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PBA CHAMPION DEFEATS COLOMBIA’S CLARA GUERRERO
Apr 30, 2012
Four-time PBA champion and PBA Player of the Year contender, Mike Fagan of Dallas, United States, defeated two-time world champion Clara Juliana Guerrero of Colombia in the title match, 469-446, to win the 3rd Track Dream-Bowl Palace Open Sunday afternoon at Dream Bowl Palace in suburban Munich, Germany.
It was the fifth career European Bowling Tour title for Fagan and the second this season after the Brunswick Euro Challenge in March which also counted as his fourth PBA title. PBA players from the United States have won four out of seven EBT events this season. The 31-year-old right-hander became the first multiple EBT champion this season and widened his lead in the men’s point ranking.
Guerrero, who led the tournament in qualifying, posted a huge 278 in the last game of Final Round Three to make the cut to the single-elimination finals with the two-game total determining the winner.
In a quarterfinal match between two former World Ranking Masters champions, Guerrero defeated Britt Brøndsted (left), 446-420, to advance to the semifinals en route to win the women’s ranking in Munich.
It marked the third time that the Colombian national team member led the women’s ranking in an EBT tournament after the 2010 Brunswick Euro Challenge, where she captured her first EBT title, and the 2011 Vienna Open.
In the semifinal, Guerrero eliminated another World Ranking Masters champion, Stuart Williams (above right), England, 476-441. Williams, a six-time EBT champion, has won his first PBA title in the 2011 PBA World Series of Bowling.
Fagan, who led Round Three with a 255 average to earn the No. 1 seed for the finals, topped No. 8 Perttu Jussila (left), Finland, in the quarterfinals, 420-394, and posted games of 250 and 252 to sideline fellow PBA champion Sean Rash (right), 502-425, in the semis.
Guerrero pocketed 4.000 Euro for second place while Williams and Rash earned 2.000 Euro apiece for third and fourth place, respectively.
Guerrero, Rash, Williams as well as quarterfinal losers Brøndsted, Jussila, Dominic Barrett (left), England, and Mika Koivuniemi (right), Finland, will participate in the 5th EBT Masters, which follows the 3rd Track Dream-Bowl Palace Open on April 30 and May 1 also at Dream-Bowl Palace.
The Masters is the season-ending event of the 2011 EBT season and features the top 16 men and women of the 2011 EBT point rankings.
The 3rd Track Dream-Bowl Palace Open is the seventh stop of the 2012 European Bowling Tour and the third out of eight EBT “Silver” tournaments this season. The tournament will be held from April 25-29 at 52-lane Dream Bowl Palace in Unterföhring, a suburb of Munich, Germany and offers total prize fund of 50.000 Euro with 7.000 Euro going to the winner, 3.000 Euro to the runner-up and 4.000 and 2.000 Euro to the third and fourth place finisher, respectively.
Qualifying of the 3rd Track Dream-Bowl Palace Open ran from Wednesday April 25 through Saturday, April 28. Women receive 8 pins handicap each game, a standard for women on the European Bowling Tour.
A total of 48 players including all squad winners and the top 4 of the Desperado Squad qualified for the finals on Sunday, April 29. The top 8 qualifiers receive two byes, while qualifiers 9-16 bypass the first round of the finals.
Three four-game rounds each starting from scratch will trim the field to 32, 20 and then eight players, who will determine the champion in single-elimination match play rounds. In each round over two games decided by total pinfall, the highest seeded player meets the lowest seeded player, the second-highest meets the second-lowest, and so on.
The 2012 European Bowling Tour is made up of 21 events in 16 countries including two Platinum, four Gold, eight Silver and seven Satellite tournaments.
The top 50 men and the top 50 women in each event earn ranking points based on how they finish in the event. The winner of a Platinum tournament receives 250 ranking points, the winner of a Gold tournament gets 150, the winner of a Silver tournament such as the 3rd Track Dream-Bowl Palace Open earns 100, and the winner of a Satellite tournament gets 50 ranking points.
Those points will be tabulated throughout the season to determine the top 16 men and top 16 women who will compete in the sixth EBT Masters in Bratislava, Slovakia in Sept. 2013.
