SEOUL - Vietnamese Minh Cam Ma and Japanese Natsumi Higashiuchi have won a PBA tournament in the Korean professional league for the first time since joining the PBA. Minh Cam Ma was a rather successful player in the UMB leagues, while Natsumi Higashiuchi (40) won the 2012 UMB World Championship in her home land. The PBA tournaments were played under the name High 1 Resort. Minh Cam Ma won the final against Tae-jun Oh, a player who had been eliminated from the main tournaments last year due to mediocre results. The final score was 4-1 in favor of Ma (nicknamed MMC), the averages 1.241-1.058, the set scores 7-15, 15-12, 15-10, 15-8, 15-10.
The semi-finals were:
Tae-jun Oh-Jae-ho Cho 4-3 (1.254/1.212)
Minh Cam Ma-Hyun-Woo Kim 4-1 (1,821/1,270)
For Minh Cam Ma and Natsumi Higashiuchi, both it was the first major PBA trophy. Ma was the first Vietnamese to win a tournament. For Japan, Orie Hida won the first PBA tournament a few months ago.
Minh Cam Ma, who lives in Korea most of the time and called his wife on stage during the honoring, made it to the podium of a World Championship in his previous billiards life, in 2017 in Santa Cruz, where Frédéric Caudron and Eddy Merckx finished numbers one and two. In the PBA cycle, he reached the semi-finals once in 15 tournaments. This year's final victory (prize money 75,000 euros) filled him with great joy. During the homage, noises resounded again about how bad PBA players feel about being suspended from participating in UMB tournaments by the world federation. ''The situation is absurd,'' the press release on the winner read. ''But nobody writes about it, the players are victims. It can be compared to the earlier situation with the BWA in Europe around 1980.''
Minh Cam Ma became winner of this season's fifth PBA, in which of the Europeans Antonio Montes was only eliminated in the best eight by later finalist Tae-jun Oh (2-3). Javier Palazon went out of the tournament in that round by Hyun-woo Kim 1-3.
Antonio Montes won in the last 16 against Wook Kim, who had eliminated Frédéric Caudron in the first round with 128. Carlos Anguit lost in the best 16 to Chan-hyun Baek 3-2, David Martinez lost to Javier Palazon 3-0, David Zapata to Minh Cam Ma 3-1 and Birol Uymaz to Nam-guk Jang.
Natsumi Higashiuchi, who gave a victory speech in fluent Korean (Korean language studied at the University of Tokyo) had quit billiards for some time in the years after her world title in the UMB, but returned to the PBA. There, she achieved her first major success in this tournament in the final against Min-joo Baek (4-1, 0.945/0.556). In the semi-finals, the Japanese won against Bo-mi Kim 3-2, Min-joo Baek beat the big favorite Ga-young Kim 3-0.
The next tournament for the team competition starts on 19 December. For the individual PBA tournaments, the sixth round will be played from 29 December to 5 January, the seventh round from 17-24 January, the eighth until 8 February and finally the PBA World championshiop from 3 to 12 March.
LPBA's winner Natsumi Higashiuchi
