Iron City Billiards owner Michael Catanese and Kelly Fisher
It is never about just one thing.
Kelly Fisher winning a stop on the Women’s Professional Billiards Association (WPBA) tour, or Kristina Tkach claiming the hot seat, then being defeated in the finals. Or a tight, double-hill match in the opening round between the #6-ranked competitor on the WPBA, Tzu-Chien Wei, and the barely-teenaged Sofia Mast (aka The Pink Dagger). Or Mast and not-yet-teenaged WPBA competitor, Savannah Easton (aka The Roadrunner) being the commentators on the live-streamed hot seat match between Wei (or Wei-Wei, as she’s known to many of her competitors) and Kristina Tkach.
Up and down the roster of 64 players who gathered for the $15,000-added WPBA stop, hosted by a new tour venue – Iron City Billiards in Birmingham, AL – there were side, back and upfront stories about tough competition, extraordinary resilience and more than just a few surprises.
Kelly Fisher losing her third match and spending more time on the loss side than all but one of her competitors spent on both sides of the bracket was one of those surprises, in a way that her event victory was not. She played 11 matches overall, eight of them on the loss side (counting the final as a ‘lose and you’re out’ match). Brittany Bryant was the only competitor who played eight total matches, five on the loss side. Fisher is usually dominant, usually on the winners’ side of the bracket and rarely (if ever) shows any surprise or evidence that she’s playing with little or no room for error.
Then there’s the story of Kristina Tkach, who, while well on her way to making 2023 her best earnings year (of nine currently on record), entered the tournament at #24 on the WPBA’s rankings. When the event narrowed down to its final four (Fisher/Kaylee McIntosh in the quarterfinal and Tkach/Wei battling for the hot seat), Tkach was sporting the highest game-winning percentage of the four (40-13, 75%). When the last 9-ball dropped in the final match, Fisher ended up with the highest overall game-winning percentage, but only by .003 points (.717 to .714).
There was, too, the aforementioned story of the Pink Dagger (Mast) forcing the Shadow Killer (Wei) to play a 15th deciding game in their opening round match, along with later, in a winners’ side quarterfinal, The Grinder (Multiple BEF Junior National Champion, April Larson) doing the same thing. Fargo Rate calculated The Pink Dagger’s chances of winning her match against the Shadow Killer at 1.4%. The Grinder had a 10.6% chance in her match. Fargo Rate doesn’t have the ability to calculate what either of their chances would have been in a single game, let alone the deciding single game in a double-hill match, but they likely wouldn’t have improved.
Last but not least before tracking the top players through their matches, there was the hot seat match between Wei and Tkach, commentated by The Roadrunner (Savannah Easton) and The Pink Dagger (Mast). While certainly characterized by evidence that these young women were very young (they giggled a lot), when it came to the game they were watching, both of them were all-business and knew the ‘language’ of the game very precisely; commenting on the difficulty of getting ‘jacked-up over balls,’ ‘rolling up’ on others and making quite accurate predictions about what a given player was likely to be doing with the cue ball – where it was likely to travel and exactly how many rails it was likely to encounter on the way. They acknowledged sponsors when the screen graphics indicated them, sought help when some of the “buttons” they were expected to push confused them (“This is what happens when you put a 13-year-old in front of this many buttons,” said Mast as she and Easton giggled their ‘besties’ credentials). Almost as remarkable a performance at the microphone as they’d exhibited at the tables.
Fisher got underway with victories over Nathalie Chabot (2) and Nicole Albergaria (4) before coming up against Yuki Hiraguchi, who challenged and then, defeated her double-hill. Hiraguchi followed her over after she was dealt a dose of her own double-hill medicine by Kristina Zlateva in one of the winners’ side quarterfinals. Zlateva drew Tzu-Chien Wei in one of the winners’ side semifinals. Wei had supplemented her two double-hill wins over Mast and Larson with in-between victories over Sara Miller (0) and an 8-3 win over Bean (Meng-Hsia) Hung. Tkach, in the meantime, got by Christy Norris (1), Ada Lio (3) and #4 WPBA-ranked Brittany Bryant (4), before downing Susan Williams 8-2, to draw Kaylee McIntosh in the other winners’ side semifinal.
Tkach sent McIntosh into an immediate loss-side matchup against Bryant with an 8-3 win. Wei joined her in the hot seat match once she’d sent Zlateva over 8-5 to face Fisher. Tkach sent Wei over to the same fate, claiming the hot seat 8-2.
Fisher had run through a formidable gauntlet of four loss-side opponents that included wins over Monica Webb 8-3, Caroline Pao (the WPBA’s top-ranked US player at #5) 8-6 and Margaret Fefilova Styer 8-3 to draw Zlateva. McIntosh drew Bryant, who’d followed her loss to Tkach with wins over April Larson 8-4 and, doing Fisher a bit of a favor, eliminating Yuki Hiragushi 8-5.
McIntosh defeated Bryant 8-5 and in a clear case of ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire,’ advanced to the quarterfinals against Fisher, who’d defeated Zlateva 8-4. McIntosh had come into the tournament at #9 on the WPBA list and no matter how the quarterfinals turned out, was assured of moving up a notch or two on the rankings ladder. Fisher stopped her bid to go further with an 8-5 victory in those quarterfinals.
Friends since they started competing on the world stage over the past few years, Fisher and Tzu-Chien Wei participated in a number of ‘ghost’ tournaments from their selective locations; Fisher from her home in England and Tzu-Chien from a location near her home in Taipei, when the pandemic threw a monkey wrench into face-to-face competition in pool halls. They welcome the opportunities to compete face-to-face, as the did in the semifinals and win or lose, it has zero affect on their friendship. Fisher defeated Tzu-Chien Wei 8-3 in those semifinals and turned to face her final hurdle.
The final extended-race-to-10 match between Fisher and Kristina Tkach played out in a little over three hours, Fisher never getting ahead by more than two racks, until the very end. She was ahead by two, seven times. Tkach tied Fisher only once, at 2-2 and reduced Fisher’s lead to a single rack, six times. The sixth time she did it, at 8-7, was the last. Fisher won the next two to claim the event title.
Tour representatives thanked the ownership and staff at Iron City Billiards for their hospitality, as well as sponsors Diamond Billiards Products, Iwan Simonis Cloth, Aramith Billiard Balls, DigitalPool, Jam Up Apparel, Outsville, N4N (Nickels for Nipples) and Campana Performance Coaching. The next stop on the WPBA Tour, scheduled for the weekend of July 12-16, will be the $40,000-added Soaring Eagle Masters, hosted by the Soaring Eagle Casino & Resort in Mount Pleasant, MI.
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