Shawn Budd Wins 2012 South Pacific Open Snooker
/Sydney’s Own Shawn Budd has added the 2012 Club Marconi South Pacific Open Snooker title to his growing list of achievements, following a 4-2 Final victory over Steve Mifsud from Victoria in last weekend’s National Ranking event.
The South Pacific is one of the major highlights on the annual snooker calendar and once again attracted a high quality field of 62 entries.
This was also the 7th consecutive year that Club Marconi have proudly sponsored and hosted this established tournament – a tremendous achievement greatly appreciated by all snooker enthusiasts. Many thanks to Jim Ruisi, the Snooker Committee and Club Marconi’s Board of Directors for their continued support and assistance.
Spectators were treated to some entertaining snooker throughout the weekend with some excellent breaks recorded - including 2 Century breaks in total from another Sydney player Vinnie Calabrese. The highest break was Vinnie as mentioned with 127 who lost in the Semi final with a narrow margin of 3-2 to Steve Mifsud.
The other semi finalist were Ryan Thomerson who had a great break against his father in the last 16 with a 62 to win 3-2 when his father was on a break and went in off but was stopped in the semi by shawn budd 3-0.
In the final Shawn Budd took a convincing 3-0 lead only for steve to make a comeback to go 3-2 with shaun closing out the final frame to take the title 4-2. There was a great crowd of around 60 plus watching the final which was great to see. As always a great following from the patrons from club Marconi who love all sports.
Special thanks goes to Club Marconi and Diamond hill Jewlers major sponsors for the 2012 club Marconi South Pacific Open Snooker.
Other supporters donated goods for the raffle including Marconi’s very own Roger Farebrother (secret wines) Hassan Kerde, Charlie Degura and sharpsnooker. The major prize winner in the Raffle was Steve Jay winning a set of snooker and billiard balls donated by www.sharpsnooker.com.au
I would also like to thank the great support of our officials for the day who helped me out greatly during the whole weekend and offered great assistance and those were Stuart Tait and frank Galanos and all others that assisted in the events organisation.
For anyone that didn’t come to watch the final we had Cueball.tv tape the final and it should be on their website during the next week.(www.cueball.tv)
In all we had our best turn up of referee’s we have seen in quite a while with 9 turning up and I’m sure all the players appreciated them as much as the officials did as they made things run a lot better.
Shawn Budd is certainly a worthy 2012 South Pacific Champion, but snooker is the big winner after a tremendous weekend of competition.
Michael Sharp
Tournament Director
