We had a huge turnout today with 142 entries (88 qualifying entries and 54 economy parlay entries), a 1 in 4 cash ratio and paid out over $6,000.00 in main and side event prize fund. The players bowled on a very tough 37ft Melbourne oil pattern that took an average cut score of +24 to advance to the quarter finals, which meant if you barely bowled your average each game you would still have made the cut! The players mainly played the outside part of the lane on the fresh, but as the day went on there were more players that were able to move to the inside part of the lane. Even in the later squads, the majority of players still played right of the 2nd arrow, but the scores didn’t really go up at all the last squad.
We had a whopping 11 new bowlers at this event! We want to welcome Ken Davis, Greg Thompson Jr, Stephen Bennett, Wesley Taylor, Stephanie Smith, AJ Zujewski, Austin Yetz, Ken Yetz, Jeremy Brown, Anthony Castaneda, and David Jolly to the SFT AHT family! We hope all of you had a good time at your first event with us and look forward to seeing you at another event! We want to congratulate Greg Thompson and Stephanie Smith who made it all the way to the quarter finals as new bowlers! Also, congrats to Stephanie Smith, Joe Hart, Mike Killgore, and James Roethle, on being this event’s parlay power players!
The quarter finals were a big one with 29 players, which meant for the first time in quite a while, we would be advancing the top 3 bowlers in each division to the semi-final round! The cut scores were very low again, especially since the semi-finalists bowled on the fresh oil patterns. It ended up taking +43 in the A division to move on, +20 in the B division, and C division +48. The top 3 in the A division were, Dylan Taylor, Jonathan Ferrell and Brad Erickson, with Jonathan Ferrell being the #1 seed. The B division had Howard Strause, Ron McDonald and Andre Murillo with Howard being the #1 seed. Th C division had Kevin Dollar, Keith Ryan and Steve Marks with Steve being the #1 seed. Being the #1 seed is a big deal because you get to pick the pair that your semi-final match is bowled on. This is a big advantage, because you could pick a pair that you did really well on in the quarter final round. In this case it worked out well for Steve Marks and Howard Strause, but not so much for Jonathan Ferrell. Steve and Howard were the division champions in their divisions, but Dylan Taylor was able to put enough pressure on Jonathan Ferrell to force Jonathan to double in the 10th to win, and Jonathan wasn't able to do it, giving Dylan a chance to win his 7th SFT AHT title.
The final match wasn't a very exciting one. Dylan got off to the races with a spare and a string of strikes and never looked back. Also Steve and Howard had some opens early, which allowed Dylan to get comfortable and keep striking all the way to the 10th bowling his highest game of the tournament 268 scratch! Congrats to Dylan on taking home the title, Steve Marks for 2nd and $600 and Howard Strause on 3rd and $300! Thanks to the 142 entries that made this event such a good one! We look forward to seeing you all next weekend for our event at Brunswick Desert Sky lanes!
