04/24/2015
This Friday the first tournaments began at the European Billiard Championships in Brandenburg/Germany. Before this major sporting event is officially opened on Saturday by CEB-President Wolfgang Rittmann and the Mayor of the City of Brandenburg, Dr. Dietlind Tiemann, the first matches were already played today.
A total of twenty tables are set in the so-called Stahlpalast and one can see the investment that was made to make this event unforgettable for all participants and fans. All tables are broadcasted live on the Internet and the whole venue with its big and small scoreboards, lights and much more makes people feel they are in a real sports-arena. The fantastic set up has ensured that all of the participants are full of praise.On the full size billiard tables, with the playing surface 2.84 meters x 1.42 meters, the 3-cushions-specialists started the contest today.
From the beginning 48 participants are divided into sixteen groups of three players each. Only the winners go through to the knockout-stage. Then the 16 seeded players will join the tournament and it will be single-elimination until the final. Marco Zanetti (Italy), as title holder, is of course one of the seeded players. He is joined by Frédéric Caudron, Eddy Merckx (both from Belgium), Dick Jaspers (Netherlands), Torbjörn Blomdahl (Sweden) and Christian Rudolph from Germany just to name a few.Both Semih Sayginer (Turkey) and Kostas Papakonstantinou from Greece played very well in their first matches and will probably make it to the main stage of the tournament. Raimond Burgman from the Netherlands had a great comeback in his match after he was down by 3:20 points, he finally won the match against Thomas Anderson (Danmark) with 30:29, but in the end this wasn’t good enough to reach the main stage. Surprisingly, one of Germany’s biggest hopes was out of the tournament, Martin Horn lost the deciding match against Sergio Jimienez from Spain.
The Juniors Division also started their first matches today. 16 players were qualified and spread across four groups. Only the two best of each group will reach the single knock-out stage of the tournament. After two matches played only four players are undefeated. Two of them are the French youngsters Gwendal Marechal and Matthieur Franck. They are joined by the Portuguese Joao Ferreira and Berkay Karakurt from Turkey. All of them will surely make it to the quarter finals on Saturday.The young German Simon Blondeel is one of the medal contenders from the host country. He is so far undefeated in his group in the discipline Free Game and won his match against Kevin von Hees from Belgium by 150:59 points in 3 innings. Only Pierre Martory from France could convince with a quite similar result. Both of them should easily make it to the quarters.Besides these three single events the club-team tournament for under 19-players has begun today. They are also playing the Free Game but so far it’s much too early to call a favorite. Only a few matches have been played.
All results, pictures and further media-information can be found here. Pay-per-View-Livestream is broadcasted by www.kozoom.com.
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