Hjorleifson Wins Quebec Invitational

Sep 2, 2013

Hi everybody Andrew has asked me to do a quick summary of a tournament I went to in Gatineau, Quebec and I figured I would like to take the chance to let everyone know about the format they used out there because I feel like it is something we could try in Ontario.
Photo courtesy of Billardquebec.com
The tournament was held in a pool room called Billard la Huit and the organizers at this room decided to put on a last minute tournament to fill the cancellation void of another tournament that was to be held in Gatineau the same weekend. They only announced the tournament one week before as the cancellation of the other event was last minute. All the promoting was done strictly on facebook, the word got out and they achieved their goal of a 32 player field in a very short period.
Here is how the format went:
- 9-ball
- Winner breaks
- Rack your own
- Call shot (like 10 ball rules)
- Handicaps of 7, 9 and 11
- Everybody pays the same entry, for this tournament it was $125
- The room added $1,000 minus ten dollar green fees
I thought the tournament ran great and It made me think that we could do something like this maybe 4 times during the 404 season. It would be like a regular 404 event with slightly changed rules, for our tournaments I was thinking we would use 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 handicaps and we could make the entry fee $100. The event would be open to anybody with the lowest handicap being 7 and would be geared towards competitive players.
The favourites in the tournament included John Morra, Erik Hjorleifson and Naomi Williams from Toronto and Jeff Blais, Nicolas Guimond, Dany Nguyen, Jared Amyot and John Leblanc from Quebec. On a side note I would also like to mention that they ran the Calcutta in a way that I have never seen before. They announced at the beginning that there would be 16 blind bids of the 32 players in the tournament. So basically if you want to buy someone you have 16 chances to buy them then the remaining 16 players went in the field. They generated about $1500 in the Calcutta, which I think was pretty good considering how many people were there and the strength of the field. This way saves time and I think would generate just as much money as going through every player.
Here are the results not including calcutta:
The FinalistsJohn LeBlanc and Erik HjorleifsonPhoto courtesy of Billardquebec.com
1st Erik Hjorleifson              $1900
2nd John LeBlanc                 $1000
3rd Patrick Dery                   $675
4th John Morra                     $450
5th\6th Maxim Villeneuve  $250
Nicolas Guimond    $250