Corey Deuel came back from the one loss side and won the First Annual Relay for Life 9-Ball Invitational Charity Benefit at Capones Billiards in Spring Hill Florida.
Deuel was undefeated through Thursday with wins over Ronnie Wiseman and Charlie Williams. Sunday started with an 11-8 win over Jeremy Jones, but Deuel's run was abruptly brought to a halt later Friday with an 11-2 loss to Johnny Archer. Deuel got back on track with a dominating 11-4 win over Mika Immonen to earn another shot at Archer in the finals.
Deuel came out strong in the finals and raced to a 10-6 lead, but struggled to score the final game. Plagued by uncharacteristic misses, Deuel watched Archer win four straight games to tie the score at 10-10. A dry break by Archer in the case game led to a push out by Deuel. Archer gave the table back to Deuel, who pocketed the one ball and caught a break as the 9-ball stopped rolling right next to the 2-ball. One carom later, the match was over with Deuel scoring the 11-10 win.
"I guess I got a little too comfortable with the lead" said Deuel afterwards. "I caught a little break in the last game" was how Deuel described the end of the match.
The reason that all of the players came together for this event was charity as event sponsors Robert and LeAnn Sapp were raising money for cancer relief. The final count for the event was over $24,000 raised with many of the players donating portions of their prize money to this very worthy cause.
Complete brackets for the event are online as well as a photo gallery from Diana Hoppe.
Complete Payouts:
1st Cancer Research $24,000
1st Corey Deuel $3000
2nd Johnny Archer $2000
3rd Mika Immonen $1800
4th Tommy Kennedy $1300
5th/6th Nick Varner, Jeremy Jones $1000
7th/8th David Broxson, Ronnie Wiseman $900
9th/12th Earl Strickland, Charlie Williams, Tony Crosby, Gabe Owen $800
13th/16th Marcus Chamat, Ralf Souquet, Robb Saez, John Schmidt $600
17th/24th Kim Davenport, Rocky McElroy, Troy Frank, Mike Davis, Raj Hundal $500
Photo courtesy of Diana Hoppe - Pool Pics By Hoppe
