Final Four Set at Straight Pool Championships
Predator Straight Pool Championships / East Brunswick, NJ
by Skip Maloney
The final four are set at the Predator Straight Pool Championships at the Hilton Hotel in East Brunswick, NJ. Niels Feijen will join Nick Van Den Berg, while the Philippines’ Francisco Bustamante and Jasmin Ouschan meet in a final single-elimination round of play on Saturday to determine the champion.
Bustamante was the first to make his way to the final four with an early evening 200-41 victory over Huidj See. The remaining matches played out simultaneously, with Feijen facing USA’s John Schmidt, Thorsten Hohmann versus Nick Van Den Berg and Jasmin Ouschan, continuing an unlikely streak of victories, playing the number-one-seed Oliver Ortmann.
Ahead by two balls at 184-182, Schmidt allowed a moment of pique to cost him the victory, not to mention some cold hard cash. After missing a shot that he presumed signaled victory for his opponent, Schmidt swept his stick across the table and conceded the match to Feijen. Van den Berg was next. He and Hohmann were rarely more than 20 or so balls apart until the score hovered in the area of the 120s, when Van den Berg took repeated command of the racks and finished it at 200-126.
View the Final 16 Single Elimination Brackets
View the Predator World Straight Pool Championship Final 32 Double Elimination brackets
View the Predator World 14.1 Straight Pool Round Robin Brackets online
View the Predator World 14.1 Straight Pool Final Round Robin Scores
Arguably the surprise of the tournament, Jasmin Ouschan, followed her 200-174 victory over Mika Immonen that advanced her into the final eight, with an impressive 200-133 victory over the number-one-seeded Oliver Ortmann that placed her among the final four. Ouschan did a lot of little things right, leading to a series of repeated mini-runs of 10 or 15 balls in the race to 200 that were offered to her by an increasingly frustrated Ortmann.
Ortmann stumbled repeatedly over the transition from one rack to the next, putting himself in a position for a good break but failing to make one. Ouschan stepped to the table, negotiated her mini-run, and just prior to a rack transition, missed and sat down. Ortmann stepped up, finished the rack, and then failed, for a variety of reasons, to capitalize on his own break chances; at one point, he smashed his stick on the table edge in frustration over a shot that he should have made. Ouschan took advantage of every opportunity, settling for small but consistent runs that eventually added up to 200.
Saturday’s action will commence with a noon match-up between Niels Feijen and Nick Van Den Berg, followed at 2:30 p.m. by Bustamante and Ouschan. The finals are scheduled to begin at 6:30.
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