The HCL South Zone Open Bridge Championship drew to a successful close on Sunday, October 27.
The tournament saw a fantastic response of 74 pairs for the MP Pairs, 32 teams for the Swiss Teams and 57 pairs for the Swiss Pairs events. This event had 5 pairs who were in their teens!
In addition, there was a special event held for 'Beginners' defined as those who had played bridge for less than three years.
We present below a short recap of the events there and their results
Swiss Teams
30 teams participated in the Swiss League of 6 rounds of 10 boards each. At the end of this 6 teams viz. Crouching Tigers, Saila's, KingPins, Four star, Omega and Deepadhar qualified, in that order, to play the super league. The results, along with the rosters of teams can be seen here.
The 6 teams played a super league of 8 boards each. The reduction in boards was caused by a sudden request from the hotel that the venue be surrendered a couple of hours earlier.
The event was won handsomely by Team Omega (Asantha De Mel, R Krishnan, S. Vijayraghavan, Raghvendra R) with Team Deepadhar (Deepa Jacob, Prosenjit Manna, Babhrubahan Bose, Bhaskar Sarkar and Sukrit Vijayakar). But, for me, the team to admire was the third placed Team Four Star (A Rajagopalan, M V Rao, P Ramachandran and C K Sreedharan). This was a local team with the youngest player celebrating his 80th birthday on the 27th of October. A deep bow to you sirs.
The full result of the super league can be seen here. The top 3 teams can be seen below
Team Omega - Champions Team Four Star - Third Place Team Deepadhar - Runners Up
Synthite Swiss Pairs
Sreenivas Makala and Gunaranjan Pemmarju
57 pairs participated in the Synthite Swiss Pairs which was conducted over 6 rounds of 6 boards each. The event was won Sreenivas Makala and Gunaranjan Pemaraju who secured 87.21 VPs.
In second place were Vijay D and Kannan R with 82.44 VPs.
The third place was secured by Chandramohan and Seenivasagan with 80.06 VPs
Beginner Pairs
This is a new concept started by the Kerala Bridge Association. The event is open to people who have been playing bridge for less than 2 years. The event had 11 participanting pairs and was won by S. Ananthan and L Sundaram. In second place were H. Anas and Allen Matthew with S Roshand and S Krishanth in 3rd place. Roshand and Ananthan are all of 9 years and the others are in their early teens. It was nice to see so many youngsters participate in this event. The complete results can be seen here.
Match Point Pairs
We have, of course, presented a detailed report on the match point pairs, which can be seen here. We have mentioned it here for the completeness of this post as well as to share the winning pair receiving their trophy.
We have received a lot of constructive feedback from the participants and our aim will be to implement as much of it as is feasible in the next edition. We hope to see a lot more participation then.
Thanks a lot for your support
Anant and Rajesh Somani, an extremely popular and highly rated father son pair from Mumbai, lifted the Dr. K V Jacob trophy for the Match Point Pairs in the ongoing HCL South South Zone Championships being conducted at Trivandrum, Kerala.
In a field of 74 pairs, they won the event with a handsome score of 66%. In second place were Uttam Gupta and C M Kulkarni with Srinath Rajam and Nirmal Jain in third place.