17 March 2013:
Gulati, Talwar, Lilly qualify for Snooker Masters 2013
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.
Gulati put on
display some fine potting skills in the end to win the fourth
frame and then went on to secure the tie with the construction
of 60-plus break to seal the issue in his favour 4-1.
The second
quarterfinal saw another interesting battle between Punjab's
Lilly and Haryana's Parveen Rathi.
Lilly was two-up
in the tie which also saw him constructing a break of 67 in
the second frame. However, Rathi made a splendid comeback in
the third frame to reduce the margin to 1-2. Lilly made quick
amends to his game in the next frame and won it 62-51 to surge
ahead. In the next, he potted the ball all around the table
skillfully to emerge victorious 4-1.
In the third
quarterfinal, Kolkata's Kothari was stunned by Chandigarh's
Talwar who took the match to the decider. Kothari won the
first frame with relative ease but Talwar, 2010 Guangzhou
Asian Games quarter-finalist, put him under immense pressure
by securing the next two frames. Down 1-2, Kothari showed good
fighting skills to draw parity in the best-of-seven frame
last-eight match. Talwar again made inroads into the rival's
citadel and won the fifth frame 62-04 but the Kolkata-cueist
was not ready to cede the possession. Kothari took the game to
the decider in his bid to qualify for the Mumbai finale but it
was not the case to be as Talwar held his nerve to win the tie
on black ball.
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