IBSF World Snooker Championship 2009

IBSF World Snooker Championship 2009

News & Updates

REPORT OF 17.11.2009

Phillip Williams of Wales stretched Pankaj Advani, the Indian maestro to the full distance before bowing down 3-4 in a highly competitive league match of the ONGC-IBSF World Snooker Championship 2009 being held in Hall 3 of Hyderabad International Convention Centre, Hyderabad. Having won the first frame comfortably, Advani however lost the second, which was quite scrappy as both the players kept on missing regulation shots. The third frame saw Advani a completely transformed player. From the word go he went down to the business and started to amass point after point with pin-point precision and crafted a magnificent break of 106 with great panache. The salient feature of the break was the lovely nudges that he gave in cluster of reds several times to retain his top-of-the-table position. Advani continued his sustained aggression as he claimed the next frame too with a break of 70 to go ahead by 3-1. Unperturbed by Advani’s devastating display of snooker in the previous two frames, Williams came back strongly in the next frame and with the help of some classical potting and positioning claimed the fifth to reduce the deficit. In the sixth, Advani inspite of having taken the early advantage missed a regulation pink pot in an attempt to dislodge the last red stuck to the top-right cushion. This offered Williams with an opportunity to spring back to the game and he did not make any mistakes thereafter as he went on to pocket ball after ball and arrived at a point when he needed only the pink ball to pocket and to win the frame. It was do or die situation where Williams choose to double the pink into centre pocket and did that like a seasoned campaigner to level the proceeding. The decider saw both the players entangled in a battle of attrition and it was Advani who came out victorious with his crafty play as he played some high-quality safety shots to put Williams at bay.

Having squandered the early advantage of two frames, Yasin Merchant of India once again displayed a careful and calculated game to win two successive frames and won the match 4-2 against Ahmed Aly of USA and confirmed his place for Knock-out stage.

Daniel Thorp from Australia finally won his first match of the tournament after loosing first two matches. Today he defeated Moosa Saleem of Mauritius 3-1.

Inspite of a great comeback to level the score 2-2 after being down by 0-2, Geet Sethi of India could not hold his candle against Clive Thomson of New Zealand lost the match 2-3. Sethi had his chances in the decider but wasted a couple of very easy openings and gifted Thomson to wrap up the proceeding. After the match, while Sethi admitted that he played far below the expectation, Thomson expressed his great feeling of beating an Indian legend of cue sports in India.

On the other hand, another veteran cueist Devendra Joshi recovered from the disappointment of his last match and won his match comfortably against his opponent Thomas Williams of Canada by 3-0.

In the ladies segment, current National Champion, Meenal Thakur of India exhibited some good potting skills to set aside the challenge posted by Margaret Gorski of Australia by 3-1. Having lost her earlier two matches, this win was much needed for Meenal to keep alive her chances to move up to the knock-out stage.