New Delhi, Mar 17:Former National 9-Ball Pool Champion, Sandeep Gulati and veteran Dharminder Lilly today qualified for the RKG Snooker Masters 2013, India’s biggest Pro-Am Snooker tournament, after winning their respective quarterfinal matches in the North Zone championship, here.
The 2010 National 8-Ball Pool champion, Sumit Talwar also qualified for the Snooker Masters from the North Zone after registering a hard-fought victory against the 2011 IBSF World Billiards Championship (Point Format) semifinalist, Sourav Kothari 4-3 at the Megapool Snooker Academy in Dwarka.
The trio will be joined by the winner between Chennai’s Rafath Habib and Punjab’s Manjot Singh, who play their quarterfinal match later in the evening today.
In the semifinal matches tomorrow to be followed by the summit clash, the results will decide the Ranking Order of the players which will be taken into account while preparing the draws for the May 6 to 13 championship in Mumbai.
The four players from the South Zone had already been decided for the Snooker Masters and the North Zone tournament will give way to the East and West Zone qualifiers to be played later this month.
Eight-time world champion Pankaj Advani and Aditya Mehta will participate in the tournament. They will be joined by 16 qualifiers from across four venues in India — Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata and Pune. The prize money is the biggest offered in India with the winner’s purse being Rs 500,000 lakh.
In today’s first quarterfinal between Gulati and Nitesh Madan, the former was approaching towards a comfortable win just when Madan pulled out all the stops to secure the third frame with a fine break of 68.
Both the Delhi cueists were engaged in an interesting tussle as they battled hard to outplay each other in the fourth frame. (PTI)
Follow our WhatsApp channel