At the Dynamic Billard European Championships in St. Johann i.Pg., teams Germany and Poland won the Gold Medals in the team competition.
In the men’s division, the final match turned out to be a thriller. Germany played Russia. Sebastian Staab won the 8-ball match over Maksim Dudanets quite comfortably with 8:4. That match was the first one over. When it was finished, the score in 9-ball between Ralf Souquet and Konstantin Stepanov was 4:5 in favor of Stepanov and the 10-ball match between Joshua Filler and Ruslan Chinakhov was 6:6. In both matches, the Russians had a high lead. Chinakhov was up 5:1 on Filler while Stepanov also lead 5:1 over Souquet. But the Germans fought back. At 7:7, Joshua Filler was at the table and he was running the rack. No problems were on the table. But suddenly he played a bad position for the 9-ball, positioning the 10-ball in between the cue ball and the 9-ball. What an unnecessary mistake in that situation. He went for a jump-shot but he missed it, leaving two tremendously tough shots for Chinakhov. The „Siberian Express“ went for both of them and made both shots under unbelievable pressure. That gave him the 8:7 victory over Filler and the 9-ball match had to be the decider. The score was 6:6 at that point in time between Souquet and Stepanov. Souquet went on the hill first with 8:6 but Stepanov pulled one back to make it 8:7. Then Ralf Souquet won the final rack and took the match which brought the first Gold Medal this week to Germany.
Team Germany reached the final match by ousting team Sweden 2:0 in the semi-final. Team Russia defeated team Finland in the semi-final.
In the women’s division, team Poland reached out for Gold today. They defeated team Russia in the final match. Oliwia Czuprynska was able to get the first point into the Polish account with a 7:2 victory over Nataliya Seroshtan. But Anna Mazhirina was able to tie the match, defeating Katarzyna Wesolowska 6:2 in 8-ball. A shootout had to decide the final match. The first shots were all missed by the players. It was Czuprynska who pocketed the first shot and put the Russians under pressure. But the Russians could not stand the heat. They missed too many shots and in consequence, team Poland won the shootout and took the title with 2:1 over Russia. On third place in the women's competition were teams Norway and Germany
Medal table after 3 of 5 events:
The Dynamic Billard European Championships will continue tomorrow morning at 09:00 local time with matches in the 8-ball individuals.
The Championships are played on 24 tables which will all be streamed LIVE throughout the whole event. In order to be able to follow all the action LIVE, premium membership can be purchased at www.kozoom.com. Once a premium membership is held, all events for the respective period of time can be viewed LIVE. Additionally, a huge video gallery is contained in the website.
The event is hosted by the European Governing Body for Pool, the European Pocket Billiard Federation (EPBF) and organized by International Billiard Promotion (IBP). For further information and reference please go to the federation website www.epconline.eu, visit us on Facebook or check out our youtube channel for regular news clips or contact our press officepress@epbf.com
