Final eight players (minus Susan Wilbur)
The Arizona Women’s Billiard Tour held their June event at Skip & Jan’s Sports Bar in Tempe, Az on June 8th - 9th - and Jaye Succo showed the field of twenty players why matches aren’t decided on paper.
The field included the usual selection of top talent from Arizona, Las Vegas, New Mexico and Wisconsin; with top seeds that included Bernie Store, Susan Williams, Sara Miller and Vegas’ Stacy Allsup.
Bernie Store looked like the player to beat early on this weekend as she scored day one wins over Tracie Hamman, Susan Wilbur and Sara Miller. On the opposite side of the board, Jaye Succo had day one wins over Lynor Johnson, Beth Orth and Amanda Pulley to remain undefeated going into Sunday play.
Two favorites that didn’t escape day one were Susan Williams and Stacy Allsup. After a first round bye, Williams dropped a hill-hill decision to Susan Wilbur and was eliminated two matches later by Tracie Hamman. Allsup’s day was even worse with a “two and out” performance.
Play got underway on Sunday with Bernie & Jaye being joined by six players on the one loss side. That number would be cut to four players on the one loss side with Orth defeating Hamman 7-6 and Wilbur defeating Justine Bishop 7-4.
Sara Miller would then end Orth’s day with a 7-1 scoreline, and Wilbur kept her tournament hopes alive with a 7-2 win over Amanda Pulley.
The final four players would then be in action with Sara Miller snuffing out Susan Wilbur’s tournament hopes 7-3, while Bernie faced off against Jaye for the hot-seat.
On paper, the hot-seat match should have been a no-brainer. Bernie hasn’t finished lower than 2nd place all season and this would be Succo’s first time playing for an AWBT hot-seat. The race to seven match saw Bernie making her way to the hill first with a 6-3 lead. Neither player looked to be enjoying fighting with the tough pockets at Skip & Jan’s, and Bernie appeared to tighten up a little when she got to the hill. Jaye showed that she was more than capable of taking advantage of Bernie’s uncharacteristic careful play as she won the next four games to take the hot-seat 7-6.
On the one loss side, Bernie looked like the player we are all used to watching as she broke open a close 2-2 match to quickly dispatch Sara Miller 7-3 and earn the chance to redeem herself against Succo in the finals.
The final match was a race to nine and it would go all the way to the 17th game to determine a final winner. A 2-0 Store lead was tied up at 2-2. Bernie would then surge ahead 5-2, but Jaye clawed back to 5-4. It was then that Bernie took control of the match and raced to the hill at 8-5. Jaye would need to win four games before Bernie won one more. Jaye took the next rack, and then the next. Before the fans knew what had happened, Succo had erased another three rack deficit and tied the match at 8-8. The final game would be decided quickly when Store hung the 9-ball in the corner pocket and left an unmissable 1-9 combo. Succo did not miss the combo as she celebrated her first AWBT tour victory.
While fans who were not in attendance might have been surprised by these results, tour director Tres Kane showed no surprise at all. “Jaye is playing up to her ability today”, he said. “I have watched her playing Sunday night league against some of the top players in Phoenix and she has learned a lot over these last few months” he commented.
Succo definitely looked at the tournament as an accomplishment. After the event, she said “I’m ready for any challenge thrown my way. I knew I had to work my way up, as far as the standings and actually winning a stop, but I didn’t think it would happen this fast - especially against someone who shoots as well as Bernie.”
