Well the first major snooker event is now been completed just last weekend at the Porirua club of the NZBSA North Island Snooker Championship.

With 31 players entered was going to be a 3 day event and with the defending champion turning up was going to be a tough ask to do the double considering the company of ranked players performing as well.

Section play on Friday and Saturday saw some upsets along the way with a lot of matches going the distance amongst the lower ranked players to have bragging rights until they meet again.

A highlight of section play was there was a black ball play off for the 16th spot to qualify between Riley James and John Maxwell proved to have only one shot needed to sink the black off the break. Well done Riley, you made it look so easy off 4 cushions to sink the black.

To the last 16 of the main played on late Saturday afternoon into the evening.

A big upset was young Cody Unkovich beating Steve Robertson 4/2 which added to Codys scalps of being able to take big name players out at the last 16 has become a habit but came unstuck in the next round against last years winner Lawrence Millington 4/2.

Onto the quarter finals, another stalwart of the game in NZ saw Jack Lemon come through playing very well and using all of his experience to play well all weekend but came unstuck against Deepak Bala, so the top 4 seeds played through there quarters as per the photos.

To the final, Lawrence Millington the defending champion vs the # 2 player in the country KD Singh.

And what a final Lawrence raced out to a 3 nil lead in best of 7 frames and look like a white wash but KD had other ideas and played one frame at a time to level it up at 3 all going into the final frame,

Neck and neck at the half way stage until a nasty snooker laid by Lawrence had KD in all sorts of trouble and to add, a free ball situation followed by a another snooker in behind the black by Lawrence put the game out of reach after fouling 3 times from KD to which KD conceded the frame and match to Lawrence Millington 4/3.

Congratulations Lawrence Millington winning back to back the North Island Snooker Championship 2021/22.

A big thank you to the Porirua Club for their availability of there venue for 3 days.

Russ Delahunty who was a ring in to fill a gap and looked after section and plate play at the Johnsonville and thank you Johnsonville club for the loan of your tables for 3 days.

Darryl Jensen for being the chief Referee and helping assisting T/D.

CCBSA for for hosting the event.

Lastly and played also Sam Bond, but dedicated time to put together the very new and improved graphics onto our live stream for this event, so every one around the world can tune in to what we have achieved in live streaming for the last couple of years to what we can do now and and it only gets better. Cheers Sam.

www.snookered.co.nz

Check out Sams web page to results and match stats for live streaming.

Also you can see the streamed matches uploaded now from the event on the NZBSA YouTube Channel.

I'm looking forward to the next event in a couple of weeks and do it all again in the South Island Championships.

Regards

Dave Judd

Secretary

NZBSA

Article added: Thursday 19 May 2022