Snooker tournament pots £1,000 in prizes

SARK residents will be given two opportunities to revisit their misspent youth in the coming weeks.

Sark Building Company is sponsoring an open snooker tournament with a first prize of £500 and this will open today, with the finals on 17 February.

It's the first such tournament to be held at The Red Room – an up-market snooker and pool hall – at what used to be Polly's Restaurant, adjacent to the Bel Air Inn. Already the entry list has closed at 32 players.

Tournament organiser Peter Cunneen told me that players had seeded themselves according to their own assessment of their ability and will be divided into four groups of eight. They will play each of the others in their group once and the top two in each group will then progress to quarter final, semi final and final stages.

Apart from the £500 first prize, the runner-up will receive £250 and the third-placed player will get £125. There will also be £125 on offer for the player making the highest break of the tournament.

'It's the Sark season for some evening entertainment for residents, with the very popular quiz at the Island Hall and other activities, so Sark Building Company have added this tournament to the list and the entrant number was very quickly fully subscribed,' he said.

That's not surprising with £1,000 in prize money on offer.

It's a nice little earner for a few evenings away from the television set.

I know enough about snooker to lay up the balls correctly and that's about it. I know even less about the second opportunity for residents to demonstrate that they don't spend all their time crocheting and sorting sock drawers.

It's what's called a Texas Hold 'em Poker Tournament and it's at the Island Hall on 28 January. Again there are cash prizes – for the top six players – and the money raised will be divided between the Sark Football Club and an island charity of the winner's choice.

There is a £20 entry fee but that includes chips – the sort you play with rather than eat – a drink from the bar and a buffet. I'm told there's a maximum of two 'rebuys' per player – I included that in the hope that someone knows what I'm talking about, because quite frankly I've never come across that expression before.

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I had an email recently asking if non-Sark residents could contribute to the appeal fund to restore the First World War memorial window in St Peter's Anglican Church, for which £6,000 is needed.

The answer is an emphatic 'yes'. The organisers, the island's ex-service men and women, will take cash or cheques from virtually anyone and it wouldn't surprise me that they'd bite hands off for foreign currency also.

Appeal organiser Reg Guille told me recently that they were almost half-way towards their target and as I write I have just been told that there will be a specific fund-raising event at the Island Hall in the near future. More on that next week.

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In the meantime, Chief Pleas will have held its Christmas meeting by the time this is published. Other than to say that it will probably be over before lunch, there's not a lot else I can forecast.

However, one agenda item caught my eye – the planned appointment of a former Ministry of Justice civil servant to review Sark's administration at a fee of £1,000 a day. If it means telling Chief Pleas that it should take far fewer than 18 committees/sub-committees to run this island, there are enough residents with the expertise to tell them that for nothing.

One example – we have a Sark Influenza (Human) Pandemic Committee and, with nine people on it, it's one of the biggest. We've also got a Medical Committee and a Public Health Committee. Need I say more?

The email address for comment is fallesark@sark.net.