Ralf Souquet (Courtesy J. Sturgis)
It is, after all, why they ‘seed’ players into brackets, right? If they didn’t place the top-notch competitors at opposite ends of a 128-player bracket, like the one they’re using at the 2025 Diamond Open Players Championship, the event’s two best competitors (whomever you may consider them to be) might square off in an early round and if the winner of that match meets the third-best competitor in another early round and loses to him (or her), your two best competitors could be on the way home in the second or third round of play. Those two competitors wouldn’t be happy and neither would the spectators, many of whom may have traveled for miles to take in the last matches in the hopes of watching the players they know, not the ones they don’t know anything about.
It’s why, as the matches progress, when the field gets whittled down to much lower numbers, one tends to see the better competitors moving on. At the Diamond Open, the first big dividing line between the start and the finish is the one between double-elimination and single-elimination play, when 128 has become 16; the last eight from the winners’ side and the loss side of the initial, double-elimination bracket, all of whom are ‘in the money,’ guaranteed a payout for what they’ve accomplished by just being among the final 16.
Last night (Friday), the winners’ side of the bracket had come down to 16 players, all of whom were scheduled to meet, against each other, at approximately 3:45 p.m. this afternoon (Saturday, March 12). The eight winners of that multi-player set of matches will move on to single-elimination, while at approximately 6 p.m. this evening, the loss-side’s 16 will compete in their final qualifying round for advancement to single elimination.
Beginning with the ‘headliners’ from the winners’ side, Fedor Gorst, after downing three opponents by an aggregate score of 30-7, will face Bosnia/Herzegovina’s Sanjin Pehlivanovic, who also arrived with a 30-7 aggregate score. Jayson Shaw, who ran the same three-opponent gauntlet to emerge with an aggregate score of 30-15, will take on Canada’s John Morra, whose toughest challenge came in his opening round of play when he defeated Alan Rolon 10-8. Two matches later, in which he’d given up a total of five racks, he showed up to face Shaw with an aggregate score of 30-13.
Albania’s Kaci brothers, Eklent and Kledio have advanced to this afternoon’s matches. Eklent Kaci chalked up a 30-9 aggregate score in his first three rounds, and will face Shane Wolford, who managed a 30-15 aggregate. Brother Kledio (30-17) picks up US Mosconi Cup Captain Sky Woodward, who opened with a double-hill win over Shaun Dobson, which got his racks-against total off to a bad start and ended at 30-20.
Lithuania’s Pijus Labutis had his racks-against total jacked up just last night, when he fought and won a double-hill match versus Lo Ho Sun. He’d come into that match with a 20-8 game record and ended up 30-17 to draw Ukraine’s Vitaliy Patsura, who had opened with a shutout and then chalked up two, 10-4 wins for a 30-8 aggregate score going into the final qualifying round.
Lukas Fracasso-Verner joined the winners’ side final 16 with a 30-10 aggregate score and was scheduled to face Jesus Atencio and his 30-14 aggregate score. Spain’s Francisco Sanchez-Ruiz’ (F.S.R.) toughest opponent through his first three matches (Canada’s Martin Daigle) chalked up five against him, while his next two added three each for a 30-11 total.
F.S.R. was to face The Kaiser, Ralf Souquet, who started things off with a ‘bang,’ by defeating Earl Strickland 10-3. Souquet then gave up seven over the next two matches to face F.S.R. with an aggregate score of 30-10. Last, but by no means least, The Hitman (Thorsten Hohmann), whose 30-13 aggregate score will come up against Hunter Lombardo’s aggregate of 30-18.
What that all means is that the 16 players that have come to their single-elimination, qualifying round this afternoon, have given up, on average (rounded up), 13 racks to their previous three opponents (a high of 20 and a low of 7, twice). That average, taken a step further, means that all 16 competitors in this afternoon’s matches have so far (again, on average, this time rounded down) given up just four racks to each of their first three opponents.
Will those averages hold as they move into this afternoon’s matches? Will the competitors who fail to qualify for the final 16 from the winners’ side win the single match they need to win on the loss side to qualify for single elimination? We’ll know before the night is over and look at how it all went down tomorrow.
0 comments