"Your so-called boss may own the clock that taunts you from the wall, but, my friends the hour is yours."

Yes, my friends, not only is the hour yours, so is this 2024 (plus a bit) crokinole year in review blog.

Like any quote torn from its context it’s quite flexible in the meaning one can draw from it. Its application to a desired justification is as malleable as double-bubble gum. And its meaning, at this moment, is to inspire a look back at 2024.

Now you are probably thinking, "shouldn’t this have been posted months ago?" My answer to you: I am, bravely of course, unencumbered by the passage of time. I am pushing the boundaries of not only calendar recognition, but also the norms of timing year in review analysis. Why should I let a simple thing like the adoption of the Gregorian calendar a mere not even 500 years ago, or the orbiting of the earth stop me from executing a good idea I had months ago?

Shouldn’t this have been posted before the end of 2024? Shouldn’t this have been posted before tournaments were played in 2025?

My answer: the blog gets written when the little spirit of crokinole penmanship crawls into my fingers to express its will. Should that not happen until a month(s) later, it is only greater evidence that I am an innovator.

And really, who’s to lose from a year in review blog written four months late? When I picked up Easter chocolate a week late it was 50% off and just as delicious! So too will be this blog.

The above quote, for those curious, is from a book in the thriller science-fiction television show Severance. If it wasn’t such a captivating show, then maybe I would have written this earlier. And with that extended prelude, on with the review.

International

The international crokinole scene was a lot harder to follow this year; that’s a good thing. I remember when knowing the results of one tournament would pretty much sum it all up. Even keeping up with the NCA is tough to do, which is where we’ll start.

The NCA’s announcement of a new tournament tiering structure has allowed the Tour to explode in events. Most of those new ones are coming from the USA with events in Texas, Missouri, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Florida, New York, California, and the Carolinas. The new tour stops have caused the stock to rise of a few Americans who have been frequenting the events.

To name only a few, Ryan Buhr, Jamie Harter, Darin Van Gammeren and Brian Ruckdeschel have been previously unknown or lesser known and racked up some high finishes.

Also of note in the new events that popped up was the appearance of Antonio Cuaresma in the Brooklyn Doubles Championship. Cuaresma has been promoting crokinole in Spain for a few years and attended the 2022 UK Championships and the 2023 World Championships previously. His journey to Brooklyn was his most successful crokinole trip, winning the title with partner Jose Gonzalez.

Exciting news out of USA in the past year and a bit as well is the emergence of two new crokinole tours, the Northeast Crokinole Tour and the Southeast Crokinole Circuit. It will be exciting to see which competitors rise to the top in those respective tours during their first season.

In Hungary there’s a couple new competitors who have found their way to the top. There are still names we’ll remember like Krisztián Berzlánovich, Árpád Lonsták and Péter Ladányi. But taking the two big Hungarian tournaments in 2024 was a new name, Ádám Huszárik. He won both the World Cup and Hungarian Championships, defeating Berzlánovich in the final, while another new name Nikolett Huszárik finished in the top four in both events.

At the World Cup the reigning Dutch Champions, Joert Edink and Sander Brugman took the doubles title. They’ve been on a roll after coming away from 2024 with the Belgian Championship for the first time. And the duo that’s dubbed themselves the Roaring Twenties will be in competition at the 2025 World Championships.

Crokinole UK completed its first season in 2024, and is now well nearing the completion of its second season and it continues to be a great success. Events in the UK first were a neat spectacle to see Brian Cook back in competitive action and a winner of the first two editions of the UK Championships in 2022 and 2023. He hasn’t been as active since the Tour began, but the level of competition has certainly risen to give Cook a tough time when he is competing.

Tom Curry won 4 events on the 2023-2024 Tour to win the Tour title, including winning the 2024 UK Championships. This season his success has continued, winning 3 events (out of the 5 total events so far). Steve Burrows has played in 2 events and won them both, and is the only one who can catch Curry in the season standings this year. Mike Ray currently sits in a solid position to finish among the top 3 on the Tour.

Not included in the UK Tour standings, but still an event of prestige is the UK Doubles Championship which was won by the Hungarian team of Árpád Lonsták and Nikolett Huszárik.

