As we moved into the finals of the World Junior 9-Ball Championships our host country is featured as it has a player in all three final matches. Poland's Daniel Maciol lost his opening match 1/7, but fought his way back through from the loser’s side to gain his spot in the final. His opponent, Zheng Xiao Huai was undefeated going into the finals and is just 14 years old. Daniel produced too many guns against his younger opponent to claim his victory. This is the third gold medal from the Juniors World Championships for Poland with their players winning both gold medals for boys and girls in 2011. Daniel’s victory was quite a turn around from his opening match and it appeared from that performance he wasn’t destined to remain for very long in the tournament, but in using his second life to great advantage, he is today a world champion. Well done.
The Girls Division final featured Xia Yu Ying of China facing Chezka Chenteno of the Philippines. Chenteno grabbed the Gold in this one. She was able to draw on her experience of playing in a number of women’s tournaments and gaining good results over some leading women players. Today she put all that to good use to win a gold medal and title of world champion. The scoreline at the finish was 9/3. No doubt the young Chinese player Xia YuYing will have learned a lot from the experience and hopefully will put it to good use in her future tournaments.
Lastly, the Boys under 19 Final was captured by Long Ze Huang of China 11-5 over Maksim Dudanets of Russia. China had a player in the final of all three divisions, but had lost-out in the first two. This may have placed a bit more pressure on Ze Huang, and if it did, he certainly adapted and didn’t allow it to phase him one bit. With the help of the better run of the balls, and using a snooker cue, Ze Huang played very consistently and solid, making very few errors which allowed him the run out a comfortable 11/5 winner. Early in the match, Maksim was able to keep pace with his opponent, but a couple of bad rolls cost him two racks and from there he was never able to recover.
These championships were played at the Shanghai Huimin Middle School for the second time having been played there last year as well. The winner of the U/19 Division, Long Ze Huang is a student at this school, and joins his school mate Kong De Jing who was successful in winning the U17 world title last year. Quite extraordinary that the same school can produce two world champions in consecutive years.
