In crokinole country

CBC

14 hours ago

At the World Crokinole Championship in Ontario, a Canadian math prof is vying to take back the title from the current American champ.
Justin Slater, right, shakes hands with Connor Reinman after being knocked out in the semifinal round of the World Crokinole Championship in Tavistock, Ont., on June 1, 2024. Reinman went on to win the tournament — his second in a row. On Saturday, Slater — who has five world titles — will try to reclaim his crown. Evan Mitsui/CBC
By Evan Mitsui Jun. 6, 2025
Justin Slater may be one of the most dominant competitors you've never heard of. His game is crokinole and, on Saturday, the Canadian will attempt to reclaim his crown from American upstart Connor Reinman, who's chasing his own place in history.
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The World Crokinole Championship will run — as it has for a quarter century — on the first Saturday of June in Tavistock, Ont., about 50 kilometres from Kitchener, near the spiritual heartland of a game that's been played in this country longer than organized hockey.
Crokinole is a game where finger dexterity is key. It lands somewhere at the nexus of air hockey, pool and curling and is played on a wooden board with a shallow hole in the centre.
Players typically discover it at the family cottage as kids, then rediscover it as adults in the basement or shed. It pairs well with beer, but not at the highest levels of play.
The game is in the midst of a renaissance and competition at the world's toughest tournament has never been stiffer.
The defending champ
'It's the precision that drew me to it initially and then the strategy,' said Reinman, a day after clinching his second world championship in a row last June.
A graduate student at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music, Reinman, 28, has a head for numbers and compares the action of crokinole to billiards.
'You can see the physics playing out' when you line up a shot, he said over FaceTime from his home in Bloomington, Ind., where he and his now fiancée, Michelle Astorsdotter, (who competes in the recreational division) had returned after the tournament.
A numbers guy
Slater, 32, is an assistant professor of math and statistics at the University of Guelph. Like Reinman, he's a numbers guy and, like Reinman, started playing serious crokinole as a teenager.
'When I didn't want to do my calculus homework or whatever, I would sit at the kitchen table and just shoot 20s,' Slater said, seated across from a crokinole board set on his kitchen table in Guelph, Ont.
Scoring in crokinole is not dissimilar from darts or curling with points ascribed to concentric zones radiating out from the centre. A 20 is when a player sinks their piece in the centre hole. Right on the button. At the top echelon of competition, where Slater and Reinman play, competitors tend to sink 20s as if guided by magnets, seldom missing the mark.
Slater is the winningest player in competitive crokinole with five world titles to his name — more if you include the doubles trophies he has won with his father.
The Slater name dominates the leaderboard between 2015 and 2019. Only COVID could stop his run when competitions were cancelled from 2020 to 2022.
Another win is a chance to prove he's still got it. 'I was clearly the best for a while, not anymore though,' he said.
'It's cool to be the best at something, even if it's just crokinole.'
When tournaments resumed in 2023 Reinman emerged seemingly out of nowhere, first winning regional competitions then the world title back-to-back in 2023 and 2024. Now, faced with the possibility of a three-peat, Reinman is breathing rarefied air. Slater does not want that to happen. Their Canada-U.S. rivalry makes a win for either of them sweeter still.
A game older than hockey
Hockey may be Canada's game but crokinole's been around longer.
There are similar games played around the world, including carrom, developed in India in the mid-1800s and played on a square board. Crokinole historian Wayne Kelly, of Stratford, Ont., died in 2016 but not before addressing the game's origins in The Crokinole Book, which describes a game of the same name being played in Ontario farmhouses as far back as 1867. (The first game of organized hockey was played in 1875 in Montreal.)
And then there's Eckhardt Wettlaufer's 1876 board, on display at a museum in Kitchener, Ont., which every player knows and references as the oldest known crokinole artifact and proof of the game's Canadian provenance.
'It's Canada's game'
Origins aside, the game's popularity is rising and much of that interest is coming from south of the border at clubs like the Extra Pint, in Voorheesville, N.Y.
Club founder Jason Molloy's friendly games soon outgrew the garage and now, thanks largely to word-of-mouth and YouTube, Extra Pint has chapters across the East Coast and Texas. The U.S. Open, now in its fifth year, is hosted in Voorheesville, a small town like Tavistock.
'We take pride in Connor [Reinman],' Molloy said over the phone from his office in Albany County, N.Y. 'There is definitely a friendly rivalry between the American and Canadian players,' but, he added, 'Connor is a dual citizen so we joke that he's got to pick a side.'
Reinman, who even Slater will admit is the best player right now, is the son of a Canadian mother and learned the game visiting the family farm in Blyth, Ont.
'There's no question it's Canada's game,' Molloy said. 'The top 20 players are all Canadian but that means we've got nothing to lose. What's the goal? To beat the Canadians.'
The boardmaking market
When it comes to boardmaking, Canada, too, has the market cornered for quality, and the tournament boards are made at nearby Tracey Boards.
After a YouTube video went viral, 'We got more orders in three days than we usually got in a month," Jeremy Tracey said in his new boardmaking shop in Elmira, Ont. An apprentice of Willard Martin, who had been building boards in the region for three decades, Tracey hoped to hit 500 boards per year after hanging his own shingle at a smaller location in 2018.
Demand has been such that he's moving several times that volume and employs a staff that includes a full-time craftsman plus three sons, Reid, Nolan and Garret. Their mother keeps the books.
The growth in his business, Tracey said, is mainly through word-of-mouth and boots on the ground, specifically his (though he prefers flip-flops). He spends weeks on the road, travelling to tradeshows like PAX in the U.S. and Australia, where he hosts tournaments for beginners. Many place orders for boards on the spot.
'It's so fun, they get hooked. It snowballs from there.'
A sold-out championship
Back in Tavistock, this year's championship tournament sold out months ago and will include 400 players. 'An all-time record,' according to organizer Nathan Walsh.
Of those competitors, a strong international contingent includes Ryotaro Fukuda, travelling from Japan. It's Fukuda's second time at worlds and this time, he's bringing an apprentice who will play as his doubles partner. The No. 2 U.K. player, Mike Ray, is also entered as are Dutch champions Sander Brugman and Joert Edink, known in their native Holland as The Roaring Twenties — a nod to the period garb they compete in. Hungary, too, is an emerging powerhouse with players flying in to compete.
But the main draw is Reinman and Slater.
For Reinman, a three-peat would cement his place in history, a feat only achieved once before, by Toronto's Brian Cook. For Slater, a sixth world title would solidify his G.O.A.T. status and put the record for most wins that much further from Reinman's reach — and put the top prize in Canada's oldest board game back in Canadian hands.
Editing and layout by photo editor Showwei Chu and senior editor Lisa Johnson
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