John Morra (Photo courtesy of Dave Thomson - Mediumpool.com)
John Morra may not be known for his bank pool game, but that will be be a thing of the past as he has won the Derby City Classic Bank Pool event.
Morra started the event with a fairly manageable draw but that is only half the battle in any tournament. Morra displayed a bank game that many fans were not expecting from him with notable wins over Jerry Matchin, Josh Smith and Josh Oneal in the early rounds. The level of competition picked up after that as Morra rattled off wins against Louie Ulrich, Charlie Bryant and John Brumback to make his way undefeated into round twelve with only three players remaining.
The other two players left at that time were Shane Van Boening and Brandon Shuff. Van Boening had dropped a match to Francisco Bustamante in the 8th round, but had come back with wins over Efren Reyes, Jonathan Pinegar and Alvis Fitch. Shuff had dropped his 7th round match against Truman Hogue, but had wins over Pinegar, Robb Saez and Danny Smith to compliment a bye in the 10th round.
With three players left in the 12th round, one player would get a bye and fate would smile on Morra as he got to sit out and watch Van Boening and Shuff try to knock each other out of the tournament.
Van Boening eliminated Shuff and got ready for the unenviable task of trying to hand Morra back to back losses.
Shane was up the task in the first match 3-2, but the second match saw Morra take a 2-0 lead and then at 2-1, take advantage of a number of hung balls by Van Boening to notch a 5-3 win in the final game for the 3-1 win and the banks title.
With the bank pool event complete, attention now turns to One Pocket with just over 200 players competing over the next three days.
We promised you results from last night's Senior One Pocket Tournament and the results from the 83 player event were as follows...
1st Bob Herchik $800
2nd Walt Anderson $400
3rd Charlie Lane
3rd Dennis Schell $200
5th Jerry Matchin
5th Jose Parica
5th John Henderson
5th Sy Brown $50
