Yesterday, at the end of 10 rounds of Swiss league for GOLD event, the TOP 16 teams qualified for the knock-out last-16 stage. The Indian team ARUN JAIN comprising of Joyjit Sensarma, Biswajeet Poddar, Arun Jain, Gopika Tandan, Swarnendu Banerjee, Rana Roy, Abhijeet Chakraborty & Samir Basak with 136.55 VPs (out of a possible 200 VPs) topped the Swiss league out of the 54 participating teams in the Gold event. Team RUSSIA comprising of Jevgenij Antonov, Andrey Gromov, Anna Gulevich, Vadim Kholomeev, Yury Khiuppenen & Tatiana Ponomareva continued their good form of day-1 and secured the 2nd place with a score of 131.80 VPs. On 3rd & 4th place were TEXAN ACES (128.11) & PODRAM (125.92). In the 5th to 8th places were FORMIDABLES (122.58), LESLIE (121.20), SHREE CEMENT (120.65) & ARISTOS (118.78).
In the SILVER event also, the top 16 teams out of the 67 participating teams qualified for the last-16 stage after completion of 10 rounds of Swiss league. The team PRAYAS comprising of Kamlesh Gupta, Vikram Jain, Tapas Kumar Roy, Shantanu Ghosh, Tanmoy Majumder, sagar Bhuiya, Swapan Sardar & Amitava Ghosh took the top spot with a score of 135.87 VPs, followed by DR. SSMC team with a score of 134.60 VPs. The 3rd & 4th places were taken by TALLURI (132.27) & PRABHAV (130.29).
In the BRONZE event, the 9 participating teams finished their round-robin yesterday morning. The results were as follows:
In the afternoon, the top 2 teams URBANE GAMING & CRACKERJAX met in the final played in 3 sessions of 8 boards each. Team URBANE GAMING represented by Abhishek Sarkar, Akash Saha, Soham Chakraborty & Sanjay Chakravarty beat CRACKERJAX represented by Pankaj Tanna, Madhuri Gokhale, Aswin Sanghavi, Viresh Kamdar, Shruti Paras Savla & Paras Pravin Savla in the finals by 12.67 IMPs (CO 0-4.33, 5-10, 17-17, 32-10) to win the “HCL Rising Stars Trophy” and the prize purse of Rs. 15,000. The runners-up purse was Rs. 10,000 prize. The 3rd & 4th prize of Rs. 7500 & Rs. 6000 went to Dhanu & Vagabonds teams. Teams ranked 5th to 8th were given a prize of Rs. 3000 each.
One important aspect of the Bronze event for beginners was the presence of young Nachiketa Muthuswamy playing with his mother Anjali Karthikeyan. The duo were playing in the Team Major Minor and finished 6th.
The qualified teams in the Gold & Silver events will play the Pre-QF matches (4 sessions of 10 boards each) today. The top 1 to 7 ranked teams in Swiss league had the option to choose their opponents from the teams ranked 9th to 16th. The line up of the PQFs based on the selection is as follows:
The kibitzers can watch the broadcast of the above matches on the website kibitz.realbridge.online. It will be a half an hour delayed broadcast to take care of the security of boards.
GOOD LUCK TO ALL THE TEAMS.
By T.C. Pant