Season 12 HRT Champion

Season 12 HRT Champion – Congrats to Pat Alan on winning the HRT championship in his 3rd finals appearance! Yes Alan. Am I wrong?

How has no one coined this nickname before now for Mr. Bassett?? From this point forward he will be known as Alan. 

On a serious note though… the HRT finals matchup was pretty legit, aside from the fact that Jerry was blacked out again! There were a couple last ball hundo’s and Jerry found himself in a pickle on lane 3. The best of 5 series was tied 1-1 and Jerry needed a 630. Having drawn his name in the side pool, I was rooting a little more for Jerry (sorry I’m not sorry Alan) so I gave him some advice. He asked what he should do, save his hundos or go for the win. I laid out the options: go for it now, or use hundos on lane 1 which he doesn’t typically roll hundos on. To compromise, I said shoot for the hundo on the first ball and if you hit it go for 6, otherwise just waste the frame and move on. Even a tie is a win at that point. So what does Jerry do, he hits the first ball and it commits him to hundos. Unfortunately he only hit 4, so yes he wasted his hundo frame.

I am always curious what other people would do in these types of scenarios. If you know you can’t hit hundo’s on Lane 1, do you go for it on Lane 3? Or do you waste the frame and try hundo’s anyways on Lane 1? If I had to give Jerry advice again, I would give him the same advice because the probability of him hitting 6 on Lane 3 is higher than hitting 4 on Lane 1. If match 4 started on Lane 2, I would have advised Jerry to waste the frame and use hundo’s to take game 4 and force a 5th game. But even at that, he would get beat on Lane 1.

At the end of the day I don’t think the outcome would have been any different because Pat Alan wasn’t going to be denied a HRT title a 3rd straight time. Congrats again!