Pijus Labutis
Three days of play are complete at the 2025 Derby City Classic and the Bigfoot 10-Ball event is nearing completion.
Day three Bigfoot matches were all second round action and the day got started with an all Filipino battle between Roberto Gomez and Lee Vann Corteza.
Gomez has won this event before, but Corteza was riding high on his win last week at the Turning Stone Classic. On this day, it was 10 foot table experience that ruled the day, with Gomez scoring a 10-5 win.
Next up was Ruslan Chinahov facing the defending champion Joshua Filler.
This match came down to the absolute control that Filler exerted at the table. He was almost never faced with a questionable shot, playing lock up safeties in many rack. When those safeties resulted in “ball in hand” for the German Champion, that led to Filler running out again and again. The final score of 10-3 for Filler wasn’t even a true indication of the will that he imposed on this match.
Coming back from the dinner break, it was Gerson Martinez taking on Moritz Neuhausen.
Moritz came out of the gate strong in this one, and claimed a quick 2-0 lead. He held that same lead at 3-1, when Martinez upped the intensity of his game and ran away with things. Martinez played a steady game and Neuhausen struggled when he did get opportunities at the table. From that 3-1 lead, Neuhausen would only manage one more rack, losing by the final score of 10-4.
The final match of the day was between BCA Hall of Famer Alex Pagulyan and Lithuania’s Pijus Labutis.
This match was a battle the entire way. Both players left it all out on the table, and matched each other’s intensity for two hours of play. In the end, it may have just been fatigue that finally defeated Pagulayan as he lost the match to Labutis 10-7.
The semi-finals are scheduled for today (Monday) with Gomez facing Filler at 2pm EST and Martinez taking on Labutis at 4:30. The finals are scheduled for 9:00 pm.
In other events at the Derby City Classic, the Banks division is into round eight, with roughly twenty four players still fighting it out. The One Pocket division is also in play, with just over three hundred players playing in round two.
Follow all of the action online at http://results.derbycityclassic.com, and watch the PPV action from the 10 footer today at http://www.digitalpool.net/diamond/
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