11/08/2021
Another great tournament at Hard Times Billiards of Sacramento comes to an exciting conclusion!
Congratulations to James Aranas for taking first place and the $5,500 prize!
The weekend tournament began with a heart warming, loving remembrance of Brendan Crockett, whose life was lost way too soon five years ago. Oscar Dominguez, Sal Butera, Tyler Styer and Melissa Helland were on stage to talk about Brendan's life and his continued legacy.
The tournament began after the moving and tearful presentation of the recreated Predator/Jacoby custom pool cue Brendan played with that was also lost in the tragic car accident and fire. Tyler worked closely with Predator's owner, Karim, and the Jacoby Cues team to make this recreation possible.
The tournament brought some of the best players in the world to compete on our live stream this past weekend. During the two-day event, we had over 10,600 comments and reactions from nearly 241,000 viewers who were watching from 10 countries including Australia, Germany, Philippines, Canada, Vietnam, India, Columbia, Peru, Singapore and all across the entire United States.
Together, we were a pool loving community and it was truly magical at times! An astonishing combined total of 642,063 minutes were viewed world-wide during this two-day live-streamed tournament!
We had great commentary in the booth with us including professional players Roberto Gomez, Omar AlShaheen, Oscar Dominguez and Tyler Styer, to name just a few. The discussions and insight from these amazing players was simply fantastic!
Along the way, my son, Steven Taylor was keeping the viewers engaged with responses to their comments in the Facebook and Twitch forums. Collins Newey and I were handling the majority of the commentary while behind the scenes, Michael Sammon was wrangling pro players into the booth and keeping the DigitalPool tournament bracket updated throughout the entire weekend.
As you can see, it takes a team of dedicated people to make an event like this as entertaining as it was.
We want to thank Desiree Dominguez for organizing and running the tournament and Oscar Dominguez along with their amazing staff for their welcoming hospitality at Hard Times Billiards during this exciting event. Without their excellent dedicated coordination and teamwork, none of this would have been run so smoothly.
We will be back at Hard Times all weekend starting this Friday at 6pm Pacific Time to stream the California State BEF (Billiard Education Foundation) Junior 9-Ball Open tournament with an added prize fund of $10,000. Every dollar of this prize money will go directly to the juniors in this event.
We hope you will tune in and help us support and cheer on these upcoming young men and women!
