Hi there, and welcome!
It's
always being said, that Snooker has to become more international, and
while the tournaments begin to spread around the world more and more, it
will be interesting to see, if the players will too.
But if you look at the status quo, the world elite is dominated by a few countries: UK/Ireland, China, a few from Thailand, Neil Robertson of Australia and Marco Fu of Hong Kong --- maybe you can add Canada and South Africa when you look into the past too, but thats it. My idea is, that it might be interesting to make a series about the top players of the "Rest of the world", and well: here we go.
GermanyNow that the German Masters has just finished, Germany is a perfect start for this. Moreover its my homecountry so its much easier for me to investigate the world wide web than for any other country.
So far, there were two players from Germany on the Main Tour:
Lets start with Lasse Münstermann (born 1979), who competed at the Tour in 2000/2001 as the first German. He gained his ticket by winning at Eurotour in 2000. According to cuetracker his performances werent very well, altough he was able to beat veteran Willie Thorne at the Thailand Masters qualifiers at least.
Later he was a World Games 2005 quarterfinalist and german national champion 2006. He also competed at various PTC events in 2010/11 with wins against Adrian Gunnell and Jimmy White as highlights. He failed to requalify for the Tour via Q School in 2011, with only one win in all three events (4:0 over Alex O’Donoghue in Q School event 2).
He owns a snooker club in Ratingen (near Colonge) and can sometimes be heared as co-commentator for Eurosport Germany. According to German Wikipedia his highest tournament-break is 138. More at http://www.lassemuenstermann.de/
The second German former Main-Tour player is Patrick Einsle (born 1987). He played a total of two season in the world elite, both times qualified via Wildcard.
In 2006/07 he replaced Paul Hunter's spot, who suffered from cancer and tragically died in October 2006. His first qualifing match he had to play just three days after the announcement, that he can compete at the main tour. He won only two matches in the whole season, both in the Grand Prix group stages (vs. Joe Jogia and Alfie Burden). In the UK championship qualifiers he was whitewashed by rising star Judd Trump 9-0.
His second Main Tour season was in 2010/11, where he played a little more succesful. In PTC 3 he reached the Last 32 after winning against Jimmy Robertson and Peter Ebdon, before losing to Igor Figueiredo. According to http://patrick-einsle.de he played a 146 in competition and four Maximums in practice.
Beside those two, there is a couple of other solid German players, like Brazil-based Itaro Santos (born 1985), who played at the World Series of Snooker final tournament and is a former national champion, Sascha Lippe (born 1983), who won the European Team Championship 2007 in Belgium together with Santos and Münstermann, played PIOS-Tour for a couple of years and reached the Last 16 of the European championships in 2010 and Stefan Kasper (2010 national champion, Wildcardround German Masters 2011 - 2:5 defeat against Nigel Bond).
You can find pictures of most of the mentioned players here. A list of players, that competed on major Snooker events (PTCs/PIOS/European Championships etc.) can be found on cuetracker.
German national champions:
year winner second place third places -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2005 Itaro Santos 2006 Lasse Münstermann Itaro Santos Sascha Lippe / Christian Gabriel 2007 Sascha Lippe Michael Heeger Olaf Thode / Patrick Einsle 2008 Itaro Santos Christian Gabriel Stefan Kasper / Jörn Hannes-Hühn 2009 Patrick Einsle Itaro Santos Sascha Lippe / Thomas Hein 2010 Stefan Kasper Sascha Lippe Andreas Cieslak / Jakob Stacha 2011 Patrick Einsle Stefan Kasper Roman Dietzel / Sascha Lippe
...next episode: Finland, Norway, Iceland
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