There’s only one event left in the 2024-2025 Tour and it will be the 2025 UK Championships happening just one week before the World Championships.

In case you missed it

Outside of the pure realm of competition there was a lot of interesting crokinole stuff happening throughout 2024.

A tremendous analysis and description of crokinole was written by Russell Samora of The Pudding. It easily earns the title of best crokinole explainer of the year.

The best data visualization of the year has to go to Shawn Hagarty. He has created his own computer program that allows him to track shot-by-shot crokinole statistics and has published them all on his tableau page. As I have nibbled around such a project for the last five years and not produced anything tangible, I feel confident in expressing that Hagarty’s work is tremendous.

Years ago Ron Langill took a vacation to Cuba and came back with a fantastic story about coming upon a crokinole club there. The story was so fantastic eventually people realized it might have been written more for humour than to describe a factual event. Langill was seemingly inspired from a trip to the Dominican Republic, because soon after another similar sounding story was regaled. Lately Langill has been recapping historic events in crokinole that have involved The Hollies, strongman Louis Cyr, a Babe Ruth imitator, and most recently a crokinole board placed under the curling ice at the 2006 Olympics.

There’s a quote I love from a 1915 novel by George Fitch that reads, ”When crokinole was introduced to Homeburg, some twenty odd years ago, the kerosene wagon had to make an extra mid-week trip.” I love how illustrative that quote is of the time when crokinole was a new game that caused tremendous excitement. It’s hard to believe there was a time before household electricity when people didn’t really have a good reason to stay up past the setting of the sun. That was until crokinole came along, and all of the sudden everyone’s lighting expenses doubled.

Today people still describe crokinole as a great game you can play when the power is out. That was tested at the Ontario Doubles Crokinole Championship this year when the municipal hydro operations had the power cut to the church for about the first 30 minutes of the planned tournament schedule. Tournament organizers decided to wait for the lights to come back on.

In the media world, 20 years after first doing a short segment about the World Crokinole Championship (one which got me into the competitive scene), TVO returned to do another short segment on the event. And in the podcasting world a duo in the UK has created the Hogan’s Alley podcast to give crokinole fans two podcasts to listen to as Andrew Hutchinson’s Pink Shirt podcast continues in its third season.

Simon Dowrick created a tremendously exciting new tournament called The Crokinole Cup. The event modelled itself after the football (aka soccer) World Cup, with players arranging matches against each other over the course of a few weeks, culminating in knock-out matches for the title. It was one of a kind and was capped off with a really exciting final match which I won’t spoil if you have a free hour. Other matches from the event can be viewed on the Crokinole Cup YouTube channel.

In YouTube/video space 2024 was the first year that I, CrokinoleCentre, had pulled back on my media obligations. I note that in my absence crokinole’s popularity has only went up. Coincidence?

But to my great pleasure competitive crokinole is still being broadcast thanks to the efforts of TraceyBoards and Garret Tracey, who have picked up the baton and jumped on a jet pack. Consistently Garret is putting out more videos in a more timely fashion then I ever did, which is no easy feat, and is helping to continue to document the story of competitive crokinole.

Speaking of the story of competitive crokinole: what an amazing year it was for excitement!

Narrow Margins, Similar Results

The quick, too-long-didn’t-read, recap of the 2024 crokinole year is that the same people won, despite the margins being so close.

At the World Championships, Justin and Fred Slater defended their 2023 world championship title with another win. The 2024 margin of victory was a single point over two different teams (Reinman/Conrad, Hutchinson/Tracey). It was their 5th world title, and the third time their world title was won by just one point.

On the singles side, Connor Reinman also defended his 2023 world title, winning 6-2, 5-3 against Josh Carrafiello in the final. It’s worth pointing out the Reinman and the Slaters won not only the 2023 and 2024 world championships, but also 2022 NCA Players Championship, which I had hoped would be viewed on the same level as the worlds, but I don’t think it quite got there. Still though, in a different world these individuals could possibly be three-time defending world champions.

In other doubles events we saw Jason and Ray Beierling win in Owen Sound, then Josh Carrafiello and Ron Langill win the Ontario Championships, and Andrew Hutchinson and Jeremy Tracey win the US Open. The parity of results certainly adds a lot of intrigue into the upcoming World Championships.

