Season Review · 2025
The Best Year the League Has Had
Nine different winners, $11,560 in prizes, twenty-five players — and Eric Denny took the title and the Annual.
Every number that describes an Eight Deuce season went up in 2025. The league paid out $11,560 across ten tournaments, more than two thousand above any previous year. Twenty-five players took part, six more than any season before. And nine different men won a tournament, where the record had been eight.
The champion
Eric Denny played all ten, won two of them, and finished on 402.45 — sixty-nine clear of Lee Ugarte and the second-highest total the league has produced. He led it in money with $1,475 and in knockouts with 28, and in November he won the Annual as well.
It is his first Player of the Year, but not his first season title: he was Canterberry League Champion in 2009-10 and again in 2019-20. Three across the two leagues is more than anyone else has.
Ten tournaments, nine winners
| Winner | Date | Field | First prize | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #41 | Lee Ugarte | January 10 | 18 | $460 |
| #42 | Jeff Holderman | February 14 | 15 | $470 |
| #43 | Warren Mervin | March 14 | 17 | $535 |
| #44 | Brian Connolly | April 18 | 17 | $580 |
| #45 | Eric Denny | May 9 | 15 | $470 |
| #46 | Justin Vaughn | June 20 | 16 | $470 |
| #47 | Mike McEvoy | July 11 | 16 | $420 |
| #48 | Eric Denny | August 8 | 15 | $405 |
| #49 | Jeff Ferguson | September 5 | 15 | $455 |
| #50 | Lance Cain | October 17 | 17 | $340 |
The first seven tournaments produced seven different winners, which had never happened; the previous best start was five before somebody repeated. Only Eric Denny won twice.
Two long waits end
Jeff Ferguson played his first Eight Deuce tournament in May 2021 and finished second in it. He was second in the 2022 Annual, and second again in March of this year. Counting Canterberry he had entered sixty-four tournaments without winning one. In September he won #49, and in November he was runner-up in the Tournament of Champions — a fourth second place in a marquee event to go with the win.
Brian Connolly did it the other way round. He went ninth in his first Eight Deuce tournament in January, was first out of his second in February, and won his third in April — taking $580, which is still the largest first prize any Friday night has paid.
The final standings
| Player of the Year — 2025 final | Played | Points | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Eric Denny | 10 | 402.45 |
| 2 | Lee Ugarte | 7 | 333.33 |
| 3 | Lance Cain | 8 | 306.27 |
| 4 | Warren Mervin | 8 | 278.22 |
| 5 | Justin Vaughn | 8 | 272.80 |
| 6 | Shawn Miller | 9 | 268.64 |
| 7 | Jeff Ferguson | 6 | 257.74 |
| 8 | Juan Lopez | 8 | 208.49 |
| 9 | Brian Connolly | 7 | 203.10 |
| 10 | Steve McLean | 7 | 202.66 |
New faces and old ones
Twenty-five players is six more than any previous season, and the additions came from both directions. Andrew Shier, Canterberry League Champion in 2017-18, played his first Eight Deuce tournament in February after five years away and bubbled in fifth. Joe Johnson, who has won three Annuals, turned up for the league’s fiftieth tournament in October and finished fourth in it. Sean Denny, Joe Rottinghaus and Josh Maida all played their first.
The Annual and the Tournament of Champions
Eric Denny won the nineteenth Annual on November 15 for $580, making eight of the day’s fourteen knockouts and then finishing it in under two minutes heads-up — the quickest end an Annual has ever had. Only Jeff Holderman, in 2023, had previously held the season title and the Annual in the same year.
Warren Mervin won the Tournament of Champions a week later for $620, the biggest prize the league pays outside the Annual.
What the year showed
The rebuy is now the engine of the prize pool: 45 went in across the season, against seventeen in 2024 and twenty-three in 2021. Six tournaments in a row cleared $1,100 between January and June, March put a record $1,360 on the table and April paid a record $580 to the winner.
The tournaments also got longer. March ran five hours and fifty-four minutes, the longest the league has played, and five of the ten passed five hours.
Eric Denny and Rick Mazza played all ten. Add the Annual and the Tournament of Champions and 2025 paid out $14,000. The sixth season begins in January.
2025 — the fifth Eight Deuce season. 10 tournaments, 25 players, $11,560 in regular-season prize money. Player of the Year counts each player’s best eight scores. The Annual and the Tournament of Champions are separate events and do not count toward it.