The Hanoi Open Pool Championship comes to a close on Sunday as four players set their sights on reigning supreme in front of thousands of passionate Vietnamese fans in the country’s capital.
A new name will be etched onto the trophy come the conclusion as Jayson Shaw and defending champion Johann Chua have departed, with four names competing for the $40,000 champion’s cheque and the biggest title of their lives.
Former UK Open champion Robbie Capito has tasted glory before now in a World Nineball Tour major, but for Moritz Neuhausen, Pijus Labutis and Harry Vergara, it’s an opportunity to realise their dreams and there certainly won’t be many better places to achieve them.
MORITZ NEUHAUSEN VS HARRY VERGARA
Harry Vergara arrived at the Hanoi Open last year as an unranked qualifier, later overcoming Shane van Boening to reach the quarter-finals on debut. Fast forward twelve months and the Filipino now stands two wins away from unequivocally the biggest moment of his career.
Standing between him and the Hanoi Open finals is the unassailable force at present that is Germany’s Moritz Neuhausen, the newly-minted Peri Open champion and someone who is working his way through a strong field in the Vietnamese capital with relative ease once again.
Neuhausen made light work of David Alcaide and Roberto Gomez on Saturday to reach the final four without breaking sweat, while it was equally as comprehensive for Vergara, who swept aside Fraser Patrick and Jonas Souto Comino to the loss of a mere eight racks.
Both Neuhausen and Vergara enter uncharted territory as they compete in their maiden WNT major semi-finals, but it’s the German who will be a sizeable favourite. He could take down back-to-back titles heading into his Reyes Cup debut next week.
Prediction: 11-6 Neuhausen
PIJUS LABUTIS VS ROBBIE CAPITO
Pijus Labutis has reached the semi-finals of the Spanish Open, the UK Open, the European Open and now the Hanoi Open, although he has been beaten on all three previous occasions. That will be occupying his thoughts and an unwanted record that he will want to banish.
One of those semi-final defeats came at the hands of former UK Open champion Robbie Capito, and the Lithuanian will have his sights fixated on exacting revenge and potentially arranging a final showdown against his good friend and potential Mosconi Cup teammate in Moritz Neuhausen.
Capito is the only semi-finalist to have been beaten in the double elimination phase, having been denied in an epic against Swedish teenager Walter Laikre, before avenging that loss in the last 64. He has since scuppered Aloysius Yapp’s 32-match winning streak in WNT open championships and held his nerve to beat Max Lechner.
Labutis, meanwhile, released plenty of emotion as he stunned Carlo Biado in a deciding rack in the quarter-finals. It evidently meant everything to him, and the Lithuanian will now be praying that it’s fourth time lucky at the stage of majors that has proved ominous for him previously.
Prediction: 11-10 Labutis