The Emergence of Crokinole’s Big 4

If I had gotten around to writing this at the close of 2024 I would have had much more confidence in this segment. Throughout 2024 we saw a phenomenon emerge that was extremely exciting from a spectator point of view. This was the combined dominance and competitiveness of four players in the singles game: Justin Slater, Connor Reinman, Andrew Hutchinson and Josh Carrafiello.

Throughout 2024 here’s how they finished in singles events featuring more than one of them:

• Elmira - 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 7th
• Chatham - 1st, 2nd
• London - 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 6th
• Ontario Singles - 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th
• World - 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th
• Turtle Island - 1st, 2nd, 4th
• Belleville - 1st, 3rd, 13th

That’s only one event where they collectively didn’t cover the top two spots, and only three of the events did any of them finish outside the top 4. Into 2025 their collective performance hasn’t been as dominant, but it is still very impressive:

• Elmira - 1st, 3rd, 4th, 11th
• Windsor - 1st, 2nd
• Crokinole Cup - 1st, 3rd
• London - 2nd, 3rd, 5th
• Ontario Singles - 1st, 3rd, 5th

Now why is this so much fun? I find there’s something about the entertainment of individual sports that is lacking when there is either too few players who are dominant, or when too many players are viewed with a realistic shot to win.

Not so much anymore, but I used to watch a lot of tennis. There was a two year stretch in the early 2000s when 8 different players won the 8 grand slams that took place on the men’s side. It was pretty hard to build up much excitement when there were more people who had a chance to win then I could keep together in my head. And later on there was a stretch in the mid 2000s (Federer) and in the mid 2010s (Djokovic) when the game was dominated pretty much by one player, to the point that every opponent felt like a massive underdog.

Now some like the randomness of sports, and the feeling like anyone can win. And some will say they like the predictability and the feeling that they are watching greatness before them: like Usain Bolt or Michael Jordan. But neither of those are for me. On one hand the outcome feels as interesting as a coin toss, and on the other the outcome can feel pre-determined.

There was a sweet spot in the middle though where men’s tennis was extremely fun to watch, and the game had four household names: Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, Murray. You could count on them to make the semifinals, and you could count on them to have spectacular matches against each other.

That’s where we were with Slater, Reinman, Hutchinson and Carrafiello. You could count on them to make it into the late stages of tournaments, and they frequently produced great crokinole matches.

And from a spectator standpoint it creates a lot of fun having a big 4 dynamic. You can craft story lines in your mind about their respective rivalries, and pick and re-pick favourites depending on the moment. It’s easy to sell the story to prospective fans:

• Slater is the established king of crokinole, with everyone gunning for his crown.
• Reinman is the clutch contender who is theoretically on level ground with the rest, but has managed to come out win the win in big events.
• Hutchinson is the hard-luck player. Long ago he racked up 5th place finishes, then he got over that hump only to encounter a brutal series of losses to Reinman at every turn, and now having gotten that monkey off his back, he wants to win every event.
• Carrafiello is the outsider, still not even two full years removed from his cues to fingers switch, and already knocking on the door of the players with much more fingers experience that he.

See? You can tell I’m having fun.

And in 2024 it was the first time I can recall having a big 4 in crokinole.

Before the NCA there was Brian Cook and Ray Beierling a clear step ahead of the competition. They were eventually joined by Justin Slater and Jon Conrad, and they did sweep the top 4 at the 2012 Worlds and 2013 Turtle Island. But the combination of those four never did get a good chance to establish itself with Slater out of province most of the year, and Cook later moving out of country.

After that there was never quite the same dominance and competition at the top. Justin Slater did most of the winning in the years that followed, with Ray Beierling also racking up quite a few, with interruptions from Conrad, Nathan Walsh and Jason Beierling.

Note that I said I would have felt more confident in this Big 4 declaration at the end of 2024, because two other names are popping onto the same stage of the established four. Those are Jason Beierling, who won in London and finished second in Elmira, and Devon Fortino, who finished second in Belleville and Ontario.

