Brian Cumming won his final block game to maintain his undefeated record and earn a bye to the semi-finals. Stuart Lawrence beat Bob Cherry in the tiebreaker — a game of one-ball — to claim the #2 position in that block. His reward was a quarter-final match with top seed Danny Huneycutt, who lost his final block game to Jeff Soo, then the one-ball tiebreak game to Robert Hurst.

In the quarter-finals, played as single-game matches, Lawrence beat Huneycutt, and Hurst beat Cherry. Hurst won the first game against Cumming in the semi-finals, and was in torrid shooting form, at one point hitting five long shots in a row. But some costly errors in games two and three allowed Cumming to advance to the finals, looking for back-to-back NC Open titles. The other semi-final has been pegged down. Soo won the first game; the current situation in game two is Soo’s clips on peg and 4-back, Lawrence’s on penult and box, with Lawrence having just missed the lift and all balls near corner IV.