Local pool star back to winning ways to pick up a grand prize
Local pool star Mark ‘Granite’ Gray bounced back to winning ways at the weekend.
Gray has suffered a couple of modest results by his standards in recent weeks, but he won won Sunday’s International Rules Tour event in Leicester, coming out on top of a field of 96 players.
Gray was seeded into the last 64 when he beat Tony Bayes 6-1 before he came out on top in two last frame thrillers. He pipped former Under 15 World Champion Cohen Bradford 6-5 and recorded the same scoreline against Wakefield’s Chris Hall.
That put Gray into the quarter-finals where he played his best pool to see off Peterborough’s Steve Singh 6-1. Another 6-5 win, this time against Doncaster’s Paul Silvester, followed in the semi-final before a 6-4 final victory against Coventry’s Mark White after a high quality contest.
Gray. who is the resident professional at the Bourne Snooker Centre, won £1,050 for his efforts. Gray said: “It was nice to get back to winning ways after a few average results in the last month that including losing in last 16 of an over 40 event at Braintree and losing in last 16 of an over 50 competition at Keighley., I also took a early loss the previous weekend in a Southern Series Tour Event at Hatfield, but recovered to win the plate competition.”