by Skip Maloney

The $1,000-added, B-D handicapped event, sponsored in part by Ozone Billiards, drew 32 players to Amsterdam Billiards and Bar in Manhattan, NY.

Teddy Lubis fell to a single opponent in the third round of play at the Tri-State Tour’s Labor Day weekend stop and then clawed his way back to the finals, handing Karim Moumen his only defeat and capturing the first-place prize. The $1,000-added, B-D handicapped event, sponsored in part by Ozone Billiards, drew 32 players to Amsterdam Billiards and Bar in Manhattan, NY.

Early Saturday, Moumen moved into the hot seat match-up following a 6-4 victory over Tom Ho. He was joined by Trevor Heal, who’d sent Raphael DeBreo west with a 7-4 victory. Moumen dispatched Heal 8-0 and awaited the results of the semifinals.

On the one-loss side, Lubis started his climb back to the finals with a 7-3 win over Mark Mallari and then struggled through a double-hill battle against Michael Aro.  Ho, in the meantime, who’d been responsible for Lubis’s only loss, defeated Demetry Rozenfeld 6-3 to face Lubis a second time in the quarterfinals. Lubis exacted his revenge with a 7-4 victory and then defeated Heal 7-5 to move into the finals.

In the handicapped format, Moumen began the contest ahead by three, but Lubis started the match by immediately overcoming that deficit to knot it at 3-3. The two struggled back and forth to a tie at 5-5 before Lubis surged ahead to 8-6, which, with Moumen entering the finals as the undefeated player, forced an extension of the match to 10 games for the victory. Lubis ran the fifteenth rack and closed it out in the next one.

Results:
1st Teddy Lubis
2nd Karim Moumen
3rd Trevor Heal
4th Tommy Ho
5th Demetry Rozenfeld
Raphael DaBreo
7th Joseph Brezinski
Michael Aro
9th Mark Mallari
Teddy LaPadula
Jay Wright
Peter Yiu