Live snooker to the max

The biggest highlight for the competitive snooker scene in Austria is coming up in just a few weeks time. This year’s 11th edition of the Austrian Snooker Open will take place from 28th April until 1st May in Salzburg, in the northwestern part of the country. The event is staged in a huge shopping mall called Europark, which is the new main sponsor of the event.

The € 10.000,- tournament will welcome some eighty top players from Austria and abroad. Expectations about big names participating are high, as last year some prominent WSA professionals like Mark King [winner], Lee Richardson [runner-up], Bjørn Haneveer and Matthew Couch entered the tournament. King, ranked number 20 in the world, has just confirmed that he will show up in Salzburg again to defend his title - of course only when he has been knocked out of the 888.com World Snooker Championship in Sheffield before the semi-final stages, taking place at the same time as the Austrian Snooker Open.

Ending up in fifth place, Hans Nirnberger from Vienna was last year’s best performing home player. Nirnberger, nicknamed Jack, will celebrate his 30th birthday during this year’s event. Although he calls swimming his biggest hobby, the 15 Reds member is among the most successful Austrian snooker players of all time, still dreaming to reach his goal once: a place in the top-16 of Europe.

Nirnberger has claimed an incredible string of [national] tournament victories throughout the years. But in the current 2005/2006 Grand Prix series [a monthly tournament for Austria’s top players], he has only managed to win one single title, beating all-time rival Garry Balter by 5-3 last November. But in January, he lost a second GP-final to Balter by 4-5 after blowing a comfortable 4-0 lead.

Nevertheless, Nirnberger celebrated the greatest achievement of his career so far last December in his local snooker club Köö 5 in Vienna. In a friendly match against John Dangerfield, Jack potted fifteen reds with blacks in one break. Of course, play on all other tables stopped to watch Nirnberger keeping his nerves and potting the remaining six colours in sequence. And then it was a fact: the first ever 147 maximum break compiled by an Austrian player! Many congratulations, even from Switzerland and Germany, kept coming in the next couple of days on the online forum of Austrian snooker association ÖSBV.

Main rival to Nirnberger is 28 years old Garry Balter, also a member of 15 Reds in Vienna. Balter has a passion for fitness and cars, but his heart is with snooker. He is the official player’s representative at the ÖSBV, and with a highest break of 143, he makes no secret of his ambitions to play at an higher international level as well. He has already won over twenty tournaments, and his winner’s list is still growing. This season, Balter performs extremely well in the national Grand Prix series, appearing in four finals and winning two of them, which puts him on top of the current national rankings, just ahead of Nirnberger.

Number three on that list is Oliver Doppler, playing for 1. UWBC in Wels, a city in the state of Upper-Austria. Doppler, aged 32, won this season’s first Grand Prix in October. Finally, the present top-5 of Austrian snooker is completed by Ebrahim Baghi and former number one Bernard Müllner, both playing for 15 Reds in Vienna. And not to forget the ladies: first female on the national rankings is Helga Egger, playing for 1. KSC in the southern state of Carinthia, in 82nd place.

In the next report on Austria’s snooker scene, we will discuss a very debatable issue these days: tournament’s prize money - or better: the lack of...

©  text: Eric Willemsen [Vienna]