Tinian ruled the 10th Marianas Friendship Cup held over the weekend at the Tinian Dynasty Hotel & Casino.<\/p>\n
Mark Ma anchored Tinian\u2019s triumph in the annual tournament, which featured singles and doubles competitions.<\/p>\n
Ma won the singles event beating fellow Tinian player Luke Lu in the tiebreak. Both Tinian players finished the round-robin singles with perfect 5-0 records. <\/p>\n
Another Tinian player, Charlie Cheng, settled for third defeating Saipan\u2019s Su Yong Dong and Jean Shi in the tiebreak. All three players recorded identical 3-2 records. Su Yong was relegated to fourth, while Shi placed fifth.<\/p>\n
Making it to the Top 10 were Liang Wei Bin (2-3), Robin Lu (2-3), Budhi Gurung (1-4), Guam\u2019s Hisamitsu Hamamoto (1-4), and Marianas Amateur Table Tennis Association president Steven Lim (0-5).<\/p>\n
Ma teamed up with Liang Wei in the doubles event and finished with a clean 4-0 record to beat four other pairs.<\/p>\n
Robin and Luke Lu had a 3-1 slate to place second, while Gurung and Charlie Cheng ended in third placed with a 2-2 record.<\/p>\n
Jean and Su Yong and the tandem of Lim and Xu Ming Tian were in fourth and fifth places, respectively, with their 1-3 and 0-4 records.<\/p>\n
Exhibition singles matches were held after the regular tournament with Sumio Yamamoto thumping Luke Lu, 3-0. Yamamoto also played against Ma with the former winning anew, 3-2.<\/p>\n
Prior to the Marianas Cup, MATTA through the help of Tinian hosted the Large Ball Ping-Pong Tournament Friday with Saipan and Tinian players challenging 12 Japanese visitors.<\/p>\n
Japan had four squads for the team event with the Yamamoto-led Japan 2 winning the team competition with a 5-0 record. Other members of the winning team were Hisamitsu Hamamoto and Kimiko Koike.<\/p>\n
Asian Games gold medalist Hiroyuki Abe led Japan 1 to a second-place finish with their 4-1 slate. Abe teamed up with Mitsuko Yamaguchi and Terumi Morino.<\/p>\n
Saipan was represented by Gurung, Shi, and Su Yong and finished third, followed by Mixed, Japan 3, and Japan 4.<\/p>\n
Japan 3 was composed of Masuyuki and Yasuk Murai and Kyoko Akita, while members of team Japan 4 were Takashi Sawada, Kimiko Konishi, and Junko Kanemura.<\/p>\n
The Mixed squad had Charlie Cheng, Lim, and Xu Ming.<\/p>\n
The pair of Koike and Sumio Yamamoto had a clean 9-0 record to finish on top of the field in the doubles event.<\/p>\n
Abe and Akita finished second with an 8-1 record, followed by Gurung and Su Yong (7-2), Yamaguchi and Hisamitsu Hamamoto (6-3), Shi and Xu Ming (5-4), Kanemura and Ma (4-5), Morino and Cheng (36), the Murais (2-7), Liang Wei and Bright Fu Liang (2-7), and Sawada and Lim (0-9).<\/p>\n
Medals were awarded to the top three placers only in the team division of the Large Ball. Marianas Cup Top 3 finishers in the singles and doubles divisions also received medals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tinian ruled the 10th Marianas Friendship Cup held over the weekend at the Tinian Dynasty Hotel & Casino.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-127128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}