The Catholic Club, Bangalore, held its annual tournament yesterday. As a transient visitor to the city, I had gravitated there to play and was really overwhelmed by the event. For more than one reason.
The first reason for being overwhelmed was the participation. There were 34 tables for the pairs event in the morning and 25 tables for the BAM in the afternoon. This kind of participation for a non-major event is very rarely seen. Even the organizers were pleasantly overwhelmed by the response.
The second reason for being overwhelmed was the hospitality. The Catholic Club, in addition to providing free Coffee and Lunch, also provided drinks with the lunch, both alcoholic and non alcoholic. This spontaneous gesture was greatly appreciated by the participants. I would have called it icing on the cake but the analogy is in the wrong state, so to speak.
I was pleasantly impressed by the performance of one outstanding junior pair namely Rekha B and Kavya G who won the Board a Match event. Rekha has been a consistent performer in the juniors over the past several years, but it was really good to see her partner and her in action in an open field today.
It would be really nice to see them being groomed to improve their game with appropriate training and other support. Maybe a sponsor can pay for their training or something like that.
Board a Match
While this event actually happened later, we cover it first because Rekha and Kavya, the stars of this article, participating in Team Raghu emerged winners by a short head from Team Kunal.
We would actually credit the victory more to them than their team mates (who happened to be Raghu Rajkumar and yours truly) because they pulled boards... bidding and making games where none seemed to exist for their opponents as also taking their opponents down what seemed to be cold contracts.
Match Point Pairs
68 pairs participated in the match point pairs. Each played 24 boards in one board rounds. In the North South direction, Sambuddha Deb and Kalyan Mohan emerged in first place with a score of 64.4%. They finished comfortably ahead of second placed Mini Naidoo and Priya Sinha. In the East West Direction, Pradeep Kulkarni and K Durgadas bagged first place with a score of 63.29%. In second place were Soumalya Ghosh and Ratna Tadepalli.
Sukrit Vijayakar