Forty sub-junior boys enter main draw of TT meet

Forty players, including a lone paddler from Madhya Pradesh, made the main draw of the sub-junior boys section of the National Ranking (Central Zone) Table Tennis Championships, being conducted at Abhay Prashal Sports Club here Monday.

Of the 40 who qualified for the main draw, Petroleum Sports Promotion Board (PSPB) players topped the list with nine of them going through while the next best effort came from West Bengal as seven of their sub-junior boys made it.

Maharashtra had six and Delhi one less.

The newly-formed state of Telangana in its maiden appearance saw three of its boys qualify for the main draw.

The lone player from the host state was Tanmay Choukse who topped his group 23, winning his matches against Kaustubh Kulkarni of Karnataka 3-0, but losing to Rohan Choksi of Tamil Nadu 1-3.

Tanmay, however, made the grade on 4:3 ratio after a three-way tie in the group.

All qualifiers, except the leaders of the first eight groups, will play their first round matches Monday night while the others have been given a bye each.

Their action will begin only from Tuesday where they will be joined by the top-eight players.

The top eight who got a direct entry into the main draw include Manav Thakkar (PSPB), Snehit Fidel Rafeeqie (Telangana), Jeet Chndra (WB), Shaurya Pednekar (Maharashtra), Sarthak Seth (UP), Sohan Bhattacharya (WB), Ashwin Subramanian (Maharashtra) and Manush Shah (Gujarat) in that order, based on their rankings.