Van Boening goes undefeated to claim second straight US Open title
“Numbers don’t lie,” said every math teacher who ever lived. The good ones might have also informed you that while that may be true, it is also true that numbers can occasionally fail to tell the whole story. Case in point: The finals of the $10,000-added US Open 8-Ball Championships at Griff’s in Las Vegas […]
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Shane Van Boening (Courtesy Molina Mike – Windows Open Facebook Page)
“Numbers don’t lie,” said every math teacher who ever lived.
The good ones might have also informed you that while that may be true, it is also true that numbers can occasionally fail to tell the whole story. Case in point: The finals of the $10,000-added US Open 8-Ball Championships at Griff’s in Las Vegas over the weekend that gave Shane Van Boening his second US Open title in a week. The most relevant number to emerge from that final matchup between the 41-year-old “South Dakota Kid” and the 27-year-old Oliver Szolnoki from Hungary was the final score 11-4.
By all indications, that number tells the story of a blowout, a dominant performance, a walk in the park, a ‘connect the dots’ breezy romp for Van Boening. Standard stuff for him. It also borders on a ‘failed to show up’ assessment of Szolnoki’s time at the table. Given a few other numbers that emerged from that last match, it was nowhere near as easy as the 11-4 number indicates. Both the competitors and spectators (in-person or watching the GriffTV stream) remained vigilant and focused as the match progressed, all the way through, until the last three games.
Of the 15 games played, only three of them featured a rack won by the competitor who didn’t break that rack. Significantly, those three were won by Van Boening. There were 12 ‘break and run’s. Also significantly, Van Boening recorded eight of them. Neither competitor chalked up more than three racks in a row, with Van Boening doing it three times. The first one began when Van Boening broke the match’s initial tie at 1-1 and ended up with a 4-1 lead. The second came after Szolnoki broke and ran rack #6 to pull within two at 4-2. The last one started with Van Boening ahead 8-4, which became 9-4 (his largest lead, which he’d had at 7-2 and 8-3 as well). His largest lead then became six, as he reached the hill at 10-4, and then seven, as he claimed the US Open 8-Ball title, his second in a row after going undefeated to successfully defend his US Open 10-Ball title, earlier in the week.
It came down to three unforced errors by Szolnoki, coinciding with the three matches Van Boening won off his break. One was a position error that left Szolnoki without a shot in the fourth rack. Instead of capitalizing on his own break and tying the score at 2-2, Van Boening cleared the table and was ahead 3-1. The other two were out-and-out misses; in rack #8, with Van Boening still ahead by three 5-2, Szolnoki missed pocketing the last ball that would have given him a shot at the 8-ball. Van Boening not only stepped to the table and cleared his four balls and the 8-ball, but managed (via carom) to drop Szolnoki’s last ball as well.
The last set of three wasn’t really a factor, as it occurred in rack #14, with Van Boening ahead by five at 9-4. Like the previous miss, this was no tough shot. It was clearly a shot that as a professional, should have put the target ball in its intended pocket, but didn’t.
All of which created an entertaining match that never seemed to be totally out-of-reach for Szolnoki. Even behind 4-9, there was an awareness that his demonstrated abilities throughout the match to that point, could have set him out on a run, long enough to catch, if not overtake Van Boening’s lead. It just didn’t happen.
The brackets for the $10k-added US Open Banks Tournament, set to get underway at 3 p.m. (EDT) today (Sun., March 9) and the $10k-added One Pocket Championships, scheduled to commence on Tues, March 11, indicate that unlike last year, when Van Boening won both of them, he will not be competing this year. He has reported on his FB page that he will be off to Bosnia this week to compete in the European Open Pool Championship in Sarajevo, scheduled, like the US Open One Pocket event, to get underway on Tuesday.
As noted, the US Open Bank Pool Championships are about to get underway, with scheduled first matches set for 3 p.m. (EDT). As with the two previous events, selected matches will be streamed live on GriffTV’s YouTube channel.
