Trinidad and To­ba­go’s Aaron Raghoo­nanan etched his name in­to the his­to­ry books yet again by win­ning the Dutch Caribbean Cham­pi­onship, which was held at Jong Bonaire com­mu­ni­ty cen­tre in Bonaire from April 3-6. Just as he did last year, Raghoo­nanan came through the tour­na­ment un­de­feat­ed, win­ning all sev­en of his match­es.

On his way to the fi­nal, the re­peat cham­pi­on beat Bonaire’s David Everts 7-3 and Cu­ra­cao’s Shan­dro Paula al­so 7-3. Those two wins put him di­rect­ly in­to the knock­out round of 32, where the race in­creased by one from a race to sev­en to the first to eight.

In his third match, he need­ed 14 frames to de­feat Charles Vos 8-6 and then went hill/hill against An­drew Mer­cera, be­fore pre­vail­ing 8-7, both play­ers from the host coun­try. His quar­ter­fi­nal match was a re­peat of last year’s fi­nal against Jorge Petroc­chi. Raghoo­nanan made light work of the en­counter de­feat­ing Petroc­chi eight-nil.

His next op­po­nent, Cu­ra­cao’s Shamir Tremus Sein­t­je was one of the re­gion’s ti­tle hope­fuls but met an in-form Raghoo­nanan who was in­tent on go­ing all the way. Sein­t­je took a one-nil lead but fell be­hind 1-4 be­fore claw­ing his way back to make the score 5-6. The Cu­ra­cao top play­er stayed close at 6-7 but the T&T cueist was just too strong and even­tu­al­ly won the en­counter eight frames to six. The last two match­es of this year’s tour­na­ment fol­lowed a sim­i­lar script to that of 2024 where the semi­fi­nal was more com­pet­i­tive than the ti­tle match. Barat Ibrahim, who placed 34th last year, was al­so un­de­feat­ed go­ing in­to the fi­nal.

He was, how­ev­er, no match for Raghoo­nanan, who won the en­counter nine frames to four. The now two-time cham­pi­on be­came the sec­ond play­er to re­peat as cham­pi­on af­ter Aru­ba’s Jorz­in­ho Everon com­plet­ed the feat on home soil in the in­au­gur­al tour­na­ment in 2022 and again in 2023.

The vic­to­ry was some­what bit­ter­sweet for Raghoo­nanan. Ear­li­er on Sun­day, his for­mer team­mate and long­time friend Dilip Deo aka Pep­per was laid to rest. Deo, a for­mer na­tion­al cham­pi­on, suf­fered a car­diac ar­rest and passed away on April 2 , one day af­ter the T&T squad left for the tour­na­ment.

Raghoo­nanan ded­i­cat­ed his win to his fall­en friend.

Raghoo­nanan led an eight-play­er con­tin­gent from Trinidad and To­ba­go, which fea­tured Sham Jagerssar, Ravi Goorah, Al­lan James, Shiv­anand Bhag­wat, Ja­son Khan, Jesse Gan­garam and Marouf Mo­hammed. Jagerssar, Goorah and Bhag­wat joined Raghoo­nanan in the last 32 and de­spite some close match­es, could not ad­vance fur­ther.

In all, there were 72 play­ers from nine coun­tries. Host coun­try Bonaire had the most with 26, Aru­ba 10, Cu­ra­cao, T&T and Guyana had eight play­ers each, St Maarten 5, Bar­ba­dos 4, St Eu­sta­tius and Suri­name 2 and 1 re­spec­tive­ly.

This was the first tour­na­ment in over ten years in Bonaire.

Mar­vin Ab­dul, pres­i­dent of the Bonaire Bil­liards Fed­er­a­tion (FEBI­BO), said he was ex­treme­ly hap­py and proud of how smooth­ly things went over the four-day pe­ri­od. He added that a lot of hard work went in­to mak­ing the tour­na­ment hap­pen and want­ed to thank all the play­ers and vol­un­teers for mak­ing it the huge suc­cess it was.

The con­tin­gent from T&T was ex­pect­ed back in­to the coun­try on Tues­day night.