28 Nov 2011 at 22:30 | Published by: paoloITA | Views: 13674 | News search

As usual in the last weekend of November, the best Italian minigolf players come to the indoor course in Vedano al Lambro to play the "Master" final, a competition reserved to the best players of the closing season.

The tournaments has been played on 2 days: first day, 5 qualification rounds (best 8 male player go directly to the 1/8 finals, players from 9th to 24th go to an extra round to get the pass for the 1/8 finals aswell; best 2 ladies go directly to the 1/2 finals and players from 3rd to 6th go to an extra round to get the pass for the 1/2 finals aswell); second day a matchplay system based on stroke counts and played on a double round of 9 lanes (the most fair chosen by the Jury, in this case 1,4,5,6,8,12,14,15,17).

It has been a very exciting tournament with some very good results.
Paolo Porta (MGC Novi Ligure) and Sara Marchiani (GSP Cusano) are some of the most successful Italian players ever (5 italian titles for Paolo, 3 for Sara), but they both miss the "Master" title even though they had been very close to it in the past.

The destiny decided that they both had to win this edition of the Master event.

In the qualification rounds they both played quite well: Paolo got the 4th place with a total of 129 strokes (25,8 avg) , Sara was 3rd in the ladies ranking with 133 strokes (26,6 avg) .
Of course, as a tradition of this kind of matchplay games, the best players from qualification could not get the top places in the final ranking.
But if Anna Bandera could at least take the silver medal, being beated only in the final by the team mate Sara (27-32 the result), Alberto Pirovano, who played exceptionally well on 5 rounds on Saturday ( 123 strokes (24,6 avg) , course record equalized) was kicked out of the tournament directly at the first stage by Giovanni Rispo.

The road to the victory was quite easy for Sara because she defeated in the preliminary round the former Senior European Champion Annalisa Aghito with a good margin, then Silvia Bandera in the semifinal (29-33) and then Anna Bandera in the final as previously said.

Paolo had to play extremely well to get his first "Master" title. On the 4 rounds on Sunday he played a total of 105 strokes (26,2) exactly as in the first rounds on Saturday, but here without playing any of the "easy" and lucky lanes like 3,9,11,16,18.
In the 1/8 final Paolo easily defeated Pierluigi Marchiani with an impressive 25-34; in the 1/4 final he had a very close match with Luca Dellasega, ended 25-27; in the 1/2 finals Paolo had a close and difficult match with Claudio Santopietro, ended 28-29 and in the final with Antonio Di Bella the match has been very tight with Antonio equalizing Paolo right at the last regular lane and Paolo winning at the first extra lane.
3rd place in the men event went to Alessandro Serafini (MC Adventure), the real surprise of the day, a player which is actually not in the first national category, that really found the day of his life and after losing in the semifinal with Antonio Di Bella just at the third extra-lane, could beat Claudio Santopietro in the small final.

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