Courtesy of Jay Crystal, Paddle Palace Club Manager
The doors opened at 8:00am for the 2019 Paddle Palace Spring Open, at 9:00am two double events started simultaneously, the U4200 doubles and the U3000 doubles. Both events featured great matches with Ryan Hoarfrost and Hung Ho winning 1st place in the U4200’s defeating Jiwei Xia and Ben Bednarz. In the U3000’s Suraj Sindia and Bhargav Korrapati prevailed over Leezan Da and Chris Opocensky.
Open singles followed and there were some surprises in the draw. 2100 Mark Flores did not make it out of his group, where Michael Groom and Nicholas Daescu advanced. Michael then lost 3-0 to up and coming PPC Junior, Dean Schultz. Dean’s wins in the Open Singles and U2200’s pushed his USTTA rating over the 2000 mark for the first time. Jiwei Xia continued his PPC dominance with a 3-0 finals win over 2017 Oregon State Champion, Jung Kim.
The biggest point winner in the tournament went to Bhargav Korrapati. He entered at 1234 and won both the U1500 and the U1700 singles events. Another top point winner was John Emoto-Tisdale of PPC who started at 1071 and made it to the finals of the U1500’s and finished the tournament at 1362!
In the U2200 singles, Ryan Hoarfrost won over Mark Flores, who beat fellow Seattleite, Vince Mioduszewski, in the semi-finals.
The last event on Saturday featured Novice players. In their first ever official tournament, Mike Schultz prevailed over Eric Ballas.
Sunday started with doubles again. In the U3600 Doubles, Weida Qian / Long Shiue won over Bill Kochenderfer and Isaac Zuckerman. Leezan Da saw her second doubles final of the weekend coming in 2nd in the U2400 Doubles with Jens Prussnat. Gerek Strickland / Harold Sun were the winners in that event.
In the U1900 singles, Landry Molimbi had two good wins and gained 93 points to make the semifinals. Sri Palwai survived a 9 in the 5th scare from Isaac Zuckerman only to lose to winner Bill Kochenderfer in the final.
Jen Beeler prevailed in five games over Jonathon Mann in the U1300 singles. It was a great event for both players as they are new to the tournament scene.
An Over 70 won the Over 40 singles, Duane Smith over Andrey Borovik. Rishi Kumar gained 296 points while winning the Junior Singles and also playing well in U1100’s. Eden Choi came second in the Juniors. Another Junior, Nathan Nelson won 11-9 in the 5th over Rishi in the U1100’s quarterfinals.
The last event of the weekend, the U1100 singles had Chuck Brockway taking the title over Serge Killingsworth.
A great thanks to all the participants and support staff and all those that came to watch that made this a great event! Special thanks to our tournament sponsors and club partners: Paddle Palace, STIGA Tables, and Nittaku Balls.
