Fiddlestix Billiard Café, owned by pro player Chris Szuter and his dad Steve Szuter, himself a feared bar table player, is a favorite stop of the Viking Tour’s. The room contains a mixture of eight 9-foot Diamond tables and a dozen 7-foot Valley bar boxes that play great. Eighty-two players from half a dozen states gathered at Fiddlestix for a double-elimination $1,000-added event that featured races to nine using the world standardized 9-ball rules, which the Viking Tour recently adopted. The bidding favorites in the player auction were Shawn Putnam and Troy Frank, as would be expected, but the large number of players entered that were capable of high finishes boosted the auction considerably and raised the total purse to $5,100.         

      As the competitors were knocked either into the o­ne-loss bracket or out of the tournament, two players kept winning match after match until they played each other for the king seat. Shawn Putnam had been playing well all weekend and welcomed the challenge. His opponent, Joseph Arbuckle of West Virginia, had never done so well in a Viking event. He beat Putnam after watching an 8-2 lead going to 9 evaporate to 8-7, with Putnam running out to the 9-ball and then missing. Arbuckle took the match and sat down to see who would come from the o­ne-loss side to challenge him. In the fourth-place match, Jim Davis of Mentor, OH, defeated Troy Frank of Canton, OH. Davis moved forward to play Putnam and was steamrolled 9-3. Not to be denied his third win of the year, Putnam dispatched Arbuckle in the first set of the finals by a 9-2 margin and then came back with an even more decisive 9-1 victory in the second set to win the event.

1^st                   Shawn Putnam

2^nd                    Joseph Arbuckle

3^rd                    Jim Davis

4^th                    Troy Frank

5^th/6^th               John Maki, Mark Cimperman

7^th/8^th              Brian Halter, Louie Karamas

9^th/12^th             Aaron White, Doug Nauer, Shayne Morrow, Sean Graham

13^th/16^th           Marty Lawson, Jason Nimitz, Jeffe Lee, Chris Szuter