Eight Deuce · Tournament #50
Lance Cain Wins the Fiftieth
Eric Denny takes the Player of the Year, and nine different men won a tournament in 2025.
Lance Cain won the league’s fiftieth tournament. Four knockouts, fourteen minutes heads-up against Lee Ugarte, and $340 — his third Eight Deuce win and third career win, all of them here.
The fiftieth also brought back a name from a long way back. Joe Johnson won the Annual in 2008, 2009 and 2016 — three of them, a record he shares with Josh Reel — and had never played an Eight Deuce tournament. On Friday he played his first and finished fourth for $130.
Lee took $315 with four knockouts of his own. Joe Rottinghaus, playing his first Eight Deuce tournament too, made four and finished third for $175.
Where the money went
| Player | Prize | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lance Cain | $340 |
| 2 | Lee Ugarte | $315 |
| 3 | Joe Rottinghaus | $175 |
| 4 | Joe Johnson | $130 |
The title
Eric Denny finished twelfth on the night and won the Player of the Year on 402.45, sixty-nine clear of Lee Ugarte. It is the second-highest total the league has produced, behind Lee’s 417.67 in 2022, and it is Eric’s first Eight Deuce title.
He is not short of the other kind. He won the Canterberry League Championship in 2009-10 and again in 2019-20, so this is his third season title across the two leagues — and no one else has more than two.
The undercard
Angela Cain bubbled in fifth, one place behind the man who won it. Josh Maida played his first Eight Deuce tournament and went sixteenth.
Jeff Ferguson, who won last month at the sixty-fifth attempt, rebought and was the first player out.
The bigger picture
Ten tournaments and nine different winners — a figure no season has come close to. Only Eric Denny won twice.
The money set a record too: $11,380 in regular-season prizes, more than eighteen hundred above any previous season. Six tournaments cleared $1,100 in a row between January and June, March topped the year at $535 for its winner and April paid $520, and forty-five rebuys went in across the year against seventeen last season.
The Annual and the Tournament of Champions follow in November.
| Player of the Year — final | Points | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Eric Denny | 402.45 |
| 2 | Lee Ugarte | 333.33 |
| 3 | Lance Cain | 306.27 |
| 4 | Warren Mervin | 278.22 |
| 5 | Justin Vaughn | 272.80 |
| 6 | Shawn Miller | 268.64 |
| 7 | Jeff Ferguson | 257.74 |
| 8 | Juan Lopez | 208.49 |
| 9 | Brian Connolly | 203.10 |
| 10 | Steve McLean | 202.66 |
Eight Deuce #50 — Friday, October 17, 2025. 17 entrants, 1 rebuy, four paid from a $960 prize pool. Final tournament of the 2025 season and the fiftieth the league has held; Player of the Year counts each player’s best eight scores.