Should we start to call it a Big 6? I don’t think the delineation is as strong yet. In the CrokinoleCentre ELO rankings the Slater/Reinman/Hutchinson/Carrafiello quartet continue to have a sizeable gap on the rest of the competition, but Beierling and Fortino are getting closer to joining them.

The 20s

If you missed it, in September I wrote a recap of the Belleville event, where the old 20s world record was beaten. Additionally, a record for the highest average 20s score across a group was shattered (previously set at 116, now reset to 133), while 7 players registered a 20s inside the top 13 all-time performances.

The Belleville tournament was an anomaly. Or at least it seemed like one until we got into these 2025 tournaments. In the 2025 Elmira event in January, 3 more players registered 20s scores inside the top 10 all-time. Then at the 2025 Ontario Singles Championship, 3 more players not only set 20s scores inside of the top 10, they all beat the previous world record.

Brian Cook held the world record with an average of 153.3 20s over 10 games at the 2011 Hamilton event. Justin Slater took the record with an average of 164.5 at the 2019 Hamilton event, and then reset it in Belleville at 165.6.

At the Ontario Singles Championship Shawn Hagarty recorded 168.9, and that was only good enough for 3rd on the day.

The new world record is now jointly shared between Josh Carrafiello and Andrew Hutchinson, both who averaged 181.1 over 10 games. The full list can be viewed here. It’s probably not a surprise that the highest average 20s score across a group was also set, with the 10 players in their group averaging 142.2 20s.

There sure are a lot more 20s than there used to be. The Ontario Singles Crokinole Championship was the last event that had a 20s record older than 5 years, previously held by Nathan Walsh with 138 in 2013 (there were nine 20s scores higher than that this year). And now there’s only one tournament left with a 20s record that’s more than two years old, which is the Turtle Island event where Connor Reinman holds the record due to a score in 2019.

What could possibly explain this recent sudden deluge of 20s scoring?

Boards? Discs? Wax? Players?

I’ll leave aside the discussion on what amount of 20s scoring is too much for crokinole, and what could be done if that was the case for another day. For now, I’ll just say, that’s a lot of friggin 20s!

World Crokinole Championships

Just a few words on this because I promised I’d help preview the tournament on an upcoming podcast instead.

I’m really excited for this event. The competitiveness in Doubles competitions in the last year puts a few teams into the mix, and for the first time this year there will be a championship match to determine the World Champion.

And in the singles, the favourites would be among the six names I’ve mentioned above, but many other names have had those flashes of brilliance this year that suggest their skill is good enough to win should it all come together on the day. Additionally, there are a number of international players signed up for this year’s event that could be competitive as well, which always spices things up!

I think it’s likely in the upcoming World Crokinole Championship prognostications that you’ll hear a general consensus that it’s getting harder and harder to win the WCC every year, and that there’s more strong players in crokinole than there ever was before.

I think the first part is true, but the second part is not.

From 2004-2011 Brian Cook made the World Championship final every year. It feels extremely unlikely this feat will be repeated or neared in the coming years. There was a span of 6 tournaments in a row that Justin Slater won between 2015-2016, that too feels extremely difficult to do today.

There’s generally just too many strong players willing to attend most of the crokinole tournaments available on the calendar. But I don’t think that necessarily means there’s more strong players than there used to be.

This will sound unusual to some, but in the past there used to be lots of great crokinole players who would not attend crokinole tournaments. I recall facing some of these players from the Preston, St. Jacobs and Cameron Heights crokinole clubs that I’d never seen before at the Schneider Haus event. They would be very strong players, all capable of finishing in the top 10 at the World Championships, and maybe even making the final and winning it. But they didn’t come to the WCC because they believed Joe Fulop or Brian Cook was better than them, and that they couldn’t win.

I’m not going to pretend to know their motives, but just to pick a couple examples, former World Champions Derek Kidnie, Al Fuhr and Bruce Hartung didn’t attend the World Championships at all in the 2010s. Surely their skill, even if diminished from their peak, was still strong enough for a decent showing.

I’d say it’s harder to win the WCC, undoubtedly, because pretty much all of the top contenders are showing up these years. And it makes for great excitement.

But crokinole has been around for a long time, and it stands to reason there was a lot of great players in the past as well.