Mika wins the All Japan Championships 2008

We just came back from our weekend trip to Seoul when Sae-chan called us and invited us to dinner with some of the worlds finest pool professionals. During the weekend that we were away they held the 41st All Japan Championships in Amagasaki with lots of international stars flying in to fight for the title.

Mika The Finnish Ice Man was winning the finals 11-2 against Philippine Ronnie The Volcano Alcano and was in a good mood for partying a bit.

Amongst others Charlie Williams, the lovely Yu Ram Cha and Rodney The Rocket Morris came along for some tasty Okonomiyaki dinner and celebration. After the dinner they went back to their hotel while Mika still felt like celebrating some more.

Mika had some flier of a little cozy looking bar/club that he wanted to check out so Itsuki and me drove him there and joined him for some friendly games of pool. Mika was showing his Finnish heritage and gave an impressive demonstration of how much beer a man can drink while still looking completely sober … it did however show a bit in his pool game, missing a couple of positions. Mika clearly wasn’t focusing on the pool, he just wanted to chill out and celebrate. In a quick race to 3 my wife managed to almost win him 3-2 … which would have been an awesome motivation for her to keep working harder on her pool game!

Later that night we started playing team games for drinks, us 3 against 3 of the clubs female professionals (well, thinking about it i think only 2 of them have been pro’s). That was a lot of fun and the games were actually pretty close. Luckily we still managed to win and therefore had plenty of free drinks.

Mika was working his magic and almost managed to get lucky with one of the women in the club. Unfortunately time wasn’t on his side and at around 4.30am in the morning we called it a night and dropped him back at his hotel, giving him a couple of hours sleep to sober up before his flight to the Philipines World Team showdown.