National 9Ball champion Himanshu Jain of Hyderabad, escaped to a thrilling 9-8 victory to give the main draw an explosive start in the Otters Club All India 9Ball Pool Tournament that started today.

Jain, who was trailing 1-5 and then 3-6 in the race to nine rack contest, rallied with a spectacular late burst to beat Nitesh Madan of Railways for his second win in Group B, after prevailing over another qualifier Rahul Sachdev of Maharashtra a session before.

"I never expected to win after falling behind by a huge margin" said Jain. "After playing so well in the first half, Nitesh suddenly started committing errors. I chose to take each rack at a time and produced positive results."

In other close ties that went down to the wire, Divya Sharma of Haryana who defeated Yasin Merchant 9-8. Yasin was down 4-8 when he recovered and set decider but couldn’t save the last rack and lost.

Even further, nothing went right for Yasin as he lost another match where 2013 Asian Under-21 Snooker Bronze medallist, Sahil Nayyar of Punjab, trounced him 9-5.

Sahil controlled the match well and obtained 4-2 lead. Yasin tried to emerge strong in 7th Rack but a ‘decision in question’ went in favour of Sahil and he further succeed to raise his lead.

Later Yasin again tried to recover and pocketed three more frames but Sahil closed the proceedings by winning the 14th rack to score 9-5.

Now Yasin has very meagre chance to reach knockouts but it all depends on remaining matches that are schedule on Thursday.

 

Meanwhile, Dharminder Lilly, Alok Kumar, Monu Chaudhary and Aayush Kumar have already confirmed their berth for the knockout stage Last-16.