Sukrit Vijayakar
The competition for the Murli Deora and Girdharilal Agrawal Trophies started in earnest yesterday with 50 pairs contesting 9 rounds of tough, competitive bridge.
The European pair of Karlis Rubins and Jelena Alfajeva took the lead early in the event and easily disposed off all challengers. They ended up almost one complete match ahead of the second placed pair of Binod Shaw and Sanjit Dey.In short, they beat everybody with the benefit of any carry over they may have received during the elimination session.
Puneet Gangal and Satyabrata Mukherjee took third place. The fourth placed trio of Manas Mukherjee, Sowmik Das and Kajal Das deserves special mention as they rose virtually like a phoenix from the ashes. They had started the session in the 48th spot.
The list of Gold prize winners is as shown alongside. Our regular contributor, Priya, secured the prize for the maximum score in the last three rounds with her team mates. Regrettably, no team with all players having less than 100 master points qualified for the gold event, hence it could not be awarded.
The organizers have decided to award this prize to young Tirtharaj Chowdhury, as a gesture of recognition for his brilliant play on the board reported yesterday. May you keep on winning many more laurels!
The Silver section was won by the trio of Vijay Anand Singh, Pradeepanand Singh and Siddharth Behura with another veteran trio of C P Agarwal, Pullak Garga and Sanjay Jain taking the second place.
The trio of Chandan Mitra, Indranath Chatterjee and Siddharth Ghosh literally leap frogged into third place, securing 49 VPs in the last 3 rounds (the author was one of the contributors to this tally!). However, since a pair is only eligible to win one prize, that award went to another veteran, Archie Sequeira and his partners. The trio of Surinder Kumar, Subhashish Gope and Dr. Vipul Jain secured the prize for the best team with less than 100 Master Points. Many congratulations to them for their strong finish in 12th place overall. I have the dubious distinction of having contributed to their performance as well!!
Congratulations to all the prize winners and thanks to all participants once again for a stupendous response.
Disclaimer : All opinions are entirely those of the author and are no reflection of the views of the BridgeFromHome Team.