option...

The winner of the TurningStone Classic was once again Johnny Archer. Congratulations !