Paul Coffman

Two trophies sit behind Paul Coffman: the Canterberry League Championship in 2015-16 and the Annual in 2021, the first Annual ever played in the fall. That second one took him eight attempts and cost him two runner-up finishes on the way, in 2015 and 2016.

He is the most patient closer this league has. His heads-up matches run an average of 24:46, longer than any other player's — and in the Canterberry years the figure was 30:58. When Paul gets you one-on-one, settle in.

The results say the same thing in a different way. 7 wins across all events he has entered, against 11 second places. Eighteen trips to heads-up and he has come out the wrong side of eleven of them. Nobody has finished runner-up in the Annual more often: three times, in 2015, 2016 and again in 2023.

The best of the wins was Canterberry #71 in June 2015 — fourteen players, nine of them busted by his own hand. He strung four Canterberry wins together between 2015 and 2017, then went fifty-one months without one before #4 in April 2021 broke it open. The Annual followed seven months after that.

He has played 127 events for 32 cashes and $5,647 in career prize money, and there is nothing timid about how he gets there — 20 rebuys, third-most in the league. Paul plays to win the tournament, not to survive it, and twice that has ended with hardware.