The Teams event of the KBA Open Bridge Championship climaxed in a houseboat today with local junior, Matthew Chandy, helping his team claim the title in an amazing come from behind performance in the last round.
At the main venue, the match point pairs went on with the first and second eliminations being conducted.
But first, let us look at a small video of the goings on in the houseboat. This is an amateur video done by yours truly so please excuse the quality.
Basically, I have attempted to show the teams playing. Unfortunately, I was not too familiar with the names of some of the players and it seemed rude to interrupt the game. So apologies to them and you, dear readers, for not identifying them.
Swiss Teams Super League
The 6 qualifying teams, in order of finish in the Swiss League, is given below for ready reference.
Coolers : S Vijayraghavan, P Sridharan, Afshar Majeed, R Raghavendra, Uma Rajesh
Crazy 6: Arun Bapat, Biswajit Poddar, Binod Shaw, Sanjit Dey, Soham Sarkar, Mathew Chandy
Papai's IV : Saswata Bhattacharya, Ranjan Banerjee, Abhijit Dutta, Pranay Majumder
Alpha One: Sudhakar Babu, Selvarajan S C, K Sridhar, Kuria Kose
Deepaadhar: Deepa Jacob, Prosenjit Manna, Babhrubahan Bose, Pradip Dey, Sukrit Vijayakar
Peri: N Periasamy, R Sreekrishnan, Kumar Venkatraman, MJR Vasudevan
The first round started with a band with Deepadhar upsetting the eventual champions with a huge win. Deepadhar followed up with another big win to emerge leaders at the end of round two, a position they retained till the last round. The team pulled off a workmanlike victory in the last round but it was not enough for them to retain their position and they slipped to 3rd position.
Swiss League Winners, Coolers started off steadily with workmanlike wins in their first three rounds till they had a big loss against the champions, largely due to having not bid a slam where their opponents bid a grand slam. However they pulled up their socks in the last round to finish in second place.
The eventual winners, Crazy 6, had a disastrous start to their outing and, at the end of round 3, were languishing in a fairly distant third place. However, after hammering Coolers in the penultimate round, they stitched together another dream performance in the last round scoring a perfect 20 against their opponents to end up on the top of the heap.
This one board in the penultimate round actually swung the fate of the top 3 finishers in an amazing manner. In the first place, had Coolers even bid the small slam they would have won the title. However, in the match between Deepadhar and Papai's IV, the latter bid the grand slam whereas Deepadhar didn't. Had that board been a push board in the match, then Deepadhar would have been champions! Of such mysterious magic is the game of bridge made.
We have to congratulate local youngster Matthew Chandy for holding his won in a team of stalwarts enabling the victory. He was playing in the last round, so the win must have been that much sweeter for him.
Team Deepadhar has been making itself known for steady decent performances. While I was a guest in the team for this event, its performance bears watching for the future!
The complete results can be seen here
Match Point Pairs
37 pairs participated in the first elimination of the Match Point Pairs. After 27 boards, MV Rao and Rajgopalan led the field into the second elimination with Rajeev S and Saheeruddin in second place. The complete results can be seen here.
The top 20 pairs qualified for the second elimination where MV Rao and Rajgopalan repeated their performance and led the field into the finals ahead of Guru Sham Sundar and Ajit Saldhana. The top 12 qualified for the finals where they will be joined by 12 pairs from the Super League qualifiers. The complete results can be seen here
15 pairs played in the MP Consolation event where Captain Paul Abraham and V N Ramamoorthy finished first ahead of Sreekumar and Sumathi Iyer.
The complete results can be seen here. This is the same link as the 2nd elimination result with this event showing on a different tab.
Today's schedule
Today will see 24 pairs contesting the MP Pairs finals. The non qualifiers can register for the IMP pairs event.
We wish all participants the very best of luck
Thanks for the reporting from Kumarakom .The video was interesting !
Great video , Sukrit!
We should do more like this for other tournaments, very good intro to the players involved.
Would be terrific if you can be clearer about names and faces, perhaps by tagging them later in the video.
Thank you so much.
I am trying to do where I can.