Corey Sykes
While Corey Sykes earned the ‘headline’ spot for finishing as the undefeated occupant of the hot seat and thus, official winner of Stop #3 on the Players Madness Tour this past weekend (July 8-9), the Tate family earned a spot in the opening paragraph when three of them – Big Brother Joey and his younger sisters, Bethany and Noelle – comprised three of the top six finishers at the $500-added event that drew 36 entrants to Breaktime Billiards in Cary, NC.
Early on, as Corey Sykes embarked on his six-match march to the hot seat, the Tate sisters were doing better than Big Brother Joe. The elder Bethany and her younger sister, Noelle, won their first few matches (four for Bethany, three for Noelle) before they both lost two in a row. Bethany finished third and Noelle finished in the tie for 5th place. Big Brother lost his opening match (to Eli Dickson; more on this later) and was forced to play more matches (11) than anybody else in the tournament. The Tate siblings brought home a tidy sum of cash for their efforts, way more than enough to buy them a few rounds of celebratory drinks, were any of them old enough or inclined to do so. They are not either of those things.
Joey embarked on a very long, loss-side run of 10 games, which might have become 11 (for a total of 12 matches), had he played in a final match against Sykes, who’d been waiting for him in the hot seat while he finished his loss-side run by defeating his sister, Bethany, in the semifinals. Instead, Joey and Sykes negotiated a split, leaving Sykes, in the hot seat at the time, as the official winner.
Joey Tate
Joey Tate was racing to 10 in each of his 10 loss-side matches, while his opponents, on average, were racing to just over 5. His first opponent on the winners’ side (Eli Dickson) was racing to 3, the lowest of the opponent races that made up the average ‘5.’ After sending Tate to the loss side, Dickson was shut out by Corey Sykes (racing to 9, throughout).
Sykes, having opened with a straight-up, race-to-9 victory over Tyler Chappell 9-7 and then, defeating Dickson, moved on to send Joshua Padron (9-3) to the loss side and draw Michael Yingling in one of the winners’ side semifinals. Meanwhile, back on the Tate ‘ranch,’ Bethany Tate was at work winning the four winners’ side matches that would put her into the hot seat match. She sent Robert Thompson (1) and Jason Figueroa (4) to the loss side and survived a double-hill challenge by Alan Wobbleton in a winners’ side quarterfinal to draw (guess who) her younger sister, Noelle, in the other winners’ side semifinal.
Sykes sent Yingling over 9-2, while the two sisters got locked up in a predictable, double-hill fight for advancement to the hot seat match; Bethany racing to 6, Noelle to 4. Bethany joined Sykes in the hot seat match with the 6-3, double-hill win over Noelle. Sykes had his hands full in that hot seat match, as Bethany battled him to a final, double-hill game before Sykes won it, 9-5.
Over on the loss side, Joey Tate was continuing work on his long trip back, mixing up matches with opponents racing to much lower numbers, sprinkling in a 9 (Tyler Chappell) and a pair of 8s (Steven Page and Joshua Padron), just before running into one of the 4s, his sister Noelle, who’d just dropped in from the winners’ side semifinal. Yingling joined the loss-side to pick up Bryan Plummer (racing to 7), who was working on a seven-match, loss-side streak that had recently eliminated, by an aggregate score of 14-1, Alan Wobbleton (0) and Derek Stephenson (1).
Plummer made Yingling’s loss-side efforts short, downing him 7-3 and advancing to the quarterfinals. Joey Tate, in the meantime, was looking at three obstacles in his path to the finals and two of them were his sisters, Noelle and Bethany. He shut out Noelle to reach the quarterfinals against Plummer, who’d defeated Yingling 7-3. Joey then eliminated Plummer 10-5 before locking up in an almost-double-hill battle against Bethany in the semifinals that he won 10-4 (Bethany racing to 6).
Generous soul that he is, Joey Tate was not likely to have derived any particular pleasure from defeating his sisters, but he didn’t allow that to interfere with his plan to reach the finals either. Generous souls that his sisters are, they likely grumbled a bit when the dust settled and they’d both been eliminated from the event by their own brother and role model, but if there’d been an event final, they’d have been tops on the list of spectators rooting him on to win it all and been first in line to congratulate him, however the final-that-didn’t-happen might have turned out.
Sykes and Tate negotiated their split of the top two prizes, collected the cash and Stop #2 on the Players Madness Tour went into the ‘books.’ Tour director Xzavia (The X Man) Boykin thanked the ownership and staff at Breaktime Billiards for their hospitality, as well as all of the players who came out to compete.
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