GYEONGGI-DO - Korean Jae-Ho Cho and Cambodian Sruong Pheavy, both former players of the world federation UMB, are the winners of the PBA final tournament. Jae Ho Cho won the final at the PBA championship, with a top prize of 143,000, against Spaniard David Martinez 5-4. Sruong Pheavy beat Korean Ga-young Kim 4-3 for a prize of 50,000 euros.
The finals concluded the PBA's 4th season. The final tournament was played at the JTBC Studio Ilsan (Gyeonggi-do in South Korea) and gathered both the men's and women's 32 best players of the 2022 season after eight individual tournaments.
Jae Ho Cho won the final against David Martinez 5-4, the Korean with 1.781 on average, the Spaniard with 1.672. David Martinez opened with a 15-12 set, Cho brought the score to 1-1 (15-12), Martinez regained the lead (2-1, 15-7), but again Cho came back to 2-2 (15-8). After that, the score kept going up and down. Martinez won the fifth set (15-9), Cho the sixth set (15-12), the Korean moved to 4-3 with 15-7 in the 7th set. David Martinez levelled the score once more (4-4, 15-11), but in the decisive 9th set, the match ended in Jae Ho Cho's favor 15-8. The Korean thus won his first final tournament.
The winners of the final tournament in the 2020 season were Juan David Zapata and Kim Se-yeon. The winners of the 2021 season were Frédéric Caudron and Kim Ga-young.
What was particularly striking about this last tournament of 2023 was that Belgians Frédéric Caudron and Eddy Leppens could not survive the first shifts and David Zapata, a previous PBA winner, was also out of the tournament early.
The women's tournament got the very popular Cambodian Sruong Pheavy as the winner. She defeated first in the semi-finals a renowned Korean, Jung-suk Kim 4-2 and finally in the final the Korean with the most wins in the circuit, Ga-young Kim, 4-3.
That final, too, was raging until the last set. Pheavy started 11-6, Kim equalised 11-8, Pheavy ran to 3-1 with scores of 11-5 and 11-3, Kim still came back 11-3 and 11-8 and on a score of 3-3, the deciding set was a real thriller. Pheavy won 11-10 in 10 innings.
In the championship quarter-finals, David Martinez beat Korean Young-seob Kim 3-2, Jae Ho Cho won against Greek Filippos Kasidokostas 3-2. In the semi-finals, Martinez got the better of Yeong-hun Lee 4-2 and Jae-ho Cho beat the other Spaniard, Jaier Palazón, 4-1.
The prize money of the top four in this championship:
Men:
1st prize 143,000 euros, second 50,000, 3rd and 4th 10,700 euros.
Women:
1st prize 50,000 euros, second 14,300, 3/4th 5,000.
Jae Ho Cho and his wife celebrating the final victory
Sruong Pheavy, the Cambodian winner