It has quietly been a great year for Estonia’s Denis Grabe. Prior to his downing Greece’s Alex Kazakis in a thrilling, double-hill final match at the 2024 Maldives Open 10-Ball Championships this past weekend (June 25-30), he’d cashed in six events, placing third twice (World 10-Ball Championships and Polish Dynamic Billiard 10-Ball Open), 17th at the 2024 Dynamic Billiard 10-Ball St. Johan Open and 33rd three times. His victory in the Maldives and its cash payout, his largest ever, almost doubled his 2024 earnings to that point, making it his best recorded earnings year with six months to go. As far as we know, it’s Grabe’s first win since he won the 2019 Dynamic Antalya (Turkey) Open in 2019. The Maldives 10-Ball Open, a WPA-qualifying Mosconi Cup Points event, drew 80 entrants to the country’s National Billiard Centre in the capital of Malé.
Okay, so buckle up for a short narrative trip to the Maldives. It’s officially known as the Republic of Maldives and is a chain of 26 atolls (small islands – in this case, 1,192 of them – made of coral, surrounding lagoons). It’s located in the Indian Ocean, southwest of Sri Lanka and India, and its north/south boundaries cross the equator, which likely had players and the tables they played on, thankful for hard-working air conditioning. All told, the islands span roughly 115 square miles, roughly a land area about the size of Tampa, FL. Its population of around 428,000 is comparable to the city of Minneapolis. The Maldives’ capital city of Malé, where the tournament was held, has a population of about 212,000 people, on an island encompassing 3.2 square miles, making it one of the most densely populated cities in the world. Players likely arrived (at least) the day before the event, when it rained, though it was dry for the five days of the event, with temperatures ranging from 84° to 90°, tacked on to whatever equator-level humidity likely made it seem hotter.
On to the event. It was held in two stages. There was a group phase in which the 80 participants were divided up into 16 groups of five each. These groups played a double-elimination bracket that advanced three of each group’s five to the final, single-elimination phase. The double-elimination phase seeded 16 of its 48 competitors into the second round.
One player in each of the 16, five-man groups in the group phase received an opening round bye, leaving the other four to play against each other in two of the three winners’ side matches. There was no hot seat match in the double-elimination group phase. One winner in those first two matches qualified for the second phase automatically, while the other had to compete against the player who had received the opening-round bye. The winner of this third, winners’ side match qualified, leaving one slot open for whoever emerged from the loss side of the individual group bracket. Both Grabe and Kazakis were the lucky ones in their group. Both won their first match and were seeded into the second round of the single-elimination phase, along with the only two competitors representing the North American continent, John Morra and Fedor Gorst.
The most notable players to be eliminated in the opening round of single elimination were Germany’s Thorsten Hohmann and the Philippines James Aranas, who both lost double-hill battles. Meanwhile, Johann Chua, Jeffrey Ignacio, Sanjin Pehlivanovic, and Aleksa Pecelj, among others, advanced to the second round, where a lot of ‘notables’ lay in wait.
Grabe’s path to the winners’ circle went through Jonas Magpantay 10-5, Fedor Gorst 10-2, and Daniel Maciol 10-8 to draw Poland’s Konrad Juszczyszyn in one of the semifinals. Two of Kazakis’ matches on his trip to the semifinals went double hill. He won his double-hill opener against Indonesian junior competitor, Albert Januarta, whose runout in Phase One against Julian Seradilla became a TikTok video, seen by 47,000 people since it happened. Kazakis then downed Serbia’s Aleksa Pecelj 10-7, before locking up in a double-hill, quarterfinal battle against Austria’s Dimitrios Loukatos, which advanced him to a semifinal against the Philippines Carlo Biado.
Grabe eliminated Juszczyszyn 10-6, as Kazakis dispatched Biado 10-7.
Grabe v. Kazakis turned into one of the most nail-biting, double-hill battles that fans are ever likely to see. And it can be viewed on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fhu30R6r4rU.
It opened calmly enough with Grabe winning the first two racks and Kazakis winning the third, but at that point (2-1), Grabe went on a four-match run to establish a lead that he’d never relinquish. Kazakis got two back to draw within two at 6-4, but Grabe came back immediately with three that put him on the hill at 9-4. It was at this point that the real nail-biting began.
A back-and-forth, 14th game led eventually to Grabe taking a shot at the 10-ball to finish the game and match. It was a cross-table, ‘ride the long-rail’ shot that a) failed to drop and b) sent the cue ball into the opposite corner. The ‘gasp’ from the spectators was probably audible two atolls away.
As every cliché in the pool book advises, Kazakis stepped up, dropped the 10-ball, and then, ball by ball, rack by rack, started what would prove to be the longest run (five racks) of the match. Asked during the award ceremony whether he thought at the time that Grabe’s scratch was his chance and that the trophy was as good as being his, he responded with a laugh.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t think about that because I still needed five more games.”
“But when you’re at the table and still in a match, it’s always good. I was just thinking that if there were any other chances and my break was good and if I gave it my best, that with a little bit of luck, you never know,” he added. “but in the end, the luck gave me up, so. . it’s all right.”
As it turned out, not only was the match extended because Grabe scratched, but it ended when Kazakis scratched. By the time Kazakis had reduced Grabe’s lead to a single game at 9-8, the tension in the arena was palpable. The silence was, as they say, deafening. The chat room in the video feed was alive with ‘who’ll win’ speculation, about evenly split between Kazakis and Grabe. With the match knotted at 9, Kazakis stepped to the table, dropped two balls on his break and watched as the cue-ball caromed off the 8-ball and dropped into a hole. Grabe ran the rack to claim the title.
Grabe was a little stunned during the awards ceremony and when asked about his scratch in Game 14, shooting at the 10-ball for the win, he admitted that the “adrenaline” was flowing at the time, that he’d overcut his shot at it, and hit it too hard.
“Of course,” he said, when asked if he thought at the time that Kazakis might take that opportunity to come back. “I had missed a few chances before and (Alex) never gives up.”
“He’s a great fighter and a great guy,” he added, turning to the spectators, “so, a big hand for Alex.”
The audience obliged. Grabe spoke briefly about his plan to take a bit of a vacation before getting back into things down the road and was asked whether winning the Maldives Open 10-Ball event was the biggest win of his career. As he stood there, thinking about it, still a bit stunned that he was being interviewed as the event champion, he hadn’t quite absorbed the fact of the victory.
“Yeah,” was all he said. “Probably.”
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